IRB: 50 Essays: Serving in Florida

                For this week’s IRB, another examination into a social essay was taken. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Serving in Florida provides a glance into the working class life of those who serve as waiters, waitresses, or simply those who live on minimum wage. Written in first person, the true stories of her working colleagues and the blunt manner in which she depicts the troubles she faces adds power to her words.

                Before the beginning of the essay, Ehrenreich has taken it upon herself to conduct an experiment in which she attempts to live a minimum wage life, having only $4000 in case something goes wrong. In a narrative arrangement, she immediately describes the conditions in which she and her fellow must work: no break times except for half-hour meals, evil managers, and a sense of humiliation. “I haven’t been treated this way- lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusations- since at least junior high school.” Ehrenreich, noting the impossibility of living on minimum wages, tries to take two jobs, working 16 hours a day in two different hotels. The exhaustion is too much for her, and ends up quitting one of her jobs as she ends on a note of emptiness, of how there seems to be no end to the vicious cycle of “serving in Florida”.

                The most powerful tool that Ehrenreich uses to convey her message of futility to readers is through personal stories. She often tells her story through others, explaining their situations and the many parallels that she can draw between them all, the most common often lack of a proper home, as well as a major psychological effect this kind of lifestyle has on them. For example, a co-worker Gail has been forced to leave her flophouse and go back to living in her truck because of her roommate who was hitting incessantly on her. Also, the use of such stories humanizes these people that many wealthier individuals cannot properly imagine. The connections that people reading Serving in Florida make to their own lives add to the power of Ehrenreich’s writings.