“How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million woman about to be booted onto the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”

These questions propelled Barbara Ehrenreich—a widely published author with a Ph.D. and a good income—into the unskilled labor market. In each of three cities, she spent a month to “see if I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month’s rent.” In Key West, she was a waitress. In Portland, Maine, she worked for a maid service and moonlighted as a food-service worker in a nursing home. In Minneapolis, she spent her time in the women’s clothing department at a Wal-Mart.

Economically, she found rent to be the killer cost. True, her study took place in the very height of the dot-com boom, which in hindsight probably skewed things a bit. Still, she ended up having to spend between 40% and 50% of her income on rent, and no one will come away from her account thinking that she splurged on housing. Mostly, her choices were limited to weekly motels, which don’t provide any kitchen space for cost-reducing home cooking. She also takes pains to note that, unlike many of her colleagues, she had no children or family to feed on her income.

Ehrenreich also found herself regularly demeaned in the jobs she accepted. The application process typically required a drug test involving a urine analysis. A couple of the job required applicants to take what amount to psychological exams. Her supervisors were often condescending and, not to mince words, mean to her and her colleagues—this despite the fact that her job was frequently taxing both mentally and physically.

To her credit, she offers no easy fixes to the problems she encountered trying to live on minimum wage, but there’s no doubt that she’s exposed a real problem: “These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how were should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans—as a state of emergency.”