Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich

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Book Reviews of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Book Review: not really trying to get by
Summary: 3 Stars

You see, one of the most distinctive things about the book is that Ehrenreich creates a fictional version of herself. She has to minimize her experience when she goes for interviews, has to disguise her true mission from co-workers and supervisors, has to (mostly) reign in her radical political views, etc. But even more, she is a completely atomized being with no family and no friends. This both makes her character in the book completely unrealistic and leaves her to spend all her time fixating on herself. Both are unfortunate. The lack of friends and family merely serves to point out what an utter impossibility it is for society to help people who have absolutely no support system of their own. One of her main problems is the cost of rent--which must be recognized as a significant problem for a society that expects people to be able to afford living quarters near the hot economies that are producing jobs. But it seems abundantly obvious that rent would be less of a problem if she was splitting it with a roommate, friend, or family member. In fact, this is so obvious that her endless complaining abut her rent loses its effectiveness because we realize how easy a problem this would be to alleviate.

Equally maddening is her refusal to take advantage of the easiest opportunity that exits to find friendship and social assistance : church. At one point she actually goes to a revival meeting, but it turns out she's only there to make fun of the service. Later, when she arrives in Minnesota, she spends an evening with a woman who a friend has suggested she look up. As far as we can tell from the text, this is one of the few times she spends a significant amount of time, and has a lengthy discussion, with someone from the social milieu she's purportedly investigating (the rest of the time she just seems to race back to her hotel room to type up notes). But here she meets someone who has been on welfare, has been homeless, has actually packed up her children and moved to a strange city, without knowing she has a real life she could fall back on if things went badly. And what is this woman's primary piece of advice :

'Always find a church.' People from the church drove her around to the WIC office...and to find a school for her twelve-year-old girl and day care for her baby. Sometimes they also helped with groceries.

But no, Ehrenreich refuses this advice, and its hard to take her complaints about the lack of available help seriously, knowing that her anti-religious sensibilities prevent her from accepting one of the most readily available sources of assistance.[....]

Meanwhile, all we are left with is Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich at work or Ehrenreich in a hotel room. The rest of the working poor are merely a backdrop. Sure, she's working the jobs that these folks work, but she's hardly living the life they lead. She doesn't participate in their lives, neither individually by visiting their homes or having them over, nor communally by doing the types of things they do in their off hours. The occasional comment from these folks that Ehrenreich does share suggests that in the first place, they are not alone, as she is. Many live with family, or have spouses or steadies who work. And they are not particularly dissatisfied with their lives, nor do they resent their employers. Actually, most of them seem proud to be working, proud of their work, and proud of the companies for which they work. [...]Though for much of the book Ehrenreich engages in navel gazing that will only appeal to her hardiest fans, in the closing pages she offers a truly moving assessment of how she did, and the pride she takes in having, for the most part, succeeded is genuinely effecting. Here is a denizen of the upper middle class basking in the glow of just making ends meet; imagine how much more powerfully such an achievement must effect someone who has been living on government assistance for years.

So we come to the end of the book and it seems reasonable to expect Ehrenreich to draw some conclusions about the whole experience and to suggest some alternatives. But, other than some self congratulations and a half-hearted pitch for a living wage (estimated to be about $14 per hour) and rent control, she doesn't bring much to the table. [....]

Summary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

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

Economics Books

• Subjects > Business & Investing > Economics
• Current Events > Poverty
• Social Sciences