Nickel And Dimed By Barbara Ehrenreich Essay

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.

These minimum wage jobs can barely keep her alive even if she was rationing her money as well as she could. “If we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do” (Ehrenreich 195). She could see that the system was against the poor and prevented them from climbing the social ranks without luck. Although still attainable, the author depicts the difficulties of those in poverty and why the American Dream is more difficult to achieve than it is observed to be by the middle and upper class.

Many low paid workers can thrive in society and get through their struggles, but the lack the respect that they deserve for what they do. Barbara Ehrenreich and Mike rose share their professional observations on this matter. Ehrenreich shares her research from a chapter in her book Nickeled and Dimed, called “Serving in Florida.” She focuses largely on how low-wage workers are oppressed and how little voice they have. She describes how difficult it is for low-income workers to survive month to month and what sorts of problems this lifestyle can cause. Roses share’s his experience in his article, “The Intelligence of the Waitress in Motion.” Rose focuses on how little credit low-wage workers receive for utilizing high level intelligence to get

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 the study resulting in her newest book, Nickel and Dimed.

“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, Barbara Ehrenreich mentions the problem of rents is the market. When the market fails to provide necessary goods, such as affordable housing, we expect the government to step in and help. We decide to believe this, because, in the case of health care, the government offers Medicare to the elderly, Medicare to the poor, and many state programs to poor children. But, with housing, radical increases of the rental market has been followed by a retreat of the public sector.

Were your perceptions of the blue collar Americans transformed or reinforced by nickel and dimmed? Have your notions of poverty and prosperity changed since reading the book? What about your own treatments of waiters, maids, salespeople?

A riveting tale about the world of low class workers, Ehrenreich puts into words what most are don’t acknowledge or are afraid to acknowledge. Through first-hand experience, Ehrenreich successfully navigates her way through the low wage work by working such common low wage jobs as waitressing, housecleaning, and sales. While along the way discovering that each job encompasses their own organizational structure, culture, and identity that she is focused to discover and conform with while being paid no more than $7.00 an hour and even at some points as little as $2.43 (plus tips). Ehrenreich persuasively forces us to realize that the American dream is slowly

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American author and some could even say a journalist for her work that was done for her novel called Nickel and Dimed. This novel is based on an experiment that was done by Ehrenreich in which she abandoned her job and left to another state to live off of minimum wage to answer her question “ How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled”. A simple answer that Ehrenreich came to, is that they don 't. A person does not live on 7$ an hour, they survive on it. She has the argument that huge corporations have been victimizing their workers, they only care about the work itself rather than the person doing it. The corporations see their workers as replaceable and they use this against their workers,

The theme of “Nickel and Dimed” is how people making minimum wage have been treated in America. Ehrenreich traveled to different places to find out how people were being treated and how minimum wage workers couldn't survive on what they were being paid. Even though Ehrenreich was only doing these jobs to journal about them she still experienced the same hard times and pains actual minimum wage workers did. This book by Barbara Ehrenreich was published January 1st, 2001. Nickel and Dimed was a well written book and it showed good examples about how one cannot live on minimum wage.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich proclaims that while on a mission to experience the struggles in the everyday life of the poor, she will never be able to fully understand what it’s like to be in that situation. Throughout her journey, she comes across many different people and job opportunities, making for a different outcome every time. Although there was variation of variables, her response to troubling situations was always the same: giving up.

Struggling as a lower class worker, Barbara Ehrenreich found a new meaning to serving people as she writes about her experience working as a waitress in her piece, "Nickel and Dimed". Starting a new life in an unfamiliar setting was the least of her worries as she endeavors to find a way to support her newly independent life.

1. What is the topic? Be as specific as you can as you summarize the issue, but don’t forget about style. Being logical does not mean that you cannot showcase a sophisticated prose style. In this response, tell us what the book is about, major characters, events, and more. Remember, you are establishing your ethos right here.

Imagine this, a women was unable to afford college when she was an adolescent, therefore she ended up working any job she could find. That leaves her with minimum wage jobs. She applies for a few jobs and ends up working two, after all she has two children to support and she is single. After a long day at work she has to come home and decide how her paycheck will be cut up, food, clothing, bills? If you can imagine that, now imagine that this is a common economic issue for one of the richest countries in the entire world: the United States.

The distributive paradigm or model that Young refers to in her book defines social justice as “the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society’s members” (Young 16). In that regard, social justice is being viewed as the distribution of material goods, resources, and other means of economic advancement. Social justice is much broader and goes far deeper than simply defining who gets what. While the distribution of resources, wealth, and material goods is an important factor when thinking about social justice, it should not be the center of discussion. The distribution of such things comes first from the initiation of a social system that defined who was worthy of receiving resources in life. To think that social justice is solely about the distribution of wealthy possessions, ignores the fact that there are social structures that have been put into place in order to control the distribution. In a sense, the distributive model only acknowledges the effects of the issue and not the cause.