Interview Reflection In Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” she caught a glimpse of how low wage workers lived in the United States, the book opened my eyes to the challenges low-wage workers face in America. But it also led to some questions, such as: How does low-wage work in the U.S. compared to low-wage work in developing countries? My interviewee, Hannah Johnson(my mom), comes from a developing country in West Africa, Nigeria. But, in her 30+ years in Nigeria she has never held a low-wage job, nevertheless she had some insight that I thought would be very interesting to include. Overall, the interviewee's story is very similar to Ehrenreich’s experience. Hannah Johnson is a native born Nigerian who came to the U.S. with her husband
and her son(me) in 2003, which is 2 years after “Nickeled and Dimed” was published. When Mrs. Johnson arrived to the U.S. it was her brother-in-law who told her about her a job opening, this is significantly different than how Ehrenreich looked for jobs, on page 13 Ehrenreich states “The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job.” This was not the case for Mrs. Johnson, she had one thing that Ehrenreich didn't have in this experiment, family. This allowed her to find out about a job opportunity at a local Maxway department store. Mrs and Mr. Johnson both applied for this job, there was an application and a “test” about basic math skills necessary for being a cashier. This is very similar to the “test” that Ehrenreich had to take to get most of her jobs, particularly on page 13 “The interview is multiple-choice..” Mrs. Johnson also applied to various amount of jobs, including at McDonald's and a local dollar store. What I found interesting about Mrs. Johnson’s job search is the fact that she did not accept McDonald’s job even though it offered more than Maxway’s $6.80 an hour. The reason she did not accept the $7.00 an hour McDonald’s job is because it was very far and a career there could not coexist with her schedule. As soon as Mrs. Johnson filled out the application for Maxway, her and Mr. Johnson were told to come back the next day and they received a schedule, which was never permanent. Since both Mrs and Mr. Johnson were immigrants, they faced a lot of discrimination from coworkers and customers. What I found surprising is that management was very kind to their foreign employees, this is a contradiction to what happened to George, a Czech coworker that Ehrenreich met in chapter 1, who is accused of stealing. On the other hand, Mrs. Johnson told me about how her accent strained her relationship with customers and coworkers, but still she enjoyed helping the customers. The most interesting thing that I got from this interview is that both Mrs and Mr. Johnson came to the U.S. with the misconception that there was no such thing as low-wage jobs, that every job would offer huge sums of money, and that everyone was doing well financially. Obviously this is nowhere near true, today Mrs. Johnson feels like she would have been better financially if she stayed in Nigeria, where she had a small shop which she built herself out of plywood. She sewed clothes and sold candy, soap, water, and cookies. Ultimately I still hold the belief that having a low-wage job in the U.S. is better than having a low-wage job in a developing country. But through this interview and reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s narrative in “Nickel and Dimed” I’ve come to realize that being poor sucks no matter where you live.
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/
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.
The invisible workforce consists of the low-wage workers that face harsh working conditions, a few or no benefits, and long hours of labor that exceed the regular business week. Barbara Ehrenreich, narrates her experience of entering the service workforce, in the book Nickel and Dimed. She proves that getting by in America working a minimum wage job is impossible. Although, the book was written in the 1990’s, the conditions in which minimum wage workers lived still prevail today. Minimum wage no longer serves its original purpose of providing a living wage for the invisible workforce.
For her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, a middle-aged female investigative journalist, assumed the undercover position of a newly divorced housewife returning to work after several years of unemployment. The premise for Ehrenreich to go undercover in this way was due to her belief that a single mother returning to work after years of being on welfare would have a difficult time providing for her family on a low or minimum wage. Her cover story was the closest she could get to that of a welfare mother since she had no children and was not on welfare. During the time she developed the idea for the book, “roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform” were going to have to survive on a $6 or $7 an hour wage; the wage of the inexperienced and uneducated. This paper will discuss Ehrenreich's approach to the research, her discoveries, and the economic assumptions we can make based on the information presented in her book.
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.
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 today’s society, the question of minimum wage is a large political topic. Many people argue that it is impossible to live on a minimum wage lifestyle. In her novel Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich looks into this issue. In an experiment in which she mimics the life of a single woman, she moves into the low-wage workforce in three different cities in America. Within these cities, she attempts to make a living off of low-wage work and records her experiences, as well as the experiences of the true low-wage workers around her. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich utilizes both vivid imagery and data in order to persuade the audience to agree that the low-wage lifestyle is truly un-livable.
Erik Erikson was heavily influenced by Freud but while Freud was an ID psychologist, Erikson was an ego psychologist. Erikson stressed that the development of the ego depended heavily on personal and social aspects. “According to Erikson, the ego develops as it successfully resolves crises that are distinctly social in nature. These involve establishing a sense of trust in others, developing a sense of identity in society, and helping the next generation prepare for the future” (McLeod, S. 1970). His theory focused on personality development through eight distinct stages. He believed that personality progressed in a stacking or pre-determined manner, this is referred to as the epigenetic principle. One must
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
Nickel and Dimed is a book about the author’s trip into the working poor world. Her profession was as a professor in biology. She noticed similar traits of her studies throughout the years, their struggle with being working poor. This struggled she saw preempted her to create a social experiment that is about how to live as a unskilled, working poor person in America. Instead of experimenting on others she took upon herself to be the one who drives into this unknown world to her. This assignment she given herself wasn’t an easy task and Ehrenreich experiences many conflicting emotions about what she will take on. Before she drives into her social experiment, she create some basic rules she must live by: She has to take the highest pay job offered and do her best to keep it, no relaying on past skills, she has to find the most affordable living conditions in the area she was in. These rules were not easily kept during the experiment and eventual she broke them all at one point or another. She also set some reasonable limits that protect her from going hungry or homeless. There was a couple times throughout the experiment that she broke her
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2001). Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America. Published- New York, New York.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed has several themes throughout it’s text, but I can’t help but think that Ehrenreich’s main point is that the poor deserve to earn more; She goes on to discuss all throughout the book how it is virtually impossible for someone to provide basic needs for themselves after only working one minimum wage job;.
In my interview I chose my girlfriend's neighbor. Hector is of Mexican decent and he is here because in Meigs county the produce fields hire Mexican laborers on worker permits. Hector started out doing this then he became the boss about five years ago and received his green card and now is an American and can speak very good English. He explained to me that in Mexico there is no age when you can start working so there are young boys working at six to ten years old to help support his needy family. He also stated that women do not usually work they are only aloud to go to the village markets and get goods for their family's and raise there many children. I asked about minimum wage and he kinda laughed and said some teens and men who work are lucky to get a dollar an hour, but he said the people who are lucky enough to get to do what he got to do make there family's a lot of money. He said when he started coming to America to work he was picked like a lottery pick because there are only so many jobs for little positions he and his entire family was dirt poor, but now he said his family is the richest in the village. He said that he has also got to move all of his immediate family to America.