Barbara Ehrenreich Weaknesses

Ehrenreich’s housing situation also makes her stand out from the real poor working class. Ehrenreich (2002) states "As it turns out, the mere fact of having a unit to myself makes me an aristocrat..." (p. 70). Almost every other person she has met has to live with another person. A hefty security deposit is required to get an apartment which many people are unable to pay so they are forced to live with family, friends, or pay for a hotel room. Cohabiting is another system the working poor faces. Ehrenreich does not have to endure the hardship of living with another person.

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

One was management: she was under the surveillance of men and women whose job was to monitor her behavior for sins of sloth, theft, drug abuse or worse. “Assistant managers” in low-wage areas like what she was dong became the class enemy. In the restaurant business, most assistant managers are former cooks and servers, and paid a salary of about four hundred a week. Managers can sit, but it’s their job to make sure no one else does, even when there is nothing to do. This is why for servers, slow time can be as exhausting. During Ehrenreich’s employment, a mandatory meeting came up, and a consultant sent out by corporate headquarters opened the meeting with a sneer, and said “break-room and whatever is in them can be searched at any time,” and all gossiping must stop.” After the corporate manager exhausted his agenda of rebukes, complaints followed concerning the work conditions. However, the consultant did not show any interest for improvement. Ehrenreich had never been treated this way, and when she asked why, it was muttered “management decisions.” Her second reason why she could not continue in the service position was that low-wage jobs showed no signs of being financially viable. People that live year in year out on six to ten dollars an hour must thrive to survive. For instance, her coworker Gail was sharing a room in a well-known downtown flop house which she shared with a male

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.

It is easy for anyone to tell that the life of the working poor is not the ideal lifestyle. Though in Ehrenreich’s words, “It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition.” (214)She means to say that it is easy for the nonpoor to ignore the true realities of those in the working class. Many in fact are not ignoring the realities but have never become aware of them in the first place. This is further supported by Ehrenreich statements about how the media rarely ever truly shows the realities of the working poor. It is hard for society to take action for a cause they truly don’t understand. Though by declaring the working poor as a state of emergency this would draw attention to the realities of the average lifestyle. In such creating

In this Book Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich is based on Ehrenreich’s ethnographic research on the tricks that people in low-wage jobs are able to survive in America off their income. Ethnographic Research (“observation involves embedding oneself reply and over the long-term in a field site of study in order to systemically document the everyday lives, behaviors, and interactions of a community of people”). Throughout the book Ehrenreich places herself as much as she can in certain situations that the lower class go through on a daily basis, for this experiment Ehrenreich took on low-wage jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, where she

In the article, “What’s So Bad about Being Poor” by Charles Murray, Murray states that “One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor”. He discusses how, contrary to present day, in America up until the 1950s those in positions of influence and power included a sizable amount of people who had been raised “dirt-poor”. Murray states that, because of this, many Americans with their lack of exposure to such people, they develop a skewed perspective of what poverty is. On account of this, Murray challenges the reader with several thought experiments which he uses to help the reader come to certain conclusions that convey his message.

Barbara Ehrenreich uses very specific techniques (“moves”) to convey her message to her readers: for instance, the approach she uses in the first part of her essay is an ‘objective approach’ which relied upon citations from published works. She drew upon statistical data and information and used extensive quotations extracted from experts who have written on the subject. The other important device used in her essay (the other side of the same coin, so to speak) is the ‘subjective approach’ that she undertook to convey her message of “white-collar downward mobility.” Examples of the objective approach is found in this passage taken from the published work of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “In Late 2003, when I started this project, unemployment

Through the struggles of stabilizing two jobs at once while searching for a temporary home, Ehrenreich displayed the frustration of sticking to her three guidelines in her experiment: she cannot go hungry, be homeless, or ignore the skills she learned through her education and past work experiences. She struggled to find jobs that provided more than minimum-wage incomes in

Ehrenreich developed the objectives of this book in a very interesting way. Ironically she developed the idea for this project over a very elegant expensive lunch at a French country-style restaurant. Ehrenreich and her editor Lewis Laphan from Harpers had gone out to lunch to discuss future articles. Throughout lunch the topic of poverty came up. Questions like, “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” (Ehrenreich, 2001 pg. 1) and how do unskilled workers survive on such low incomes, started to surface. She then thought “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism – you know, go out there and try

Ehrenreich is part of the upper-middle class; she is "privileged" to have a job in which she makes money by sitting at her desk and writing (E 2). She has never considered herself one of the working poor before this experiment, even though she explains, "the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away" (E

Barbara Ehrenreich is a successful American author that conducted an experiment of living in a life of low wages. She documented her experiences and thus made the book Nickel and Dimed. This story involves a woman named Barbara Ehrenreich who goes undercover to experiment living in a life of low wages and sees if she can survive from it. Ehrenreich effectively captures her argument of showing that it is almost impossible to provide the basic needs for one’s self by working a minimum wage job. The part of the title of the book that states On (Not) Getting By In America; the word Not goes with her argument being that it is very hard to provide for oneself under the employment of a minimum wage job.

In her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), Barbara Ehrenreich performs a social experiment in which she transplants herself from her comfortable middle-class life and immersing herself in the plight of the “millions of American’s (who) work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages” (Ehrenreich, 2001). Her goal was to explore the consequences of the welfare reform on the approximately four million women who would be subsequently forced into the labor market, expecting to make only $6 to $7 an hour. (2001 p.1) Her experiment eviscerated the idea that the American underclass was lazy, and the lie that American’s could live healthy, productive lives on minimum wage. On the contrary, she proved underclass

Ehrenreich applies for many different jobs and ends up choosing between Wal-Mart and Menards. She picks Wal-Mart and find herself working in the women 's department organizing and hanging up clothes. She realizes that she must became friendly with the dressing room attendants in order to make her job easier. Again her supervisors constantly get on her about wasting time. She uses her break times to talk to her fellow workers about a union but quits before really getting anything started.

When I think of social experiments, I don’t usually think about people actually changing their lives to merely test a hypothesis. But Barbara Ehrenreich decides to do just that when a successful editor with whom she is having lunch suggests so. This sudden decision is what many people, myself included, would call INSANE. If I were faced with this challenge, I have no doubt that I would try to wiggle myself out of it. In fact, I try to wiggle myself out of many things that are not quite as difficult as attempting to live in poverty. I have decided to compile a list: 1) cleaning my room, 2) awkward conversations with people that I have just met, 3) babysitting my sister after she’s eaten any kind of sugar, 4) skinny jeans. You get the point. A “normal” person would not drop everything to make a point about and draw awareness to social injustice in our world. Even in the first few pages of her book, Barbara shows us that she is a very capable and bold woman in whom we