The Life of Barbara Ehrenreich Essay

Minimum wage is a concept that most people overlook. However, after discussing with a colleague over lunch, Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to learn more about it on a realer and deeper level. As an author and journalist from Florida, her life changed the minute she went undercover. The intention of this project was to figure out if minimum wage was sufficient enough for people to live off of. She was not able to understand the full extent of what it like to live in poverty long term, but she did her best to feel the effects of poverty in those few months. While applying for jobs and making a new temporary life for herself, she kept her identity a secret. In order to get a better understanding of living life on a low-wage job, Ehrenreich conducted

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

In the United States, Americans are painfully aware that poverty is a massive upsurge. Americans are getting poor and poor by the minute and that’s a problem. In the book “Men We Reaped” Jesmyn Ward explains that society sees our life being worth nothing. If I had the choice to change poverty I would raise the minimum wage so more people would want to work and the money can at least accommodate for a 3 house family with one person working.

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Hearts Of Men, illustrates how gender roles have highly constricted men, not just women, and therefore have inhibited American society from developing its full potential. She deviates from conventional wisdom, which says that gender roles have been largely detrimental to only half the population, which is simultaneously confined to working in the domestic sphere and prevented from participating in the public realm. Her theory says that Americans subscribe to a "sexuo-economic system" which reduces men to "mere earning mechanisms" and forces women to "become parasitic wives" (6, 4). As she explains, members of both sexes adhere to a system which forces them to succumb to

Barbara Ehrenreich's intent in the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America exhibited how minimum wage isn't enough for Americans to get by on and that there's no hope for the lower class. Her main objective was achieved by living out the life of the "working poor". During the three cases studies she worked many jobs that are worked by many that are simply striving to live day to day. The jobs she had didn't generate sufficient income to avoid or help her rise out of poverty, in fact the six to seven dollar jobs made survival considerably difficult. Enitially, she believe the jobs didn't require any skill but while on her journey she started to realize they were stressful and drained a lot of energy. In addition to that she

Barbara Ehrenreich 's showed that she didn't have the mind set or worries of a working class person by reminding us as readers the fine line between the kind of performance she is doing and the kind her fellow coworkers do every day on the job. Time and again she lets us sink into her new world of a low-wage worker, only to pull us back with a reminder of the act. 1 She does this experiment to determine whether or not she could both live off the money earned and have enough money at the end of the month to pay the next month's rent. Working class people depend on the money they make on these jobs to survive and provide for their families. She could drop all these jobs she experimented with and go back to her real life without a worry in the

Barbara Ehrenreich used her book Nickel and Dimed to illustrate her job assignment to live in the shoes of and, write about her experiences as a minimum wage worker in America. Ehrenreich goes to live in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota and works low wage jobs, sometimes more than one at a time. The point Ehrenreich is trying to make is that it is almost impossible to live a decent life in America with one, let alone two jobs paying very low wages. It is tough to be a low wage worker in America.

All the minimum-wage occupations that Ehrenreich engages in requires her to work hard everyday. Despite all of Ehrenreich’s diligent work at the end of every month, she barely manages to make ends meet. The people that she interviewed from the Woodcrest Residential Facility were also in the same situation as Ehrenreich. Her twenty four-year old co-worker Lori has, “a serious disk problem and an $8,000 credit card debt,” (Ehrenreich, 118). Therefore it shows that American Dream cannot be attained from hard work. In this case, Lori was injured from her hard work thus leaving her crippled and

Barbara Ehrenreich uses very specific techniques (“moves”) to convey her message to her readers: for instance, the approach she uses in the first part of her essay is an ‘objective approach’ which relied upon citations from published works. She drew upon statistical data and information and used extensive quotations extracted from experts who have written on the subject. The other important device used in her essay (the other side of the same coin, so to speak) is the ‘subjective approach’ that she undertook to convey her message of “white-collar downward mobility.” Examples of the objective approach is found in this passage taken from the published work of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “In Late 2003, when I started this project, unemployment

“Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow” (Ehrenreich, 2001, pg. 199). Barbara Ehrenreich wrote this in her captivating book Nickel and Dimed, where she embarked on a journey that revalued the truth behind life in low-wage America. Growing up I was led to believe that nothing worth having comes easy. As long as I worked hard and gave everything 100% I was guaranteed success, in essence hard work was the key to success. Ehrenreich revels the sad reality for many Americans where hard work, the type you never thought possible that leads to exhaustion, does not guarantee success. Ehrenreich had very unique objectives for writing this novel and she was able to reveal the impacts of social policy then and now.

Great discoveries always begin with great questions. Barbara Ehrenreich asked two great questions, “how does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled” and “how were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform, going to make it on $6 to $7 an hour” (2001, p. 12). To answer the questions, Ehrenreich embarked upon a journey to discover for herself, whether she could match income to expense as a low-wage worker. In effect, Ehrenreich tested the fundamental premise of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, also known as welfare reform, in order to determine whether those individuals formerly on welfare and largely unskilled, could earn a living wage on the

Nowadays, everyone living on their own, hopes to have a good job that pays the bills and lets them live comfortably. In the writing “Serving in Florida”, Barbara Ehrenreich made a bold move, and she conducted an experiment where she tested if it was possible to make a living off of minimum wage. Ehrenreich found a place to live and got her waitressing job, paying 2.13 an hour plus tips. She was ultimately focusing on the lives of people who were forced to live off of minimum wage. Ehrenreich described all of this as an “experiment” to “test a mathematical proposition”. During the 20th century, economic progress took over the idea of poverty, while employees rights got taken away. This made Ehrenreich want to write

A woman of risk, controversy, perseverance, and ambition does not even begin to describe Barbara Strozzi. Being a woman composer in the Baroque Era was not a social norm and caused those who pursued this career suffering, disadvantage, and negative labels. However, as one of the top women composers and singers in the Baroque Era, Strozzi did not let negativity stop her. Strozzi, thrown into the music world by her, “father,” Giulio, excelled the best she could as a woman composer, developing her artistic skills, embracing publishing and print, and utilizing the opportunities she was given.