What Is The Final Chapter Of Nickel And Dimed

In chapter one of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, there was a footnote that surprised me. On page 37 she explained that up until 1998, employers were not required to give their employees restroom breaks. “A factory worker, not allowed a break for six-hour stretches, voided into pads work inside her uniform.” (37) I thought that seemed wrong and even inhumane, especially when bathroom breaks were only required by law since 1998, which wasn’t that long ago. How extensive were places where employees were not allowed to used the restroom, was it common in low paying, labor intensive jobs? Ehrenreich gave another example, of a schoolteacher who wasn’t allowed to used the restroom unless she braught all the kids she was teaching with her, so this rule must have spread beyond jobs people with little education could land. What other rights did workers in low wage jobs not have up until recently, or do not have?

There may be some blacks or minorities who remain poor because of their personal characteristics, but the majority of poor blacks are not different from others in motivations and aspirations. In fact, many poor people work incredibly hard at low paying jobs in order to barely get by. The most important causes of poverty lie in the power relations of society, and not the cultural characteristics of the poor individuals. The experiences of poverty have an impact on an individual's disposition and psychological state. Poverty could cause an individual to behave in particular ways, but the main difference between the poor and the rest of society is the opportunities and circumstances the individual’s encounter. It is not their personalities, attributes or values. Blacks continue to be discriminated against in employment and housing, which only contributes to poverty. The majority of African Americans are not poor because they choose not to work, but are poor because of the continuous discrimination from the dominant white race. Poor black Americans should face the same political, economic, and housing conditions as poor white Americans, but this is not the case. Because of continuing discrimination, poor black families do not live in integrated neighborhoods with comparable white families. In addition,

Hooks brings to the table that on the issues of that involves the higher class compared to those in poverty. By addressing the issues that people assumes she uses her own life stories to make a point. She uses views on how the poor is talked about in popular cultures, and how it is represented on television in her article “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor. She clarifies how misrepresented those in poverty are treated and how it affects people 's everyday lives. Many people do not realize that words can hurt. They do not realize that some people who made it big in the world started from not having a bed to lay on or a pot to piss in. In today’s society, television shows, or many different ways that misrepresentations through stereotypes of a social class, race, or gender in social media can lead to devastating negative

In the documentary “Poverty in America: Born with a Wooden Spoon” we get an in depth look about what it is like to live in poverty in America. In the early moments of the documentary we are informed that the poor people of America are a diverse group of people. These people can be put into sub group and each of them has certain different characteristics. The first and most obvious group is the homeless or otherwise known as the urban poverty. These people are scattered around inner cities and it is very easy to see how hard their life is and what kind of struggle they are going through. The next group is the group of situational poverty. Situational poverty comes about when something abrupt occurs in someone’s life that causes him or her to be forced into poverty. Examples of this can be divorce, losing ones jobs, or sudden illness. Another different kind of poverty is the working class poverty. These are the people that have jobs but make so little that they cannot get themselves above the poverty line. Next are immigrants they provide cheap necessary labor for the country to flourish but yet they are still consider to be apart of poverty. They often do not even work for themselves, they leave their homelands and live on their own just so they can get jobs to send back money home to their families. The middle class can also have people in poverty. They try to cover it up by getting themselves into loads of credit card debt and eventually fall below the poverty line to the

My group presented a family in which the mother working a minimum wage at Pharamrix and supporting her two young children indicates that the family was more concerned with basic necessities in comparison to other groups in the class where they had the ability to spend bonus money on extra circular activities such as restaurants, movies and vacations while our group focused on the families survival. Although having an extra 20 dollars to go visit the park or get milk from the grocery store, for example, other groups having medium income would spend 106$ for phone bills, internet and netflix, while individuals with our income would purchase the cheapest plan. Our group had a surplus of 60 cents and others had 22 dollars. Social inequality in Montreal is nothing new to me, from seeing homeless men beg for money on the streets of Montreal to high

I believe that all of the myths the author discussed, are common beliefs to most people. We stereotype people based off of their wealth even though those stereotypes do not reign true a majority of the time. I will admit that many of the myths the author discussed were common beliefs to me before reading the article and playing the game SPENT. After playing the game and reading the article, it gave me a new outlook on people in poverty. It helped me to see why some families living in poverty make the decisions that they do. The decision is not always ideal but sometimes it is just what needs to be done. In the game, I learned that when a person is in poverty, they have to make some very tough decisions. Many of those decisions could be between money and family. The article discusses how the parents of a family in poverty usually have to choose between going to work and going to events or volunteering at school. Although they may want to go, they need to go to work to make money and provide for their family. According to the article, parents of a family in poverty are less likely to attend the school events “not because they care less about education, but because they have less access to school involvement than their wealthier peers” (Gorski). Although in the game I did not have to make a decision about going to

That singular statement haunted me for years. That the word “poor” was directly tied to my name. A bond that could not be broken, belittling me every time I thought of it. “Poor” is such a nasty word; “poor” is a word that immediately evokes the thought of food stamps, being depressed, not having food, and living on the streets. Instead of “poor”, one should say “low-income”. Coming from a low-income family did not define who I was, although, everyone else thought it did. Growing up in a low-income family taught me how to put myself first, budget my money, how to be a hard worker, and gave me thicker skin.

