Cultural Differences in the United States of America Affect Class Gaps All countries have a society with classes of some sort. Dividing people into classes can be made using different approaches. One method is to look at different cultures among people and another is to look at income inequalities in a country. The word culture means: how a group of people behave or think. This means that people who think or behave alike are more likely to have similar cultural beliefs. Income inequality division is made from income statistics studies and affects the class division in a country. People who do not have a lot of money often live within the same standards, for example. This essay will argue that cultural differences create misunderstandings between …show more content…
In Nickel and Dimed (2011), the middle-class woman Barbara Ehrenreich explores the working conditions and the living standards of the working class. Ehrenreich encounters situations that she finds unbearable and she questions how some things can be generally accepted. One example is when Ehrenreich gets rashes over her whole body – which prohibit her from sleeping and make her look like a leper. She feels that she can work but should stay home and writes “So it’s in the spirit of a scientific experiment that I present myself at the office, wondering if my speckled and inflamed appearance will be enough to get me sent home. Certainly I wouldn’t want anyone who looks like me handling my children’s toys or bars of bathroom soap” (p. 87). Her employer says that it must be latex allergy and gives her a different pair of gloves. Since Ehrenreich does not want to ruin her undercover investigation she does not argue with the employer. Her co-workers pity her, but nobody finds it strange that she had to work anyway, except for Ehrenreich. This suggests that people from the working class expect that kind of treatment from their employer: and, therefore, they do not react – while middle-class Ehrenreich certainly is not used to being treated like that and expects her employer to care more about her well-being than he seems to be …show more content…
Barbara Jensen’s definition of belonging versus becoming applies to this quoting by Ehrenreich. She is a middle-class woman striving to become and her work is a big part of who she is. Working class people work to belong – they work to make a living and give financial security for their family. This suggests that in order to understand life in the working class: a person has to have some type of understanding and agreement with the values and the culture of the working class. Bringing a middle-class culture into working-class circumstances will not connect well. The important sign of that is that Ehrenreich empathize with her co-workers’ living and working conditions and keep thinking about them as she gets home from work. Middle-class people according to Jensen define themselves by what they do. This suggests that Ehrenreich believes that her co-workers think like her: that they keep thinking about how terrible their working conditions and lives in general are and how much better their lives could be. This implies that Ehrenreich is ignoring the fact that her co-workers have nothing to compare their lives with and that they cannot realistically hope for a life-changing miracle. Which is the opposite of Ehrenreich’s situation since she will return to her ordinary life when her research has been finished.
Throughout the novel, Ehrenreich has a very reflective tone as she discusses the difficult tasks of the jobs she takes on. At the beginning of the novel, Ehrenreich believes that managing a lifestyle on low wage job was possible but quickly came to the realization that to make ends meet one must work multiple jobs. She as well believes that she may be too overqualified for these jobs but as well comes to the realization she is under-qualified as not only do these jobs prove to be physically but mentally tiring. Ehrenreich appeals to emotion to create sympathy for low-wage workers. An example of appeal to emotion would be where Marge states that the owners of homes they clean believe “They thinks we’re stupid”(100) and “ We’re nothing to these people”(100).
Ehrenreich reveals the harsh truths of the working poor in the most respectable way possible; by living their prosaic day-to-day struggles and writing authentic experiences. To begin, Ehrenreich works in a dive type restaurant making only $7.50 per hour; how can anyone who is responsible for themselves survive on minimum wage? Ehrenreich mentions, “...the $30 I had to spend on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry’s servers-a setback it
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
In her expose, Nickel and Dime, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women to be forced to be put into the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998. Ehrenreich wanted to capture her experience by retelling her method of “uncover journalism” in a chronological order type of presentation of events that took place during her endeavor. Her methodologies and actions were some what not orthodox in practice. This was not to be a social experiment that was to recreate a poverty social scenario, but it was to in fact see if she could maintain a lifestyle working low wage paying jobs the way 4 million women were about to experience it. Although Ehrenreich makes good
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
Barbara Ehrenreich 's showed that she didn't have the mind set or worries of a working class person by reminding us as readers the fine line between the kind of performance she is doing and the kind her fellow coworkers do every day on the job. Time and again she lets us sink into her new world of a low-wage worker, only to pull us back with a reminder of the act. 1 She does this experiment to determine whether or not she could both live off the money earned and have enough money at the end of the month to pay the next month's rent. Working class people depend on the money they make on these jobs to survive and provide for their families. She could drop all these jobs she experimented with and go back to her real life without a worry in the
Ehrenreich proclaims her message through her experiences and as well as her evidence. Therefore, when she begins her experiment, she starts to get an insight of her co-worker’s lives and the struggles they face in the world. Through her surveys, it has been revealed that her job in Key West, Florida “shows no sign of being financially viable” (25). Most of her coworkers either rent a room or sleep in their car. As for Maine, it becomes difficult to acquire an
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
Ehrenreich goes into this experience knowing that she is above everyone and knowing she has money in her back pocket for any scenario where she is in need. Not even realizing that she was talking down on the working class, Ehrenreich refers to the working poor people's lives as ¨this parallel universe¨. As Ehrenreich gets into her first job working for minimum wage, she says ¨At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified.¨ Ruling out things was something that Ehrenreich did from the beginning. Choosing to rule out homelessness, she would never be without a car, and no shelters or sleeping in cars for her. Attitude played a big role in how she began her experience right from the start. The people who are actually living in poverty do not have any options to fall back on. Ehrenreich’s attitude is not of one who actually goes through the daily struggles to get by in this world. Being above everyone was something she made clear to all readers right in the beginning. On the other hand, Turkel’s attitude is very uplifting and appreciative of the working poor and how they have so much pride and passion in the work they do. While interviewing the working class, Turkel gets invited to eat dinner at some man's house, and without even realizing it, Turkel is leaving the dinner on short notice not fully appreciating that this stranger invited him into his home and used money he probably did not have to buy him Italian. Turkel says ¨I found myself neglecting the amenities and graces that offer mutual pleasure and host.¨ Realizing these people take huge pride in what they are doing, and love doing what they do, Turkel started to see how working like they do is actually
Most of Ehrenreich’s coworkers pay $500 or more for their rent. 5. When Ehrenreich goes for her job interviews, she gets disrespected most of the time because the employers she meets want their applicants to feel like they are lower class people. This happened to her in her interview for Merry Maids when her employer complains about finding decent help and telling her not to calculate her pay into hours. Ehrenreich never talks about an employer being nice, but in her low-wage work, she tries her best to prove herself, but she is still not treated with
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.
Throughout the book Ehrenreich’s co-workers all seem to struggle, such as the trouble with housing in Key West and healthcare in Maine. Having a place to live, eating properly, and healthcare seem to be the biggest cause of concern within the working class. Most of the jobs that she worked, the workers did not have healthcare packages or benefits. So it wasn’t uncommon for them to have trouble trying to manage their health and struggle to pay for medication, let alone a visit to the doctor. Without healthcare and a lack of proper diet (in Maine she had a ‘thirty minute’ lunch break but most of her co-workers barely ate anything close to a meal) it is not hard to see how the working class can easily be shot into poverty; seeing as most of the working class that she had encountered were just living above the poverty line. Reading about what she noticed and noted about her co-workers it isn’t hard to imagine how easy it would be to fall below the poverty
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.
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