"Nickel and Dimed" is Ehrenreich's tale of going undercover as a member of our country's working poor, earnestly trying to make ends meet - as millions do every day - with a paycheck that hardly earns the right to be called a living wage.

It's a well-told adventure tale, a show-don't-tell call to arms, and a valiant piece of reporting. "Nickle and Dimed" is also an addition to a slowly expanding genre of downwardly mobile first-person, nonfiction accounts first made famous in the 1930s by George Orwell's story of self-imposed poverty, "Down and Out in Paris and London." Books such as Ted Conover's "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing," about his year spent working undercover as a corrections officer, line up next to Charlie LeDuff's New York Times piece about working in a slaughterhouse (an echo of Tony Horwitz's labors in a chicken factory for The Wall Street Journal).

These are scrupulously reported, heartfelt stories, deserving of the Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards they've received (the jury's still out on Ehrenreich's addition to the canon). Often, the authors are self-conscious of the inherent unreality of their short-term working-class experiments and offer insightful higher-class confessions. This awareness of a lack of pure authenticity frequently earns these works credibility.

It's hard to top the defense of reporting on labor by doing that labor yourself. But these terrific tales can't make up for one absence they highlight by their very popularity: the lack of underclass America telling their own stories in their own words. The real thing, not just an experiment.

Established, well-paid writers may be getting magazine commissions and book contracts to write about the hardships of low-wage America (and too rarely at that), but where is the opportunity to read actual real-life experience, not just an undercover facsimile? What we never get are stories told without the elite mediation of a "professional." These books, no matter how noble, still smack of downward tourism.

Why can't we learn about waitressing from a waitress, not just someone spending an aberrant month translating the experience? Take the news that broke recently that Random House celebrity editor Peter Gethers was working "undercover" as a waiter to gather material for a book of his own: It sounds like the punch line of a joke about writerly dilletantism. I mean, how many waiters are writers dreaming of a fat Random House check as they schlep and scrape plates to pay the rent?

It seems that the problem lies in editors - of both the Random House and periodical variety - distrusting that someone outside their comfortable circles might be capable of turning a phrase. Ironically, it's the writers who go downwardly undercover who often comment on the possible books waiting in a world where an agent is something you clean with and a working lunch is something you serve to other people.

When Ted Conover "came out" to his fellow correction officers, he says he was greeted with slaps on the shoulder and a chorus of comments like, "That's great, Conover - I was thinking about writing a book, too."

Ehrenreich told me about a similar experience upon leaving each of the many workplaces she describes in "Nickel and Dimed."

"I'm always struck by how many people consider themselves to be writers who are working jobs that are more invisible in this culture," she says. "Sure, I'm a writer, and it's how I make my living, but they're writers, too."

You probably don't need to just take the word of these star journalists. Just think of all the great storytellers you've met on the job, on train rides and in diners. If people will purchase and read stories about the challenges of low-wage labor from high-paid writers, maybe they'd sign on for the real thing as well. Studs Terkel isn't going to be around much longer to throw the party and set up the place cards for us. (Remember "Working"?)

Someone had the guts to give Larry Brown a book contract when he was a firefighter. Why not to janitors and waitresses and slaughterhouse workers as well? Anthony Bourdain's memoirs of Manhattan chef-dom ("Kitchen Confidential," one of last summer's hot Hamptons beach-reads) shouldn't be as far as we get into the mechanics of feeding the public clean food.

It's the news media, with their potentially vast reach across many classes of readers, that concern me most. We deserve fair representations of the daily trials of all corners of our culture, not just the political and employer class.

So what is to be done? The typical response would be to run a special series (such as last year's "How Race Is Lived in America" in the Times, featuring LeDuff's excellent aforementioned piece). Put together a team of dedicated editors willing to seek out and strengthen first-person voices, develop a roster of writers with attention to an exact demographic palate, alert the Pulitzer committee and proceed. But this strategy would provide a mere distraction from the usual top-tier attention. It's really just giving at the office, just Black History Month, not a systemic commitment to reflect society on a daily basis.

Fine, editors and publishers might say. You want regular inclusion? Let's set aside a weekly column that will feature writing from the below-professional strata. That's a start (and, let's face it, a highly unlikely fantasy), but even that suggestion isn't good enough. See, the point is integration, inclusion, desegregation - all those good '60s concepts that never quite lived up to their multitude of syllables.

Sequestering a low-wage America behind a thick fence of black ink keeps it distant, exotic, in the projects, in the kitchen. The point is to weave class threads together into book publishing and daily journalism the way they are spun on subway platforms and in office buildings. There's plenty of existing machinery out there waiting to be activated for more than upper-class awareness.

Many newspapers have workplace sections and columns now (of course, the stories we see inside are first-person white-collar accounts), and magazines and Sunday sections often have personal essay columns perfectly suited to this kind of material.

To let people tell their own stories to the extensive spectrum of readers would surely help to develop a basic respect for the range of people who share air and asphalt every day. Actions follow understanding. In this case it might change the big picture, like how people vote on welfare reform, as well as simple daily deeds, like tipping in a restaurant. Maybe, if the doomsday forecasters of our trembling economy have got it right, celebrity editor Peter Gethers will find he needs your generous tip - for real. Now that would make for a best-selling authentic workplace memoir.

Lauren Sandler writes about culture. She lives in New York City.

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