Jerry’s is a run-down restaurant in the middle of Florida that serves as an undercover investigation site for Barbara Ehrenreich. As a white-collar scholar turned blue-collar waitress, Ehrenreich experiences the reality of a fast food diner where she serves customers in “human waves.” The restaurant is filled with unpleasant sights and smells, such as creamy carrion, pizza barf, decomposing lemon wedges, and water-logged toast crusts resembling a typical garbage can (Ehrenreich 180).
Throughout her time working for both Jerry’s and Hearthside, Barbara Ehrenreich gains insight into the challenges of minimum wage and harsh working conditions. She discovers how one’s chosen career and work environment can profoundly impact a person. In her essay “Serving in Florida,” Ehrenreich employs emotionally charged language, ethical and logical appeals, as well as diverse sentence structures to convey her personal struggles as a low-wage laborer in contemporary America.
Making her credibility evident and building a trustworthy bond with readers, Ehrenreich effectively conveys the pain experienced as a blue-collar worker through the use of logic. This logic is particularly evident in the footnotes of the essay. The presence of footnotes establishes the author’s knowledge and expertise on the subject matter, indicating both her understanding and credibility to the readers.
The footnotes offer additional logical tools, such as allusions, historical contexts, and citations. In her essay, Ehrenreich asserts that Jerry’s lack of cleanliness compels the employees “to move through the kitchen cautiously, akin to Susan McDougal who wore leg irons” (179). Additionally, within the footnotes, she provides a historical context for the reference to Susan McDougal, explaining that McDougal was “incarcerated for showing disrespect to the court, engaging in deceitful activities, and participating in a clandestine plot related to the unsuccessful Whitewater scandal…” (179).
The author’s extensive background knowledge and logical connection between the suffering of Susan McDougal and the Jerry’s employees clearly demonstrate the hardships she is trying to convey to the readers, as well as providing proof of the accuracy of her job at Jerry’s and everything she has been writing about. This logic is further supported by historical context. For instance, when she mentions that all the girls who “work [her] shift” would cover for each other “if one of [them was] off sneaking a cigarette or pee,” she provides background information on the necessity of this behavior, explaining that until 1998, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks (189). By sharing this context, she demonstrates her knowledge of the current situation and establishes herself as a trustworthy and commendable author. The basic information she provides also helps readers better understand the concepts discussed in this essay, which may be unfamiliar to many people today. Logic not only proves Ehrenreich’s credibility but also aids the reader in comprehending her purpose for writing and publishing this essay.
The progression of crude and foul language demonstrates one of the main challenges Ehrenreich encounters during her transition from being a scholarly writer to becoming a poor waitress. She expresses her longing to return to her previous life, yearning for her home. She becomes so desperate for the written word that she obsessively reads the six-page menu at Jerry’s. Her extreme actions reveal that despite having the option to quit easily, she endures the agony of enduring long hours and receiving meager wages.
At first, she felt a sense of heroism in taking on two jobs, but it eventually took a toll on her. Initially, she described her experience at the Hearthside factory as “powerfully vindicated – a survivor…” and used positive adjectives like “beautiful” and “heroic” (180). However, in the next paragraph, she recounts being yelled at for eating while working, which frustrates her. Her language turns increasingly vulgar, particularly when she remarks how her “flesh seems to bond to the seat” (181).
In the text, the reader can observe the increasing anger the author feels regarding the situation she has gotten herself into. Initially perceived as a heroic act, it ultimately results in pure defeat. Furthermore, Ehrenreich also demonstrates how specific hardships can make it challenging to attempt new experiences. Throughout the essay, she utilizes crude language to convey her disgusted thoughts and sense of hopelessness. This is particularly evident in the introduction, which encompasses her entire experience, encompassing both her jobs at Hearthside and Jerry’s.
In an unpleasant manner, she likens the setting at Jerry’s to a human body: “The kitchen resembles a cavern, akin to a stomach that leads to the garbage and dishwashing area, which is the lower intestine…” Additionally, she employs descriptive food items to describe the smell, blending repugnant scents like “rotting lemon wedges [and] soggy toast crusts” (179). These expressions alone generate a detrimental perception of the establishment, prompting readers to ponder how she was compelled to endure such dreadful circumstances.
