Nickel and Dimed On (not) Getting By in America by Ehrenreich

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

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

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

Ethos, pathos, and logos are all devices that Barbara Ehrenreich effectively uses throughout her novel Nickel and Dimed to prove that America needs to address the commonly overlooked issue of poverty within every community. It is important that she uses all three devices because they help support her argument by increasing her credibility, connecting to the readers’ emotions, and appealing to their sense of logic. The combination of these devices puts a sense of urgency on the problem Ehrenreich is addressing and therefore creates an effective argument.

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

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

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

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.

The evidence that is given to the reader in the book would have to be reliable considering the author has a wide range of background on the subject of low income workers. Another point would be that Ehrenreich does not give much of statistics except for when she tells the reader about how many people are working in medium wage jobs. This all seems to be reliable information because of how Ehrenreich is an educated woman with dozens of friends who are also experts in the field of how much someone is getting paid can affect their lifestyle. Ehrenreich uses the statistics in the first chapter of the book when she begins her journey talking about her plan and how she will be able to show how working as low income worker is an extremely strenuous task to complete.

In chapter 3 Ehreneich chooses to move to Minnesota and continue her experiment there. She decides to get a job at Menard’s in the plumbing section. While she is doing her drug test for her job she thinks about the whole process of applying to a job with the application, interview and Drug test. She realized finding a job can be experience with time, gas money and if you have children finding a babysitter for them. She ended up not working at Menards and is working at Walmart. While working at Walmart she does not understand why anyone deals with the low wages that they receive she talks to the workers and try to make they start inion to stand up for themselves. From just having meeting or discussions. Some people decide to look for other

Ehrenreich does explain an explicit thesis in her book. Her idea is that she will search for job just like any other desperate unemployed white middle class person would. She would hire a career coach, subject to tests, uncomfortable group meetings, online job ads and resume boosters to gain a job with benefits and a $50,000 salary. She decided to spend $6,000 on all the expenses she would incur for these employment services and set aside ten months to fully direct all her attention on searching for this "good job." The purpose of writing this book was to show the reader how hard it is to get a decent job. These career coaches and personality tests did nothing to help Ehrenreich find a job. They did take her money and frustrate her with relentless enthusiasm about thinking positive and not feeling down or losing hope.

I think Ehrenreich’s purpose is to show the world the unfair treatments that poor people face at their jobs. She went into the experiment thinking that it would be easy, but by the end she realized that to even live under a roof she had to work two jobs. Also, this book could be used to motivate the poor people to demand higher pay at their jobs.