Nickel And Dimed Reflection

The main message that this book offers is how difficult it is to get by for people who work for minimum wage.The difficulties these people face are made worse by the fact that they're bosses and managers are often strict and can be inadvertently cruel at times.The message was that for some people the situation got to the point where no matter how hard they would work it just wouldn't be enough,Ehrenreich was raised in a household where she was led to believe if you worked hard enough you could rise up but in this country for some people it just wasn't possible.

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

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

There is one part of the book that I really did not care for and not real sure what it has to do with her argument. While Ehrenreich is in Maine on one Saturday night she goes to a tent revival and she talks about her how she starts expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole and how Christianity is to crucify him again and again. I am not sure how this pertains to the main point of the story or provides support to the point. I was shocked that she never offered to help any of the women she worked with in any way. Outside of Ehrenreich’s experiment she is financially well off. I am confused as to why she did not help Holly when Holly hurts her ankle and has to take herself to the emergency room. I think she did very well in Florida for herself. Being a Waitress is probably the best paying low wage job someone could have if you work at a decent restaurant and have a good disposition.

This book had several strengths, for one it contained first hand experience; experiences being that Ehrenreich had worked in different cities and in a wide range of jobs. This was able to give the reader a feel that no job is similar, but the way the employees get treated is similar. For example, Ehrenreich had worked as a waitress, maid, and a cashier. In the time of her waitress occupation she dealt with many unfair rules of management and rude customers. In the time of her maid occupation, she also dealt with unfair rules of management and rude homeowners. Finally, as a cashier; she also dealt with unfair rules of management and unfair schedules that they wouldn’t accommodate to. So the relapsing problems in these jobs that Ehrenreich took on would be that management were the

Reluctant at first to be the one doing the research, Ehrenreich finally capitulates and begins life as a minimum wage worker in America. The main idea of her experiment was to spend one month in each place and make enough to pay the second month’s rent (p.5-6). She wonders if she will find some special techniques that the poor use to get by. She finds that there are no secret economies, people just do the best they can with what they have available.

Ehrenreich reminds her readers that the minimum paying job isn’t enough to provide a decent house for herself, instead she has been living in a trailer. She reiterates that not only working conditions of the lower class are a factor to their poverty, but living conditions for the poor aren't as pleasant as they are for the upper middle class. She follows with another restriction that rises after a coworker of hers spends too much time at a bar. The employee turns out to be another woman who is, "another trailer home dweller and a mother of three". She provides these details because the environment that lower class employees live in tends to drive them to getting drunk, or even into harmful habits for themselves and the people they surround themselves with.

Continuously, Ehrenreich concludes with disdain that living off of a minimum wage job without being homeless is difficult or impossible. At each of the states she travels to, she finds she must work two jobs in order to afford even the most basic rooms. She notes that her troubles are not unique. Persistently, she writes about her coworkers being homeless or in one instance, not even being able to afford proper food and instead eating only a bad of

Ehrenreich makes these observations with academic precision, interspersed with firm middle-class values, but these judgments were not made from an ivory tower, coldly calculated and formed with the disinterested tone of the scientist that she is. To the contrary, Ehrenreich attempted to immerse herself in the lives of female underclass minimum-wage earners and performed her research by taking work and attempting to live off of wages earned by working at truck stop diners cleaning companies. She lives in seedy motels and eats the waste of customers right along side those whom she is studying (2001). In this way she ideally positions herself to understand and report on the dehumanizing effects that

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

The biggest appeal that Ehrenreich makes is after she ends up walking out of the housekeeping job/waitress job because she cannot handle it anymore." I have failed… I don 't cry, but I am in a

In the beginning she was reluctant and did not want to do it herself. She was going to have "some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands" do it instead. For the first sections of the book, the author is passive and does not care. Despite trying to educate the public of the strife of the minimum wage workers, she is not passionate about what she is trying to teach. However, as the novel continues she becomes more actively involved. With this involvement she quickly becomes exhausted. Referring back to this invalid out of date experiment, when Ehrenreich was too tired to continue she had the option of quitting, of going back to her normal life. The people she was trying to imitate do not have that luxury. They do not have the option of quitting and starting over when they feel tired. Or they do not like their job, or they are being mistreated in the workplace. Actual low wage people rely on the one or two jobs they have to live. Getting fired or quitting for them is like a death

Ehrenreich eventually found work as a waitress, where she learned firsthand the struggles of working in a restaurant for minimum wage. The pace that the work demanded oscillated from lethargic to manic,

Furthermore, Ehrenreich is almost discriminatory of this social class, despite her origin, because she makes a point of criticizing them. She is almost justifying the minorities of society here, for she creates a negative image of this higher social class of individuals. Another powerful sense of imagery is created when Ehrenreich writes, “There are not exactly people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved between shifts from the heat,” (Ehrenreich 40). Describing the workers in such a derogatory manner as “canned labor” accentuates how they are simply objects in the eyes of corporate management and

As an investigative approach to study the lives of minimum wage workers, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich conducted this research by assuming multiple low paid positions herself. Her essential goal for this study was to determine how low paid workers survive on their income. She began her adjustment to the working class lifestyle by establishing regulations for herself to eliminate any advantages from her real life that could alleviate her throughout the process. In doing so, she abandoned all of the luxuries that her middle-class career afforded her, such as a comfortable living environment, fresh quality meals, and working independently. Immersing herself into this lifestyle allowed her to witness the arduous circumstances of low wage living that she could not have experienced otherwise.