Serving In Florida By Barbara Ehrenreich Summary

Some Americans are lucky and do not have to rely on their families to help them after they get their own jobs. However, this is not a possibility for the working class poor. Many of Ehrenreich’s fellow workers rely heavily on family to meet their basic needs of housing, food, and help with childcare. Many Americans will put excessive demands on the family unit before going to the government for help. Ehrenreich only had herself to take care of. Many of her coworkers had to go home and take care of their children and household.

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

Her language become more and more crude, especially when she mentions how her “flesh seems to bond to the seat” (181). The reader can easily detect her ever-mounting anger with the situation she has put herself in and what at first seemed like a heroic act ends up being one leading to pure defeat. As an extension to this idea, Ehrenreich shows the reader how certain hardships can make it difficult to try new things. In multiple instances throughout the essay she uses crude language to display her disgusted thoughts and sense of hopelessness, but it can be seen specifically in the introduction. The introduction is based off of her entire experience; after her jobs at Hearthside and Jerry’s. She compares the environment at Jerry’s to a human body, and not in a very pleasant way: “The kitchen is cavern, a stomach leading to the lower intestine that is the garbage and dishwashing area…” She also uses descriptive items of food to depict its scent, combining strange and appalling odors such as “decomposing lemon wedges [and] water-logged toast crusts” (179). These phrases themselves create a negative image of the restaurant, commanding the readers to question how she could have possibly been forced to work in such horrible conditions. Ehrenreich’s rough language effectively shows certain emotions brought out by the transition from writer to waitress, a white collar to a blue collar job, and the hardships that it brought.

Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth Living in Bootstrap America, tells her story of what it’s like to be working poor in America, as well as what poverty is truly like on many levels. With a thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses her journey from lower class, to sometimes middle class, to poor, and everything in between. Throughout the read, Tirado goes on to reveal why poor people make the decisions they do in a very powerful way.

In Barbara Ehrenreich's bold and honest book she tackles the issue of poverty in America head on, by becoming a low wage worker herself. Ehrenreich delves into the often unheard of issues relating to poverty and low wage work, providing her readers with a new perspective on America's working poor and manages to give her audience a stark emotional, yet logical and factual, look into the working class' poverty epidemic. She uses her own anecdotal evidence and supports it with statistics and facts, appeals to ethos by challenging the ethics of corporate America and it costs, finally she hits an emotional chord with readers by reminding them of what low wage workers must endure so that we can live in our America.

Eighner himself has lived on the streets as a homeless man. He allows the reader to join him in his own personal life stories in order to show the severity of his past situation. Eighner tells of the embarrassment and shame that comes from scavenging through trash to stay alive. He writes of the woeful feelings that a homeless person possesses in their time of wander. “He can wipe the egg yolk off the found can, but he cannot erase the stigma of eating garbage out of his mind” (Eighner 144). With much passion, he speaks of the homeless as victims of a undeserved life. However, according to Linderman, the life of a dumpster diver can be quite satisfying.

4. In paragraph 8, Eighner presents three principles one must follow to eat safely from a Dumpster; in paragraphs 59-60 he explains how to go through a Dumpster; and throughout the essay he includes many cautions and warnings. Clearly, he does not expect his audience to take up Dumpster diving. What, then, is his purpose in including such detailed explanations?

Author Bryan Stevenson (2014) writes, “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned”(p.18). According to the non-profit, Feeding America (2016), in 2015, 43.1 million, or 13.5%, of people in the United States were impoverished. Poverty is a vicious cycle, trapping people and families for generations. The inability to escape poverty is due in part to difficult class mobility in the U.S. but also because certain factors reinforce the idea and state of poverty. Bryan Stevenson’s bestseller Just Mercy, Lindsey Cook’s article “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal”, Michelle Alexander’s excerpt “The Lockdown”, and Sarah Smarsh’s “Poor Teeth” all explore the idea of poverty and the systems that sustain it. While all four readings focus on poverty differently and explore it using different techniques, they all share similar big picture ideas about how poverty is fortified through systematic, societal, and psychological efforts.

Ehrenreich is part of the upper-middle class; she is "privileged" to have a job in which she makes money by sitting at her desk and writing (E 2). She has never considered herself one of the working poor before this experiment, even though she explains, "the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away" (E

Homelessness is increasing every year and effecting Americans of different age, ethnicity and religion. In Lars Eighner “On Dumpster Diving” he explains what he went through while being homeless. He describes how and what foods someone should be looking for and to always be conscious of what one is eating because there is always a reason why something has been thrown out. He continues to go into detail about other items that can be found in the dumpster like sheets to sleep on and pieces of paper to write on. Things that can keep him busy through the day. Eighner carefully explains to his readers how being a dumpster diver has become a life style for the homeless and this is how they survive. It’s a way of living and they are comfortable

As the author moved from locale to locale she identified a variety of recurring hardships faced by the working poor. The chief concern for many was housing. Finding and maintaining economical housing was the principal source of disruption in their lives. For many of the working poor it’s not uncommon to spend more than 50% of income on housing. These leaves a scarce amount of money left over for anything else and creates a situation where the person is always worried about losing their shelter. In a nutshell, it’s Ehrenreich’s conviction that wages are too low and rents are too high. She does speak with many individuals who simply cannot afford the high rental rates and are forced to live with family, friends, or in some

The author has also made intentional attempts to persuade the audience through the use of logical statements backed up by evidence. Eighner has started the essay by introducing how he viewed dumpsters as valuable objects. He then gives reasons why he is depending on dumpsters for his food. Being out of the workforce, he had no means of acquiring meals. He thus seeks refuge to the dump sites to get what he described as discarded and perfectly good food items. To support his position, Eighner informs his audience that this decision followed his inability to buy food as the little money he had was used to pay rent. He writes, “I put almost all my sporadic income into rent. The necessities of daily life I began to extract from Dumpsters” (Cite). Hence, he is able to convince the audience that his actions were as a result of saving money for rent.

During Ehrenreich’s time spent in Florida she talked about the housing options and how much it cost to live in Key West (a

Barbara Ehrenreich is a best-selling author, who wrote the descriptive narrative essay titled, “Serving in Florida”. In this writing, Ehrenreich tells the readers about her experiment into seeing if it was truly possible to live off of minimum wage, in a low-wage community located in Florida. Ehrenreich initially published this writing in her novel called Nickled and Dimed, but since then, it has also been published in other books for students in school. In “Serving in Florida”, Ehrenreich finds a place to live for about $500 per month. While living there, she had a waitressing job, paying 2.13 per hour plus tips. Throughout the writing, Ehrenreich described the obstacles that made it almost impossible to live off of only minimum wage.

To what extent does the word, “minimum”, impact the average person? Probably not the same that minimum wage workers experience. To minimum wage workers, “minimum” is life.