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In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, the author, Barbara Ehrenreich, takes on an experiment where she leaves her job as a highly acclaimed writer and decides to become part of the working class in order to better understand them and their continuous strains and worries. Throughout the novel, the author cleverly utilizes statistical data, her own personal experiences and the previously untold experiences of others to bring to light the harsh reality facing many Americans who, despite their daily hard work and effort, are shockingly close to poverty.
As a way to communicate additional information to the audience, Barbara Ehrenreich provided statistical data in the footnotes of certain pages. Although these statistics are not
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Over the course the experiment, Ehrenreich takes on various jobs in three different cities becoming a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide and a sales clerk at Wal-mart for short periods of time. When describing these experiences, Ehrenreich occasionally delves into the strain these jobs are having on her motivation and her perspective. Lines like, “I don’t cry, but I am in a position to realize…that the tear ducts are still there and still capable of doing their job,” and “no one will notice my heroism on that Saturday’s shift,” clearly demonstrate the overwhelming feelings of depression and low self-esteem that many readers can relate to from through their own personal experiences. By allowing herself to experience first-hand the emotions that derive from the poverty that she is analyzing, Ehrenreich solidifies her credibility to not only her audience but also to …show more content…
One of them being the aunt of a friend of Ehrenreich’s named Caroline. Caroline went through a real-life version of the hypothetical situation Ehrenreich created for herself for the experiment. At first Caroline had a good job and lived in New Jersey with her husband and kids, until she decided to leave her husband and move into her mother’s home with her kids in tow. She then moved to Florida when transportation to her job became too difficult for her to manage. In Florida, she got a job at a hotel cleaning rooms as well as the news that she had diabetes. It was also in Florida that Caroline eventually met a man who she got married to, this marriage, however, didn’t end her any troubles as she still has a low-paying job and children that she must take care of. It is these types of people that Ehrenreich encounters during her experiment. People who have experienced the middle-class lifestyle in the past and are now forced to join the working-class. Families who, although employed, are at the brink of scarcity and debt because of their extremely low wages. Since the audience is most likely part of the middle-class themselves, the reading of others’ very similar experiences can cause a feeling of fear to envelop within them, emphasizing the hardship that many people like Caroline go through in the United States;
...y (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/02-03/01-27/lecture.html Spotlight Reviews, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063889/102-7245049-5615318?vi=glance The Connection, http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2001/06/0625a.shtml The Labor Lawyer, www.bnabooks.com/ababna/laborlawyer/18.2.pdf Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Americam www.growinglifestyle.com/prod/0805063889.html
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.
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
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 majority of her witty remarks were used in a sardonic way. This was to present the hopelessness of her situation. On page 109, Ehrenreich speaks of how unskilled her job really is. "But why complain about not being paid when those people at the Buddhist monastery pay with their own money to do the same kind of work?". Ehrenreich continues to sarcastically illustrate the hopelessness of her position on page 151 when she describes the hotels in which she is forced to stay in. "To say that some place is the worst motel in the country is, of course, to set oneself up for considerable challenge. I have encountered plenty of contenders in my own travels--the one in Cleveland that turned into a brothel at night, the one in Butte where the window looked out into another room. Still, the Clear view Inn leaves the competition in the dust." Her condescending and ridiculing tone leaves no doubt that she is using sarcasm to help paint a clearer picture. Humor turned out to be a very successful way in illustrating just how poor her living conditions were throughout her journey. Finally, on page 160, Ehrenreich continues on her sarcastic path. "Tonight, I had the ne sensation, Survivor, on CBS, where "real people" are struggling to light a ...
Economic inequality and injustice come in the same hand. Poor people are more likely to experience inequality and injustice. The negative assumptions of poor people are created by the media and politicians. Promoting economic justice by offering people living in poverty some form of social support. Barbara Ehrenreich found in her experiment the workforce for low-wage was difficult. Conley talks about the different types of social inequalities and how they have been unsuccessful.
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.
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
Lenny Abramov was a 39-year-old man who worked in Indefinite Life Extension at Post-Human Services, which allowed the wealthy and the healthy—known as High Net Worth Individuals—to become immoral. Lenny is a self-deprecating Russian-American Jewish male, who is self-conscious about his appearance, uselessly well educated, passionate, neither old nor young, and helplessly prone to error. Eunice Park, on the other hand, is a 24-year-old young Korean-American woman who is constantly struggling with materialism and the pressures of her traditional Korean family.... ... middle of paper ...
Ehrenreich notices how troublesome a minimum wage workers life is by her pretending to be a minimum wage worker as well. A strength of Ehrenreich's argument is that she was able to show examples of how some of her coworkers lived poorly. An example that she gives is, “Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate,a male friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts,but the rent would be impossible alone.” (25). Some of her coworkers had to go through tedious situations as can't get out of them because they can't afford to live on their own. This shows a strength in Ehrenreich's argument because it give more credibility. Another strength in her argument is she went to go experience low wage work first-hand. She said, “Maybe when I got into the project, I would discover some hidden economies in the world of the low-wage worker” (3). Ehrenreich realized that the only way that she was going to get the answer was by doing the job for herself even though she didn't want to at first. By her experiencing this first-hand she is able to strengthen the argument because she will be able to effectively convey her message. If someone else were to conduct the experiment then there would have probably been a lot more holes throughout the
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.
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
At the beginning, I was very skeptical of Ehrenreich and her set up of the study. She makes it very clear at the beginning of the book that she was not doing this for emotional reasons. She explains that, “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day (Ehrenreich, 2001, p. 6). This struck me as not only a bit on the heartless side, but a complete and utter flaw in her research methods. As a Ph.D in Bilogy, Ehrenreich is of course used to the objective side of research, but should have known from the start that the real world is not an objective laboratory. The people that she spent all of those months with working and interacting with were not simply robots that only went to work and sleep. They had emotions and dreams and aspirations other than simply to make enough money to pay next month’s rent. When starting the study, Ehrenreich did not take any of this into account. She simply set up a point blank experiment, to attempt to live how the other half lives, but she soon found out that this is not as simply as paying rent for a