Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickle and Dimed” she explored a life as having a low wage earning by working several jobs in numerous of different places as she tempted to live off the wage she earned. Even though she had a doctorate in science she is known as a journalist and as well as muckraker. In the novel she states her journey on how she pondered how someone unskilled, uneducated, and untrained workers can survive with the minimum wage incomes. Barbara gave us real life experiences of her personal life as she had witnessed firsthand as her loved ones struggled living minimum wage jobs to provide enough utilities for her family. As a brave and curious person Barbara Ehrenreich was she decided to take a journey to live as a single mother
middle of paper ... ... She asked how people get by (or don't) in low-wage jobs in the United States. To perform this, she exhausted several months finding and operational low salary jobs while living on the budgets those jobs permitted. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063889/102-7245049-5615318?vi=glance) References Kathy Quinn, Barbara Ehrenreich on Nickel and Dimed, http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/Documents/Ehrenreich.html Scott Rappaport, 'Nickel and Dimed' author Barbara Ehrenreich to speak, http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/02-03/
As a sociologist we look at two different perspectives, there is structural functional perspective and the conflict perspective. Out of the two perspectives I agree with the conflict perspective more than I do the structural functional perspective, and I’m going to use this perspective throughout my paper. I choose this perspective because as much as we want society to be “fair” and it work smoothly, it just doesn’t. We have struggle for power and I believe there are the groups that are powerful and wealthy, and there are some groups that are the working class and struggle to make it. I also picked this perspective because in the book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich gave up the power and wealth to struggle with the working class to show us how truly difficult it sometimes can be.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print.
In Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, the author frequently focuses on the demeanor and appearance of the people she meets and sees during her research trips. Throughout the book she makes witty, opinionated comments that can easily be taken out of context. Because of this, her wisecracks convey the impression of her being narrow-minded. Also, these comments do not help her with any of her arguments because of how she comes off. Ehrenreich improper use of humor puts across the impression of her being biased.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, worked at minimum wage paying jobs and reported the hardships that people had to go through on a day-to-day basis. A critic responded by saying, “This is simply the case of an academic who is forced to get a real job.” Ehrenriech’s reasoning for joining the working-class is to report why people who must be on welfare, continue to stay on welfare. Her reports show there are many hardships that go along with minimum wage jobs, in the areas of drug abuse, fatigue, the idea of invisibility, education and the American Dream. A big disadvantage that the lower class has compared to the wealthy is a lack of quality education.
The American Dream is attainable by each and every one of us. The American Dream is the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to achieve success through hard work and determination. Every successful person living today had to work hard for their position. They climb the ranks until they got to where they stand today. Everyone could become successful and live the American dream as long as they work very hard starting at a young age into adulthood and study and perform well in school. They must study for school and get a good education. In the book “Nickel and Dimed”, Barbara is struggling to get along because she is surviving off jobs that require little to no education and experience.
In her unforgettable memoir, Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to explore the lives of the working poor under the proposed welfare reforms in her hometown, Key West, Florida. Temporarily discarding her middle class status, she resides in a small cheap cabin located in a swampy background that is forty-five minutes from work, dines at fast food restaurants, and searches all over the city for a job. This heart-wrenching yet infuriating account of hers reveals the struggles that the low-income workers have to face just to survive. In the except from Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich uses many rhetorical strategies to illustrate the conditions of the low wage workers including personal anecdotes of humiliation at interviews, lists of restrictions due to limited
In the Working Poor, David Shipler shows the different levels of poverty in the United States. Although many people work every day, they still do not have enough money to live their lives comfortably or contently. In chapter 1, Money and Its Opposite, we discuss the different people that worked hard their entire lives only to remain in or below the poverty line. For instance, in the book Shipler speaks of the disadvantages that the working poor are susceptible to. Often being taken advantage of by employers that do not give access that they are entitled to, the working poor are more likely to be audited than the wealthy, and become victims of cons that point toward money for a small payment, first.
Ehrenreich opens up her book at an extremely difficult time in her life, battling cancer. Not only is she battling cancer but she is at a time where she is being exposed to the darkest times to positive
Millions of Americans work full-time, day in and day out, making near and sometimes just minimum wage. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in part by the welfare claim, which promises that any job equals a better life. Barbara wondered how anyone can survive, let alone prosper, on $6-$7 an hour. Barbara moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, working in the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon realizes that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts and in most cases more than one job was needed to make ends meet. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all of its glory, consisting of
The biggest appeal that Ehrenreich makes is after she ends up walking out of the housekeeping job/waitress job because she cannot handle it anymore." I have failed I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time in many years, that the tear ducts are still there and still capable of doing their job." (Ehrenreich, 48) This is the biggest appeal because Ehrenreich is quitting on the whole project. She is basically telling the readers that it is impossible for her, a "well-off", woman to live the life of a low wage worker.
The author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, began her experiment in Key West because she lived near there. Then she moved to Portland, ME since it was mostly white. She finished her investigation in Minnesota, where she thought there would be a pleasant stability between rent and wages. From the beginning, she ruled out high profile cities as a result of the high-rent and the lacking amount of jobs. As a secretive journalist, she related the near poverty experience to a life long ago when she was a child or raising her own children, as a result she endured the crushing feeling of anxiety. She knew she had a home to return to and her savings to fall back on therefore, the feeling of anxiety would not be experienced
Like most people whom conduct experiments, Ehrenreich must first establish credibility of her knowledge of this subject. She does this in her introduction in numerous ways. Ehrenreich comes out saying that she has a Ph.D in biology but has a fancy for writing. She starts off with her exposure to low wage paying jobs by using her sister and her husband a companion for over a decade. Her sister, who use to work for the phone company as a sales representative, a factory work and receptionist who described it her experiences as “the hopelessness of being a wage slave”. Her husband use to work for $4.50 an hour in a warehouse before he was fortunate enough to land a good paying job with the union workers the Teamsters.
“To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else”.(221) Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Nickel and Dimed explored life as a low wage earner by working several “unskilled” jobs in different areas of the country and attempted to live off the wages she earned. She undertakes many noble trades, working in low wage and underappreciated jobs while trying to figure out how the people of this country do it every day. She also looks to examine the functional and conflict theories of stratification as they relate to the low wage jobs she pursues. The goal of Barbara was to find if she would be able to live off the money
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, published in 2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a book about an author who goes undercover and examines lives of the working lower class by living and working in similar conditions. Ehrenreich sets out to learn how people survive off of minimum wage. For her experiment, she applies rules including that she cannot use skills acquired from her education or work during her job search. She also must take the highest-paying job offered to her and try her best to keep it. For her search of a home, she has to take the cheapest she can find. For the experiment, Ehrenreich took on low-wage jobs in three cities: in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota.