A Journey On The Lives Of The Invisible Workforce, By Katherine Newman, The Washington Post

Besides a check, that she had to turn right back over to pay rent and buy few groceries in order to live for the next day. In turn, that same above described situation is the depressing truth about the cycle of poverty and the experience of one woman who placed herself in a project in order to relate the desperation of minimum wage workers of America.

Some Americans are lucky and do not have to rely on their families to help them after they get their own jobs. However, this is not a possibility for the working class poor. Many of Ehrenreich’s fellow workers rely heavily on family to meet their basic needs of housing, food, and help with childcare. Many Americans will put excessive demands on the family unit before going to the government for help. Ehrenreich only had herself to take care of. Many of her coworkers had to go home and take care of their children and household.

What is most interesting about Barbara Ehrenreich?s journalistic venture is that she worked in a white color position as an accomplished journalist, but her immediate family came from a meager financial background. It appears as though she had a grasp on the hardships of poverty in America, which is why she wanted to dig deeper. Ehrenreich?s sister had a series of low paid jobs, her father worked in the coal mine, and her husband met her when he was making only $4.50 an hour. Ehrenreich began her research in 1998 and the book was published in 2001. Ehrenreich did not set out to be poor. She set out to bring attention to the condition of the survival of a minimum wage income of $6.00-$7.00 per hour.

The situation Ehrenreich is describing is the reality of millions of Americans; they work multiple minimum wage jobs, and are paid “so meagerly that workers can’t save enough to move on.” In addition, Ehrenreich recalls the actions of the U.S. government in regards to assisting these Americans. The article opens with the contribution of President Lyndon B. Johnson on the “War on Poverty”, then the “attack on welfare” in the 90s, concluding with The Great Recession. While writing Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Ehrenreich abandoned her comfortable life to live the life of a low-income American; she worked multiple entry level jobs including Wal-Mart, a maid service, and as a nursing home aide. Through these actions, Ehrenreich establishes her ethos. Because she’s lived the lifestyle she’s describing, she has the authority to speak on the topic. Ehrenreich concludes with her proposal to help the

Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth Living in Bootstrap America, tells her story of what it’s like to be working poor in America, as well as what poverty is truly like on many levels. With a thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses her journey from lower class, to sometimes middle class, to poor, and everything in between. Throughout the read, Tirado goes on to reveal why poor people make the decisions they do in a very powerful way.

In Barbara Ehrenreich's bold and honest book she tackles the issue of poverty in America head on, by becoming a low wage worker herself. Ehrenreich delves into the often unheard of issues relating to poverty and low wage work, providing her readers with a new perspective on America's working poor and manages to give her audience a stark emotional, yet logical and factual, look into the working class' poverty epidemic. She uses her own anecdotal evidence and supports it with statistics and facts, appeals to ethos by challenging the ethics of corporate America and it costs, finally she hits an emotional chord with readers by reminding them of what low wage workers must endure so that we can live in our America.

While out dining with a friend Barbara Ehrenreich, a bestselling author of many books had came up with a question which would mark the start of a whole new life experience. Her question was, “how does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” The topic of poverty had greatly fascinated Ehrenreich but not to the point that she would actually want to experience poverty herself. However, this changed when the friend she was dining with suggested she should be the one to go out and experience the unpleasant lifestyle that is poverty. Upon starting this experiment she knew she had to construct a plan so she sat and began to plan out how she would be living throughout the experiment When concluding her experiment Ehrenreich argues

Like the previous example of our class activity, you can gather some information about the family to personally consider whether you think the people portrayed deserve help. In the opening of the book, Andrea Campbell gives us information about the couple’s job status, income, and family size, which allows the reader to make a first opinion on the family’s deservedness. Once this introduction is made, the reader can see the twists and turns that can lead a family into needing government help, which is often the part of the story that gets lost – as most assume those in poverty are there because of their own ambition or actions. The wife gets in an accident, which forces the couple to take an insurance plan from the California government that is designed to keep them in poverty by taking away their income after a set cap is reached (Campbell 2014). The book continues to take the reader through the experience of trying to survive on social insurance and means-tested programs (those where recipients must hold a job or other status to maintain benefits), and ends with three Chapters discussing the difficulties that means-tested programs create for those in poverty. By forcing the reader to, in some way, experience a very average story about surviving in poverty, the book forces the reader

