Nickel And Dimed Summary

The book Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting by in America, written by Barbara Ehrenreich is a book that relates the experience of how she survived living on poverty-level wages in America as a waitress, maid and a Wal-mart sales associate. Barbara left her comfortable surroundings as a journalist with a Ph.D in biology to work various "unskilled" and "under compensated" jobs in order to achieve, "the old-fashioned kind of journalism". In regards to leaving her comfortable lifestyles for a few months traveling through Florida to Maine and Minnesota, she discovered that people who are paid six to seven dollars an hour did not generate enough income for those who did not want to live

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

Ehrenreich also appeals to is pathos through descriptive word choices. Pathos is defined as the use of emotionally loaded language, emotional events, and figurative language in order to inflict sympathy on the reader. In this case, Ehrenreich is attempting to create sympathy for people who work minimum wage jobs by describing her own experiences in detail. For instance, when Ehrenreich is at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, she sees a street performer and decides to give him money for his beautiful playing. She says, “When the song ends, I give him a dollar, the equivalent of about ten minutes of sweat” (Ehrenreich 86). Ehrenreich wants to remind people that the money she made is a result of hard, physical labor she endured. She sweat for ten minutes to earn that dollar, and so she reminds readers that any money she has is a result of hard work she put forth. Usually people do not think of dollar amounts as time spent working, so by doing this and including the word “sweat” (which indicates tireless labor), she creates an emotional appeal towards herself and others who have minimum wage jobs. Also, Ehrenreich describes in detail the unpleasant tasks she needs to perform with her job as a maid. Obviously not every minimum wage worker is a maid, however a lot of minimum wage jobs have similar tasks like maids’. For example, Ehrenreich goes into

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

In ‘Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, the main claim made by the author was that the low-working class are, in general, forced into an inescapable cycle of poverty. The low paying jobs they have to take are barely enough to pay rent, buy food, and other necessities. This doesn’t even include those in less favorable conditions than those Ehrenreich mimicked in her experiment. In general, Ehrenreich was trying to prove that the “living wage” offered by entry level jobs is not, in fact, “livable”. The significant supporting evidence provided in the book included Ehrenreich’s first hand experiences of mimicking (to her best abilities) what low-wage workers live everyday, as well as a plethora of supporting facts and statistics. All of Ehrenreich’s evidence was heavily supported with reliable resources. Based on the facts she presented, I agree with her claim that the majority of low-wage workers get stuck in poverty as a result of the entry-level workforce system as a whole. The evidence regarding statistics was very valid and well cited, and her first-hand experiences, while with possible flaws, only worked to further support what she was claiming. Ehrenreich’s methodology of obtaining evidence was very direct, and proved to show a plausible experience that most of the low-class would have in a best-case scenario. By that I mean in some of the best circumstances (no children, no serious medical needs, ect.), it is reasonable to assume that Ehrenreich’s experiences are

In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, the author Barbara Ehrenreich took on an experiment for better understanding of the working class. She left her comfortable life and took on lower paying jobs herself.

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 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.

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.

After reading Nickel and Dimed, I think that having any job is better than no job at all. I think that having a job shows that you are independent and that you don’t have to rely on others. There are some people out there who are far too lazy to find a job and would rather rely on their family for their income. This book made me feel more aware rather than angry. This book has taught me what the life of a typical low wage worker in America looks and feels like. While reading this book, I felt really bad for Ehrenreich because she had to undergo a lot of hardships all by herself and she usually had to worry about her budget. It made me think about how my life would be when I get older. It felt worried that I’ll struggle the same way Ehrenreich

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

Ehrenreich’s experiment is challenging the notion that employment opportunities will move women from the poverty line, which in turn, increase their self-determination and value in the economy. Transitioning from welfare to work will lead to greater prosperity for society. The economy will eventually be subjected to a decline that can eliminate a plethora of jobs. And should the

Also, I believe that she tried to make it as realistic to finding a white-collar job as she possibly could. Ehrenreich states, “As for the resume: although it had to be faked, I wanted it as much as possible to represent my actual skills…” I think this is a smart strategy for Ehrenreich because if she does land a job she will be able to perform the skills listed on her resume. Also, I think it was smart of Ehrenreich to have people one her resume as her references that will lie for her if they were to be contacted. Although I believe that Ehrenreich thought through her experiment and was prepared in many ways, I do not think she was in the right mindset going into the experiment. I find it frustrating that she stated “... I imagined that I would be immune from the constant subservience and obedience demanded of low-wage blue-collar workers, that I would be far freer to be, and express, myself. As it turns out, I was wrong on all counts.” Another statement I do not understand on the same topic is, “Where I imagined comfort, there is now growing distress…” Both statements are puzzling because I do not understand why Ehrenreich thought that this experiment would be easier than the one she did for blue-collar workers in her novel Nickel and Dimed. I feel as if finding a job, for the majority will be challenging. Blue-collar and white-collar both have to go through an