Nickel And Dimed Analysis

In the book Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, who is a famous journalist and writer, she explores how low-wage workers survive in America by going undercover to learn for herself. Her project begins in Florida where she worked as a waitress. Her goal throughout the entire project was to manage enough money to pay a second month of rent. Ehrenreich fails at her first job . Ehrenreich then explores Maine where she begins living in a motel. Ehrenreich gets hired as a housekeeper at a nursing home and a maid . By the end of her time in Maine, Ehrenreich exposes who she really is. Ehrenreich then explores her last state, Minnesota. Ehrenreich finds a job as a retail worker and begins doing fine but later begins hating her job. It is to complicated looking at Ehrenreich's success or failure of the whole project because one can not say what one feels about the whole book because it is to long especially because ones paper to write is to short. Criteria is important because it brings satisfaction and it helps create a final decision. Did Ehrenreich show great effort during her project and were her experiences realistic? Although Ehrenreich slightly failed at experiencing

When I purchased Nickel and Dimed earlier in the semester for the course, I read plenty of reviews saying that this was a must-read for everyone. I assumed that it would be a fairly informative book regarding the reality of poverty in America with bits and pieces of sad, disheartening testimonies thrown in along the way to reinforce our view of poverty; what I did not expect was the amount of honesty and humility that would come packed into those two hundred pages. Ehrenreich uses her experiences in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota to catch a glimpse into the lives of those living below the poverty line in America who struggle to make ends meet working

“Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow” (Ehrenreich, 2001, pg. 199). Barbara Ehrenreich wrote this in her captivating book Nickel and Dimed, where she embarked on a journey that revalued the truth behind life in low-wage America. Growing up I was led to believe that nothing worth having comes easy. As long as I worked hard and gave everything 100% I was guaranteed success, in essence hard work was the key to success. Ehrenreich revels the sad reality for many Americans where hard work, the type you never thought possible that leads to exhaustion, does not guarantee success. Ehrenreich had very unique objectives for writing this novel and she was able to reveal the impacts of social policy then and now.

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, given to her by an editor, she had planned to write an article about her experience. Her article purpose intended to reach the community that is financially well off and give them an idea how minimum wage workers deal with everyday life. It

The issue of income inequality is a reoccurring theme in Maria Konnikova’s article “America’s Surprising Views on Income Inequality” as well as Barbara Ehrenreich’s memoir Nickel and Dimed. To commence, Konnikova writes about the rapid growing gap between the rich and the poor. In particular, she elucidates, “Income inequality has grown by record amounts since the 2008 recession: between 2009 and 2012, incomes for the top one per cent of the population rose by more than thirty per cent, while those for the rest of the country-the bottom ninety-nine per cent-increased by less than half of one per cent” (Konnikova 1). Clearly, it is difficult for low-class individuals to make enough money to support themselves and their families. Furthermore,

High turnover is something that goes hand in hand with low wage jobs, so companies are always looking for a workers replacement. Finally Ehrenreich is able to secure employment at a place she give the pseudonym, Hearthside. To help protect identies of companies and people she actually worked for and with, Ehrenreich decides to use fake names to achieve anonymity. Ehrenreich starts out at 2.43 an hour plus tips. One of the first things Ehrenreich notices is that the people around her are only working hard enough to get by. Because the managers will yell at anybody who is done with their work, and not doing something new, the workers seem to be happy with just working at a slow pace, doing just one job. Because the only reward for finishing early is being yelled at by a manager, that apparently spends his day doing nothing, there is no real bonus to go the extra mile. Due to this negative reinforcement, Ehrenreich notes that the restaurant is almost moving in counterproductive mode. With less being worked on, less is being accomplished, attributing to the overall sad appearance and low morale of the restaurant and its employees. The next problem Ehrenreich encounters is the constant berating handed out by her supervisor "Stu". Ehrenreich observes that due to this constant barrage of insults and degradations, workers are forced to feel like they are subhuman. Weekly the managers announce

In Chapter three of “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, one of the most significant scenarios I would say is when Barbara is talking with Caroline about her lifestyle. Caroline lives in a $825-a-month rental home with her husband and two children. They are considered middle-class because they make close to $40,000 a year, but scraping by to make ends meet. Caroline goes on to tell of her low-wage life; this includes a hotel room cleaning job in Florida, and now book keeping job in Minnesota. Also, Caroline tells Barbara of her struggles with balancing a job and children, and her own health when living in Florida.

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich used her book Nickel and Dimed to illustrate her job assignment to live in the shoes of and, write about her experiences as a minimum wage worker in America. Ehrenreich goes to live in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota and works low wage jobs, sometimes more than one at a time. The point Ehrenreich is trying to make is that it is almost impossible to live a decent life in America with one, let alone two jobs paying very low wages. It is tough to be a low wage worker in America.

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 this world particularly real is the fact that we have all come across the hard-working hotel maid, store associate, or restaurant waitress but we hardly ever think of what their actual lives are like? We regularly dismiss these people as

From the beginning of Nickel and Dimed and Scratch Beginnings, the question posed is the same: “Does the American Dream still exist in the modern America?” And while liberal and conservative commentators will openly contradict each other and argue the viability of making it from almost nothing in this modern age, all that is hearsay. Ehrenreich and Shepard, the authors of Nickel and Dimed and Scratch Beginnings respectively, tried to go beyond what the commentators were doing and prove whether the American dream was still alive by embarking on their own separate case studies. And while, it is imaginable that anyone can rise from rags to as, Shepard stated “slightly better rags,” the how to do this is the item in question. To the American public

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

The main idea of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrates the complications and the way on how minimum wage workers survived during 1996 in Florida, Maine, and in Minnesota when the welfare reform had an impact on minimum wage. Her goal was to experience how to settle for rent, food, and bills while working in minimum salary. The idea of this project came in mind when she discussed with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, about future articles in magazines and then asked “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to

In the essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, titled Nickel and Dimed written in 2001. This article talks about how Barbara struggled through her low-income life at the time in Florida. Due to high rent and low wage, her experience shows us that the most middle-class Americans have a huge financial problem. Now, she wants to prove why economic crisis still exist in some parts of America.

The pinpoint cause of poverty is challenging to find. People who live well off and are above the poverty line may be quick to assume that laziness, addiction, and the typical stereotypes are the causes of poverty. Barbara Ehrenreich, a well known writer on social issues, brings attention to the stereotypical ideology at her time, that “poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles” (17). Ehrenreich is emphasizing the fact that statements like the one listed, often influence readers to paint inaccurate mental pictures of poverty that continue to shine light on the ideology of stereotypes being the pinpoint cause to poverty. However, there are many other causes that are often overshadowed, leaving some individuals to believe that poverty was wrongfully placed upon them. Examples would include: high rates of unemployment, low paying jobs, race, and health complications. Which are all out of one’s ability to control. There is no control over a lack of jobs and high rates of unemployment, nor the amount of inadequate wages the working poor receive. Greg Kaufmann, an advisor for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Half in Ten campaign, complicates matters further when he writes, “Jobs in the U.S. [were] paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent. Jobs in the U.S. [were] paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent” (33). Acknowledging Kaufmann’s fact, the amount received for a family of four is fairly close to the yearly salary of a high school graduate, which means, receiving that kind of pay for one man may seem challenging, now imagine caring for the needs of four individuals. To make matters worse, certain families receive that amount of money and carry the burden of paying for