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: An entertaining read, but not REALISTIC!
Summary: 3 Stars
I read this entire book in one sitting, because it really is well-written and funny. I laughed out loud when she described a busser sucking "deliriously on an imaginary crack-pipe" when he was making fun of a particularly weasel-like manager.
I think it's worth the purchase price, but the premise is not good. I know that the author is making a social commentary, but I know what it's like to make a lot of money, and I also know what it's like to live on $9,000 per year (in California, no less).
When I was in my 20s, I was DIRT poor, worked two jobs (sometimes three), and I lived off of $25 of food per week. I even remember exactly what I bought. 4-pound bags of spaghetti, Top Ramen by the truckload (7 cents a pack back then), and giant cans of pasta sauce (about 99 cents for a can, which I saved in a margarine tub and used throughout the week). I had one saucepot, and I bought my work pants at thrift stores. In fact, I bought all my clothes (except for shoes) at used clothing stores. I drank Kool-aid (10 cents a pack) with very little sugar, or, if I was really going to splurge, I bought Crystal Light and made a gallon and a half out of a little tub that was supposed to be for 2 quarts.
Let's just say I wasn't very healthy back then. But I made it and put myself through school (without loans). I didn't own a car and I always had roommates. I think the author's issues with housing have more to do with the fact that she was unwilling to live with someone else. When you're poor, that's not realistic.
I think that the biggest social commentary (that the author missed) was the way that poor people FEEL. The ones that are stuck in that cycle of poverty always feel hopeless. They never feel like there's something better out there. They don't want to go to school, even though there are Junior College training programs that would be free to them. I think it's more an issue of self-esteem than anything else. If you feel like a worthless person, then that is the reality that you create. It's more damaging than anything else. That's the REAL tragedy here. That these men and women at the bottom feel like they should remain where they are.
Even when I was scraping by and living in the dirtiest slum apartment on earth (a broken bedroom window patched by duct-tape and there were dead cockroaches in the bathtub every morning), I never felt like that was where I was going to stay.
Conclusion: This book is worth reading, it's very well-written and the author makes some very funny observations. But read between the lines.
Christy Pinheiro, Author of: *The Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit*
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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