Ehrenreich effectively uses rough language to convey the emotions that arise from her transition from writer to waitress, from a white collar to a blue collar job, and the resulting hardships. In addition to her blunt tone, Ehrenreich also appeals to ethics to explore how one’s workplace can shape their understanding of morality. She particularly learns this through her encounters with George, a nineteen-year-old Czech dishwasher who had only been in America for a week when they met (184).
She takes it upon herself to instruct George in English, which is something the individuals who had transported him to America failed to ensure he knew beforehand. By going through all of this effort for a total stranger, it appeals to the readers’ moral compass. It portrays her actions as doing what is right and assisting someone whom nobody took the trouble to aid. It appears that the hardships she has experienced have inspired her to assist others so that they don’t have to confront the difficulties of being a new employee alone.
In the final part of the essay, George is caught stealing from the dry-storage room after he was fired. However, it should be noted that George was still working there until a replacement for him could be found. Upon learning this information, the narrator regrets not defending George. She reflects that if he had taken something like Saltines or a can of cherry pie mix, it was probably out of hunger. The narrator realizes that by not defending him, she didn’t do what was right. This realization leaves her with a feeling of something “loathsome and servile” that compelled her to remain silent.
Ehrenreich discovers that jobs such as Jerry’s, which have poor working conditions and pay minimum wage, can drain a person to the point where they lose the courage necessary to even accept such a job in the first place. It becomes extremely difficult to maintain bravery in the much more pleasant environment of low-wage workplaces in America (186). She draws a parallel between this experience and people losing their courage in POW camps. By experiencing enough hardships, Ehrenreich demonstrates how easily one can lose their sense of right and wrong and their moral compass.
The passage utilizes different sentence structures to effectively convey Ehrenreich’s shifting tones and guide the reader in understanding her purpose and the context in which she aims to create it. In certain instances, the tone is formal and erudite, with complex and lengthy structures used to present basic information to the reader. However, at other times, her tone becomes angry and colloquial, with a broken and informal structure, as she endeavors to express her frustration towards the difficulties imposed by these jobs.
In the footnotes, Ehrenreich cites Kim Moody, the author of Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, who argues that the increase in stress levels signifies a new management approach that deliberately induces stress (footnote 2, 182). This reflects a different aspect of Ehrenreich’s character, where she takes on a more scholarly perspective and opposes her crass side. It showcases her state prior to experiencing the burdens of blue-collar labor. At times, Ehrenreich becomes overwhelmed by her frustration with the unfairness of low-wage work and longs to return to her previous life as an academic scholar.
In the essay’s conclusion, she expresses her feelings about not defending George, stating: “On the contrary, a new and repugnant feeling had entered my being —something loathsome and subservient…” (186). The phrases are deliberately fragmented to reflect her intense emotions: frustration towards her job, guilt for not standing up for George, and confusion about whether the low-wage American workplace is to blame for her lack of defense. By using her sentence structure, the author aims to convey both her emotions and her intended message.
Barbara Ehrenreich showcases how her experiences at Jerry’s and Hearthside transformed her from a logical and formal individual to an angry and colloquial one, as portrayed in her structure. In “Serving in Florida”, she utilizes appeals to logic, ethics, emotional language, and structural changes to provide readers with insights into the life of a blue-collar laborer. She vividly illustrates the grueling nature of working long hours, only to return home with sore feet and a minimum wage. While not all readers may have encountered such occupations, many can empathize with Ehrenreich’s predicament.
The challenge presented by Ehrenreich asks if any individual would possess the courage to venture undercover and encounter such an unfamiliar circumstance. Would anyone display the bravery to overcome a situation so distant from their own usual reality that they lose sight of what is considered normal? Ehrenreich urges readers to undertake the seemingly impossible, potentially grueling experience, ultimately leading them to develop gratitude for their own situations while also emphasizing the undeniable reality that certain individuals confront this scenario daily and it demands attention.