As the author moved from locale to locale she identified a variety of recurring hardships faced by the working poor. The chief concern for many was housing. Finding and maintaining economical housing was the principal source of disruption in their lives. For many of the working poor it’s not uncommon to spend more than 50% of income on housing. These leaves a scarce amount of money left over for anything else and creates a situation where the person is always worried about losing their shelter. In a nutshell, it’s Ehrenreich’s conviction that wages are too low and rents are too high. She does speak with many individuals who simply cannot afford the high rental rates and are forced to live with family, friends, or in some

Through interviews with welfare workers and recipients, Hays demonstrates the high costs welfare has had on the moral, economic, physical and mental well-being of poor women and their children due to what she considers to be the conflict between the two opposing aspects of reform: work values and family values. She believes that these conflicting values and the inherent weaknesses in the Act contribute to serious and ongoing problems for welfare recipients.

Ehrenreich also found the experience of the working poor abound with indignities, from monitored urination for drug testing to subjection to search. Ehrenreich notes the indignity, “I still flinch to think that I spent all those weeks under the surveillance of men (and later women) whose job it was to monitor my behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse or worse” (2001, p. 22). “According to Marx, the exploitation of workers by capitalists and the resulting alienation from work result in the denial of workers’ humanity” (Hodson & Sullivan, 2008, p. 8); once again, a description strikingly similar to Ehrenreich’s experiences and observations.

In “Nickel and Dimed”, Ehrenreich, the highly skilled journalist, wonders, “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?’ and, ‘How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”(1). She is wanting to catch the attention of a specific group of people, the higher class and higher skilled workers and taxpayers. This class of people, who can help influence what the welfare reform does to help the single mothers and what the employees for the “unskillful jobs” get paid, are not always fully educated on what true poverty is. In fact, no person can truly experience poverty until they are actually in poverty and Adam Shepherd wanted to truly experience

Barbara Ehrenreich is a best-selling author, who wrote the descriptive narrative essay titled, “Serving in Florida”. In this writing, Ehrenreich tells the readers about her experiment into seeing if it was truly possible to live off of minimum wage, in a low-wage community located in Florida. Ehrenreich initially published this writing in her novel called Nickled and Dimed, but since then, it has also been published in other books for students in school. In “Serving in Florida”, Ehrenreich finds a place to live for about $500 per month. While living there, she had a waitressing job, paying 2.13 per hour plus tips. Throughout the writing, Ehrenreich described the obstacles that made it almost impossible to live off of only minimum wage.

“$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, discuss the 1.5 million Americans with an income of only $2 a day. Throughout the book, Edin and Shaefer discover the strategies and living conditions of 18 families living on $2 a day by spending months and even years documenting them. The authors illustrate the troubling trend of a low-wage labor market that fails to provide a living wage. Beyond the data, this novel presents a memoir of rising poverty and income inequality in America. Marx’s conflict theory comes into play on how the poor and unemployed essentially fight against each other for basic human needs like food and water in order to survive.

Edin and Lein wanted to discover the surviving strategies of single mothers who are on welfare or work on a low-waged job. They argue “neither welfare nor low wage work gives single mothers enough income to meet their families’ expenses” (253). To find out the set of survival strategies of single mothers to make ends meet Edin and Lein interviewed 379 low income single mothers. They chose their interviewees from different cities, different aged group, and different ethnic background. Most mothers who are on welfare wanted to find a job and be out of the welfare but the primary problem that single mothers face was that “family economics”. With the minimum wage income it was impossible for the single mothers to bring the ends meet. Neither working nor being on welfare was enough to survive therefore mothers who are on welfare supported their budget by generating substantial supplementary income. Edin and Lein states that “welfare recipients generated extra income by working at side jobs, obtaining cash from network members, community groups and local charities”. They also get cash help from the family members, child’s fathers, and from a boyfriend. Because they were afraid to lose welfare benefits they did not tell anyone about the extra income they have. To survive they needed both the welfare benefits and the extra income. It was very difficult to establish a trust with the interviewees in the beginning because they were afraid if they talk about it they might lose the