Low wage workers: The Rejects of Society "They neglect their children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high” (221). Barbara Ehrenreich uses juxtaposition by comparing the working and upper class to implore sympathy; she makes the working class appear as victims, which brings empathy and guilt among the upper class. Society doesn’t see low wage workers by their genuine attitude towards their paying customers, but as an outcast because of their occupational status. However, one individual changes the way upper classes view the working class in the form of a book. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, brings the audience into her personal journey as an intentional low-wage worker. Ehrenreich accentuates how society views low-wage workers: she highlights how society sees low-wage workers as drug and alcohol abusers, she reveals how society set up traps to prove that low-wage workers are liars and thieves, and shows how society creates a psychological effect, which affects how the working class views themselves. Many assume a low-wagers life is miserable due to not having a well-paying job. The fact is that many people think the poor are poor because they constantly spend their money unwisely, maybe even on drugs and alcohol. Looking in a low wage worker’s perspective, they see a world where people assume they are substance abuser, because their lives seem miserable, however in the wrong way. Ehrenreich claims that low-wage workers spend their money wisely especially on rent and food. She shows a low-wagers real struggle as they try to find a home: “the big pr... ... middle of paper ... ...ful for creating a negative label on the working poor. Since no one will accept low wage workers in society, they only think of them as the ‘outcasts. Ehrenreich lastly states, “guilt doesn’t go anywhere far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame- shame at our dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others” (221). She brings in an appeal to emotions of guilt and shame in her readers. She wants her readers to feel ashamed for treating the working class without respect. No one in society understands that the low-wagers job is what keeps America alive, if it wasn’t for the low wage class, there wouldn’t be restaurants servers, home care services, cashiers, etc. Society takes advantage of the little things life offers and Ehrenreich wants her audience to feel empathy towards their actions and to realize the low-wage workers are not society’s outcasts.
In her expose, Nickel and Dime, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women to be forced to be put into the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998. Ehrenreich wanted to capture her experience by retelling her method of “uncover journalism” in a chronological order type of presentation of events that took place during her endeavor. Her methodologies and actions were some what not orthodox in practice. This was not to be a social experiment that was to recreate a poverty social scenario, but it was to in fact see if she could maintain a lifestyle working low wage paying jobs the way 4 million women were about to experience it. Although Ehrenreich makes good use of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos), she is very effective at portraying pathos, trying to get us to understand why we should care about a social situation such as this through, credibility, emotion, and logic.
Life is full of hardships, ups and downs, and everywhere in between. Barbara Ehrenreich took on this life experience of working a minimum wage job and only living off what she earned. All the work she did was the for her book Nickel and Dimed, or the excerpt from Serving in Florida. I have worked a minimum wage job and understand how hard it could be to try and live on what little you earn. In Ehrenreich’s Serving in Florida, she first expresses, “ Picture a fat person’s hell, and I don't mean a place with no food. Instead there is everything you might eat if eating had no bodily consequences- the cheese fries, the chicken-fried steaks, the fudge- laden desserts- only here every bite must be paid for, one way or another, in human discomfort” (394). At first all I could think
Ehrenreich wants to find a ways to improve the quality of life of the working class. While working for Wal-mart, Ehrenreich discussed unionizing with her co-workers. The purpose of the union is so the workers can get a higher hourly wage. Her downfall in Minneapolis is when she can’t find affordable lodging. Ehrenreich stayed in hotels which become very expensive. The accommodations in these hotels proved to be almost inhabitable. The rooms were small, most had no air conditioning. The windows had no screens so they could not be left open to...
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.
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
... workers come into contact with. This novel will make the reader question his financial choices as well as imagine himself in the shoes of a minimum-wage worker. It also points to the complications many have just with paying for housing accommodations and food in this country, while making only minimum wage. Ehrenreich discovers that that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts and imparts the reader with this fact. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its persistence and apprehension, as well as liberality.
