Critical Analysis Of Nickel And Dimed By Dr. Ehrenreich

Nickel and Dimed

The book “Nickel and Dimed” is a very thought provoking read. Dr. Ehrenreich begins her book with the introduction by discussing with the audience how she developed the idea for this book during an expensive lunch. Dr. Ehrenreich speculated how workers with such little skill and education survive on such inadequate incomes. She can not fathom how these people are surviving, and wants to find out and understand their “tricks”. Dr. Ehrenreich decides to consider an experiment where she examines the consequences of the welfare reform by going out and trying to work and survive in the low wage work environment all while living a low wage lifestyle. She also decides to make some rules for her experiment. The first rule is she can

She does however give herself restrictions to the extent of what she is willing to endure. The restrictions include that she will always have a car, she will never let herself to be without a home, and last that she will never go hungry during this experiment. Dr. Ehrenreich understands that she will never have a real experience with poverty, especially since this is nothing more than experiment for her. In addition to this she has a couple of important advantages over a lot of low income workers this being that she is a natural born English speaker and she owns a car as well. Her goal in this project is simply to see if she can live off that income and pay basic expenses as the lower class does on a daily basis. One of the well illustrated themes in this book is simply poverty in America. America has a lack of social programs for the lower class and can seem rather oblivious to this issue with its least privileged citizens. Poverty is not just a cause and effect of unemployment because nobody is safe from it those who are fully employed with a great check can still slip into deep poverty. This theme is demonstrated just by Dr. Ehrenreich even

When she moves to Portland she come across a Motel that is $ 120 week. She also is able to grab two jobs one at a nursing home for $ 7 an hour and the other is at The Maids for $ 6.65 an hour. At the nursing home her job is to feed the residents then wash the dishes after. While at The Maids her jo is to clean, dust vacuum houses. Her work is exhausting, especially the maids must continuously move at a fast pace. They are shuttled from house to house and clean the rooms as fast as they can. As an employee the maids are making $ 6.65 an hour per person, Dr. Ehrenreich figures out that The Maids actually charge customers $25 per hour. She then starts to wonder why does she only gets such a small fraction of that money. They have poor work conditions as well they are not allowed to eat or drink on the job. Dr. Ehrenreich later develops an intense rash and her boss Ted told her to work through it but it got so bad she had to rely on one of her restrictions and contact her dermatologist for a prescription. One day while cleaning a house her partner Holly hurts her ankle. Ehrenreich tells Holly that she can’t work with her ankle injured, but all Holly wants to do is call Ted. Ehrenreich takes the phone from Holly and tells Ted that she does not like the way he treats his employees but Ted tells