Nickel and Dimed on (Not) Getting by in America Essay

In the book Money and Class in America written by Lewis Lapham, the way Americans look at money is exposed. It compares other nations view on monetary value against that of the Americans. It is a fact that we place more value on money than anything else. This book illustrates the corruptness of the “American Dream” as it focuses money as the “currency of the soul” and through the dream, men remain free to rise or fall. Their life is the product of the effort and the decisions put forth by them.

Everyone knows what the word poverty means. It means poor, unable to buy the necessities to survive in today's world. We do not realize how easy it is for a person to fall into poverty: A lost job, a sudden illness, a death in the family or the endless cycle of being born into poverty and not knowing how to overcome it. There are so many children in poverty and a family's structure can effect the outcome. Most of the people who are at the poverty level need some type of help to overcome the obstacles. There are mane issues that deal with poverty and many things that can be done to stop it.

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

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.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America written by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a book composed of Ehrenreich’s experiences working minimum wage in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. Ehrenreich’s sheds light onto what it is like for most minimum wage workers and brings insight into what it truly is like trying to make it on $6-$7 hourly wage. Nickel and Dimed does a wonderful job of giving insight to the everyday lives of the working class and somewhat understanding their lives better. Before reading this book, I had my share of thoughts on the working class based on what I knew from growing up with family members and even my father being apart of the working class. This book reinforced a lot ideas that I had about the working class and opened my eyes into what it means to live above the poverty line.

The article “Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By In America” written by Barbara Ehrenreich, who has a PHD in biology, informs the reader about the struggle a low-wage worker in America has to go through. Ehrenreich goes undercover and takes low-wage jobs to experience how a person with minimum wage of $6-$7/hour survives. During her experiment Ehrenreich only uses the money she earns from her job to pay rent, buy groceries,do laundry, pay for phone, and car. Throughout the article Ehrenreich’s purpose is to make high class feel grateful for what they have but at the same time she encourages them to rally support to change conditions for low-wage workers. Ehrenreich uses rhetorical techniques of syntactic repetition, pathos, ethos, and evidence to persuade middle and high class Americans to realize the need to raise the minimum wage in order for low-wage workers to live comfortable lives.

Nickeled and Dimed: “On Not Getting by In America” by Barbara Ehrenriech, is a book about a middle aged woman who went undercover as a low class worker. Ehrenreich is a journalist who in her real life and is well off. She was part of the upper class workers. She decided to do this project as a journalist investigation to shine the light on how the low class gets by or not. She visited three different cities within America and took on different jobs and lived among the poor. I found what she did to be very courageous by leaving her upper class comfortable life to live and work among the poor. However I did not agree that she started the process with a security net in place. Through this investigation she uncovered how difficult it was for the working poor to survive on minimum wage. She also uncovered how different it was among the working poor and how many obstacles there were for them to get a good job, good healthcare and decent meals.

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

“Nickel and Dimed” is a story about journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join the number of Americans who had work full time for poverty-level wages. She was inspired by her curiosity about how people living on low poverty wages survived in this country and also by the welfare reform act, which promised that having a job could help lead to a better life. But Ehrenreich wondered about how anyone could truly survive, let alone prosper, on $6 or $7 an hour. In order to find out, Ehrenreich left her home and moved to states like Florida, Maine and Minnesota. She settled for the cheapest homes she could possibly find, such as lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. She also accepted whatever jobs she was offered, working jobs like being a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, waitress, Wal-Mart sales clerk and a nursing-home aide. Before doing her experiment Ehrenreich described the low wage jobs as being unskillful, however she quickly discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," and that even the lowliest jobs required exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is simply not enough; you will need at least two. By publishing the her research

In her book, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America, acclaimed journalist and social activist Barbara Ehrenreich comments on the negative perceptions of the working class among educated elites. She feels that the wealthier classes are out of touch with workers, and have even grown to fear and distrust them. In recounting her experiences going from an acclaimed journalist to minimum wage laborer, Ehrenreich revealed many of the prejudices that affluent Americans demonstrate towards the working classes. While working as a maid, she senses a level of disdain from the upper class that she never felt as an educated professional. She rails against the intrusive drug and personality tests that her employers at Walmart demand, feeling that they are sparked by a sense of mistrust of the poor from the management of the company [Ehrenreich 212]. She notices that the poor are conspicuously neglected by the media, as well [117]. Upper-class society has come to think of the working class as a group of people who are idle, negligent, and untrustworthy, undeserving of social status and respect.

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel-and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she investigates whether welfare reform programs are appropriate in aiding women in poverty and that these institutions will affect their economic and social mobility in the future. The research in June 1998 as participant observation. She would personally experience the life of a worker with minimal skills living on minimum wage. Barbara poses as a divorced homemaker with a background of housekeeping for private home – essentially a mother on welfare.

With this passion to discover whether anyone can live on the wages available to the unskilled and uneducated, Barbara puts herself in a situation which seems unreal. The idea is absurd, but also the curiosity about the truth, if she will be able to survive, is overwhelming and so she confronts this issue. Anyhow, can unskilled individuals, when unified, be able to survive on low-wages? Furthermore, “can a single mother leaving welfare survive without government assistance in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing and child care subsidize?” This controversial idea explores the struggle to not only maintain one’s health, but of others, as well. Now, by breaking this idea and scrambling it, we find pieces sticking out such as; one has to maintain their health with an ill parent or relative, with a good friend (who is still unemployed), with an

In “Nickels and Dimes, On (not) getting by in America” this book provides first hand research into what it is like to be a low income worker. While the book is well researched and includes important facts and documentation that points out how hard it is to overcome the economic challenges of being a low wage earner, this book takes the issue an important step further. It shows, first hand, the emotional direct effects of what it is like to live the life of a struggling employee.

It would be difficult to distinguish whether I truly experienced life from a poor individual’s perspective; nonetheless, I consider that – given the circumstances – I encountered similar situations an individual in poverty would withstand. For instance, I only spent money on food that would cost under the limitations of $3.25. This was especially difficult when I needed to use bus transportation,