There are frequent footnotes in the novel, many of them containing statistics about low-wage lifestyles. One claims that “In 1997, a living wage for a single parent supporting a single child in the Twin Cities metro area was $11.77 an hour” (Ehrenreich 127). Throughout the novel, Ehrenreich never gets paid this much in any of her jobs. In fact, she is amazed when a potential wage for a job is “not $8.50 but an incredible $10 an hour” (Ehrenreich 142). Even living on her own Ehrenreich could hardly pay for the basic necessities to live, it would have been impossible to do so with a child to care for as well. Another statistic stats that “Nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full- or part- time jobs” (Ehrenreich 26). This fact shows the flaws in the low-wage workforce. After all, minimum wage is meant to be designed to be able to support people with necessities such as shelter and food, yet 20% of those without homes cannot afford shelter with these wages. Through these statistic, ehrenreich is able to establish that it is nearly impossible to live a decent lifestyle with just low-wage job
...elp the working middle class from falling into poverty or to help the working poor rise out of poverty. Furthermore the working poor themselves lack the knowledge and power to demand reform. David Shipler says it best when he writes, “Relief will come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family —and the commitment of both society and individual.” (Shipler 5786-5788) It is time for America to open its eyes and see the invisible working poor.
Imagine waking up and regretting going to work not because you don’t love your job, but because you are facing injustices at your workplace. When we apply for a job we expect to get hired and when we do, we are always nervous and anxious on our first day because we don 't know what to expect. In “Nickle and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, she is an undercover journalist that explores the impact of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act on the working poor in the United Sates. Ehrenreich explores the process of applications and the difficulties of being a low-wage worker in and outside the workplace. The process of applications could be scary as well as humiliating, in some cases. Sometimes, the application process seems unfair, and the workplace and its
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 outside of a home. The sad reality is that millions of people in America work everyday for those wages and have to just deal with it. The majority opinion is that some poor people are lazy or choose to be that way, when the truth is that individuals work everyday some even two jobs and still cannot make ends meet because of the poverty cycle.
Poverty and low wages have been a problem ever since money became the only thing that people began to care about. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, she presents the question, “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” This question is what started her experiment of living like a low wage worker in America. Ehrenreich ends up going to Key West, Portland, and Minneapolis to see how low wage work was dealt with in different states. With this experiment she developed her main argument which was that people working at low wages can’t live life in comfort because of how little they make monthly and that the economic system is to blame.
During the middle of the book, Ehrenreich writes, "Maybe, it occurs to me, that I 'm getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black (p. 100)." I found this interesting because African Americans continuously face inequality due to race, which correlates with the inequalities that lower classes in society face. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich emphasizes that there are "hidden costs" to being poor, which includes those in poverty who cannot find a way out. The working poor, who Ehrenreich gets to know through work, live in hotels paying daily. These people in the book describe to Ehrenreich that that would rent an apartment, but they cannot afford the security deposit and starting costs. The working poor in the book also must buy unhealthy meals at fast-food restaurants because they cannot afford kitchen appliances or food to cook with. People suffering in poverty often believe they are stuck there and cannot get out, so they
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
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 saw it was almost impossible to get out of the rut of low paying professions once you're in. Barbra Ehrenreich moved throughout three locations attempting to prove her argument. In those states she obtained a job as a waitress, hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Not only did she learn about the low wages but also the treatment that was shown to the workers.
“Workers Make Appeal to Taxpayers,” also follows Andrew Olson, a McDonald 's worker who makes $8.60 an hour, and his fiance who makes minimum wage in their experience under the poverty line. “Their salaries are so meager [...] that they rely on food stamps and Medicaid to get by,” says Kelly about Olson’s current living status, a lifestyle most Americans involuntarily live. Aside from the benefits wreaked by business owners and taxpayers, the workers living on poor salaries prove as the most positively and heavily affected; the three point nine percent of working citizens treated unfairly by big businesses. “Workers Make Appeal to Taxpayers” concludes with a quote from Olson, “Just because I work in fast food, does that mean I should have to just scrape by in