Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Barbara Ehrenreich is a political/social journalist and writer. She is a best-selling author with a dozen book credits to her name. Her works include Blood Rites, The Worst Years of Our Lives, and Fear of Falling. She also has written articles for Time, Harpers, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Time Magazine. Her Ph.D. in biology endows her with the experience and discipline to approach as a scientific experiment
many members of the lower class face daily. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America seeks to expose the harsh realities of life for these people. She notes that some of coworkers are homeless and that others must support multiple people with an income of less than ten dollars an hour. Repeatedly, she includes details that highlight the desperately destitute conditions of her coworkers. At its core, Nickel and Dimed is a book whose author wrote to edify people of the
Barbara Ehrenreich published the book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, in 2001, where she wrote about an approximate two and a half year experiment she did regarding the struggles of those surviving off of minimum wage. As a result of her difficult journey, Ehrenreich realizes the difficulty of those working minimum wage and deduces, “So the problem goes beyond my personal failings and
Nickel and Dimed On (not) Getting By in America by Ehrenreich In the book Nickel and Dimed On (not) Getting By in America the author Ehrenreich, goes under cover as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich’s primary reason for seriptiously getting low paying jobs is to see if she can “match income to expenses as the truly poor attempt to do everyday.”(Ehrenreich 6) Also Ehrenreich makes it extremely clear that her work was not designed to make her “experience poverty.”(6) After completing the assignment
A Sociological Critique of Nickel and Dimed I. Introduction The economic and social class gap in America is evaluated in the book titled, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The text aims to illustrate her perspective and experiences by going undercover as a journalist. Ehrenreich portrays herself as a recently divorced woman with the skills of a homemaker. The objective of Ehrenreich’s experiment was to evaluate different jobs requiring little to no skills and to
In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich tells a powerful and gritty story of daily survival. Her tale transcends the gap that exists between rich and poor and relays a powerful accounting of the dark corners that lie somewhere beyond the popular portrayal of American prosperity. Throughout this book the reader will be intimately introduced to the world of the “working poor”, a place unfamiliar to the vast majority of affluent and middle-class Americans. What makes
Spotlighting Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Throughout the years, the ability to survive in the American economy without a college education has been diminishing. The employment opportunities now available to many Americans without college degrees are called “unskilled” jobs. These forms of employment are often unstable and offer low pay without much of a change for advancement within the company . Low income families are often constrained by many hurdles that do not allow them
Introduction Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America was the first book of its type that I’ve ever read, a real life analysis of what its like to “live in poverty,” working minimum wage jobs trying to make ends meet day in and day out. It was an intriguing story of how a woman with plenty went on to document how she lived without and I found that Ehrenreich’s commentary throughout the book offered a refreshing perspective to the usual conversation that surrounds poverty;
15.0 percent. There were 46.5 million people in poverty. The only feasible path to accepting this staggering statistic as the reality of such a proud nation is by first acknowledging the accuracy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2001) premise as it is asserted in the final chapter of Nickel and Dimed: “Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors” (p. 216). After we accept this as a truth, we must then move to analyze the
class is set up for failure? Do these workers lack the experience in their chosen fields? Do these employees lack in their work ethic? Does the government need to give more support? Questions like these arise in both the story Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich and the article “The Minimum-Wage War” by Rolling Stone. At first glance, these writings may seem unrelated; However, the themes of minimum wage and work ethic go hand-in-hand with respect to these texts