Undercover Experiences in Nickeled and Dimed: On Not Getting by In America by Barbara Ehrenriech

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

I instantly imagine everyone barefoot, no actual floors in the houses and take a long time to cook food. This young girl just wanted a simple education, and there could have been so many things to hold her down such as living in poverty, not having clean clothes, a place to shower but instead she fought through and still desired a basic education instead of letting all these things hold her down which I think is really inspirational because she kept going and even drank from a dirty puddle when she knew it would make her sick. She risked her mother getting in trouble and her own health just to get an

One major issue that the other Wes Moore’s mother experiences is not being able to get an education due to a lack of funding. Mary had become pregnant at the age of 16 and was unable to continue her education. While she was just barely providing for her family through side jobs the paid minimum wage, she was also trying to receive an education by attending John Hopkins University. She was able to do this through a program of Pell Grants. She was only able to get 16 credits done when government decided to quit funding the Pell Grants. Mary, along with many others trying to receive a college education, was unable to finish her education. Due to the cut in funding Mary could no longer afford it. Without being able to receive a college education, Mary would continue to live in poverty because without an education she would not be able to get a good job.

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.

Often throughout the book she mentions that it is said that "you're paid what you're worth", saying that little pay results in you not being to good of a person. With that label they were looked down on and viewed kind of as untouchables. They had low pay, long hours, no overtime pay, and no benefits which leads to low socio-economic-status a job that no one wants to pursue. She stressed that poverty wasn’t a sustainable condition, it's a state of emergency. Citizens in the lower classes are left to fend for themselves and the ten, eight, or six dollar jobs are all that's there for them. What she would encourage them to do is to demand to be paid what they're worth because in the end they will be better off.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a political/social journalist and writer. She is a best-selling author with a dozen book credits to her name. Her works include Blood Rites, The Worst Years of Our Lives, and Fear of Falling. She also has written articles for Time, Harpers, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Time Magazine. Her Ph.D. in biology endows her with the experience and discipline to approach as a scientific experiment the study resulting in her newest book, Nickel and Dimed.

Macklemore’s latest single, “Kevin” voices the struggle lower class Americans go through with overusing prescription medication. Drug use and abuse has become a widespread issue within the United States. One of its most troubling aspects being the abuse of pharmaceutical and prescription drugs, painkillers raising the most concern. Drugs such as Oxycontin, Ambien, and Xanax are being prescribed by doctors and given to the public and then being misused, causing more harm than good. ADD SOURCE THAT EXPLAINS THE MANIFESTATION OF THIS. Barbara Ehrenreich, an American author and sociologist explores this very problem in her book, Nickel and Dimed. When talking about a worker’s use of medication, Ehrenreich claims that, “Unfortunately, the commercial tells us, we workers can exert the same kind of authority over our painkillers that our bosses exert over us. If Tylenol doesn’t want to work for more than four hours, you just fire its ass and switch to Aleve”(25). In other words, Ehrenreich is stating how the media is pushing drugs onto the working class and through the use of personification she illustrates how workers identify themselves with the medications they are taking. Employees will opt for the most efficient medication in order to be efficient

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 her research, she spent over 600 hours in welfare offices, speaking to caseworkers, social workers, and welfare recipients and potential recipients themselves. She learned first hand how the Act affected the day to lives of poor women and their families, as well as how it affected the caseworkers who not only had to learn

Barbara would have never discovered for herself how difficult balancing a low pay job and having no one to look after your child could be. Not to mention, I think that this scenario really opened Barbara’s eyes talking to someone in depth about having a low-wage lifestyle and what that is like. Question 7: Throughout the three chapters of “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich the theme of poverty is very evident. In Chapter one, Barbara is working Hearthside and talks to her coworker Joan about her living situation.

questions and found out from the people who were living this life first hand what it was like. She states that all her colleagues spent their lives from graduate school to retirement studying the problem of poverty. She didn’t just study it from the outside, she went in and interviewed and got her questions answered.

In the documentary "My Reality: A Hidden America," produced by ABC News, reporter Diane Sawyer interviews hard-working, middle-class American families struggling to make ends meet while also examining the growing gap between the low wage workers and the upper-class. The documentary follows the lives of different individuals from firefighters, contract workers, teacher assistants, fast food workers, and even Biotechnology workers. The film gives the viewers a glimpse of the hardships that these low wage middle-class Americans go through on a daily basis. Some of these hardships include traveling eighty miles to and from work each day to having to donate blood plasma just to make a few extra bucks for a child's birthday present. On average, middle-class Americans, which make up roughly seventy-five percent of the population, are making only $54,000 a year.

Can someone really live and prosper in American receiving minimal income? Can someone create a good lifestyle for themselves on just six to seven dollars an hour? In Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to find out if it is indeed possible. Giving herself only $1,000 she leaves the lifestyle that she has come accustomed too and goes to join all the people living the low class way of life.

Why is it that whenever humanitarian aid is the topic of discussion amongst members of the American middle class, the peoples deemed most deserving of the United States’ efforts never reside within our borders? The United States Census Bureau reports that, in 2012, the official poverty rate was 15.0 percent. There were 46.5 million people in poverty. The only feasible path to accepting this staggering statistic as the reality of such a proud nation is by first acknowledging the accuracy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2001) premise as it is asserted in the final chapter of Nickel and Dimed: “Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors” (p. 216). After we accept this as a truth, we must then move to analyze the methods by which this system is perpetuated. The exploitation and injustice against the American working class is seen starkly in the treatment of waitresses and practice of systematically forcing the poor to congregate in substandard living conditions.

She also talks about their appearance and how they suffer from hunger. She explains that the government only gives her a small amount of money per month and how that’s not enough money to afford more nutritional foods and soaps to clean her kids. The outside world, in her eyes, won't help her. She says how hard it is to tell her story over and over to people. Due to this kind of situation poverty will only increase.