This next part of the book finds Barbara in Minneapolis, working at a Wal-Mart in the women’s clothing section. There is a link between one’s personal appearance and one’s financial situation that is brought to my attention in this section. I was bothered by the author’s findings that Wal-Mart caters to the lower income families. They offer inexpensive food items loaded with calories and very little nutritional value and clothes that are cheaply made and designed to fit overweight people. Much of the food available to low-income people is loaded with empty calories, which leads to obesity, however, their physical appearance become less important than food in their belly and a roof over their head. Even Barbara, making 7 dollars an hour at Wal-Mart, seeks help from a charitable agency. They prove unable to help her yet they load her up with a stack of sugary and unhealthy food items. People who have limited budgets and are in poor health still require their needs to be met. I think it is wonderful that Wal-Mart caters to these customers. The working class often uses Wal-Mart as a place to escape, if only for a little while, and not feel as though they are looked down upon. Class status exists in America and is often exploited by large

The United States was built on the concept of the American dream. The idea that anyone can achieve success if they just work hard enough and are determined enough is very lucrative. Unfortunately the American dream is not as obtainable as many think. 65% of children raised in the bottom fifth income bracket will remain in the bottom two brackets (Adams, et al., 2013, p. 143). This means that even with hard work and determination the majority of Americans will not achieve the American dream. When a person has based their entire future on the concept that anyone can succeed it can lead to judgements on those who do not achieve wealth. It leads to the idea that anyone who does not have wealth must be lazy or have some sort of personal defect. It becomes acceptable to judge those who are in poverty, because it is believed that they are at fault for their poverty, that they are not worthy of wealth. This prejudice then effects the policies put in place to assist individuals in obtaining food, housing, and other basic needs. With the media becoming increasingly present in everyday life one is left to wonder how the media depicts poverty and how their depictions influence society.

I always thought of poverty in terms of financial status but during my visit with my family, I came to understand that is not what poverty means to everyone. To some of my family, poverty meant multiple family members living in one trailer under cramped conditions. Others in my family mentioned a lack of opportunity, such as the privilege to attend college or find and maintain a job, represented poverty. My younger cousins said wearing hand-me-downs previously worn by family was poverty. I found it unfathomable nobody in my family considered themselves poor, despite others opinions. They had everything they needed; the love and support of their

In high school I began to visit friend’s homes outside of our middle class neighborhood, they were large homes, with a bedroom for every family member and lots of fancy furniture. Initially I was in awe of my friends because they did not have to share their bedroom. I couldn’t imagine how nice it would be to watch what I wanted to watch in another room because we had only one television. However, I never felt as though I was going without. I also noticed that the time my fiends spent together with their parents and siblings was less that what I experienced. This made me feel sorry for my friends. And, it wasn’t until a friends mother said she could not spend the night at my house, even though I had stayed at hers several times, that I realized we were actually poor. This experience impacted my perception and through reality right in my face. As an adult I still vividly remember the realization of my families income status. I was raised in a two, bedroom trailer with four children, three boys and one girl, and two parents. Our living room doubled as my parent’s bedroom and my bedroom closet and one of my two dressers were filled with my parent’s clothes. I am currently living in a four-bedroom home, where

These people are looked up to and declared stars in the United States. People may even look up to them and aspire to be like them. However, there have been few reality shows that depict poorer Americans in this same way. Recently, anytime a poorer family has been shown on television it has been in a negative light, and the people on it have not been declared starts or exceptional in any way. Ridgway (2013) states, “… [these shows were] just created for our bemusement and mockery of ‘white trash’ a lá Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo or Swamp People” (para.27). These shows are not there to educate Americans about the real struggles of the poor or to help us understand how to help them; they are only created for amusement. This is done by television producers to gain viewers and to make money but it has some bad consequences. When people are always depicted as a source of comedy or stupidity, they are never taken seriously. By always showing poverty in a way that is supposed to entertain us, it takes the seriousness out of it because entertainment is usually seen as fantasy. By not exposing poorer Americans in a positive light or not at all in the media, America is showing that they do not care about them or that they are only a group of people to make fun of.

“Poverty was a word to describe the poor people. Our government is helping them through different funding programs such as EITC, SNAP, and SSI.” These were my thoughts on poverty and the government before reading this book. Growing up in such an isolated rich and “good” side of the town, I was uneducated about poverty. Our only source of knowing about poverty is through news, which is a secondary resource not a primary resource. This book written by Stevenson, who grew up poor in a racially segregated community in Delaware sheds light on injustice the poor are suffering through other than lacking money.

Our society places certain preconceptions on the way we view particular roles or define certain classes of people. These roles, or social classes, are all incorporated and become the fabric that makes up our society as a whole. One such class is what we label as the poor. Society’s concept of the poor is a mental image we have constructed to represent the social and economic class of citizens that live below the poverty

Barbara Ehrenreich reads The Other America by author Michal Herrington and becomes surprised at how he considers poor people. Michael Herrington affirms that poor people are a "culture of poverty," when in reality poor people seem different from everybody else due to their poorly housed, disadvantage, and poorly fed. “The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We”-- The always presumptively affluent readers—needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth.”(Ehrenreich pg. 607) Barbara Ehrenreich discovers that Michael Herrington is incorrect; she was raised by a blue collar family, and the main reason why people are poor is due to lack of money.