Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barbara EhrenreichEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-05-08
ISBN: 0805063889
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Book Reviews of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Book Review: nicel and dimed is worth much more than a nickel and dime
Summary: 5 Stars
Nickel and Dimed
I read this book after reading Dishwasher Pete, a very lightweight read. Unlike Dishwasher Pete, Nickel and Dimed takes a hard look at how Americas low wage earners live and/or survive on such low wages. Nickel and Dimed is heavily footnoted, with anecdotal information and studies to support Ehrenreich's claims. Throughout the book, Ehrenreich was pretty forthcoming when she could have cut corner's to save money but instead choose comfort over bargain. Had this book been written by a man I can imagine he would have been able to live at or below Ehrenreich's budget because most women don't feel comfortable sleeping in homeless shelters or around men whom they don't "know". Two, there are still jobs in America in which you can make a decent salary without a high school diploma but they require brute strength. Brute strength is an area where most women are lacking. The average man has 3x the upper body strength of a woman who is of the same height and weight.
Overall, I would say this is a very good book. Ehrenreich lives and works among the poor and mentions how the poor are sometimes the cause or at least play a role in their own suffering. Take Ehrenreich pregnant coworker at Merry Maids who ate only a bag of Doritos for breakfast and lunch while her lazy boyfriend sat on his but at home with his hand out. However, she also mentioned how employers take advantage of workers i.e. Wallmart low level health insurance for its' workers and pay wages so low that they don't allow one to eat a healthy diet and live in a decent apartment.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Summary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.
As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.
So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed
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