Barbara Ehrenreich's, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", is a book that strives to change the way America perceives its working poor. Incorporated is a journal of the time spent by the author, with her identity and Ph.D concealed, working in order to discover whether she could support a basic life style from earning minimum wage. This book brings to light general problems such as stress in the work place, lack of proper benefits, and how what was merely an experiment for Ehrenreich, is a real detriment for many others. Documented from 1998-2000, Ehrenreich finds cheap residencies and works various employment positions paying between $6-$7 an hour all while assessing her findings. In working as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and a sales clerk in Minnesota, Ehrenreich soon discovers that even the "lowliest" of occupations require exhausting and strenuous efforts rewarded by a wage that barely covers living expenses and everyday expenditures.
As a native resident to Florida, Ehrenreich doesn't venture far from home to begin research. She quickly realizes the harsh variation from her comfortable middle-class lifestyle and her new predicament. She finds work waiting tables at two restaurants and is becomes a housekeeper working only once a week at a hotel. She experiences the invisibility of many low-wage workers when her face "goes unnoticed" in her native town (11). Similarly, her name is not usually used; when people want her attention, they use generic female condescending terms such as "blondie" or "baby" (12). Ehrenereich soon discovers that this must he the suppressive behavior received by many low-wage workers. She goes on to describe working for insensitive and arrogant managers who f...
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...her job opportunities. I am aware now that this along with many other issues are beyond their control. The poorer they are the more constrained their mobility is. Usually relying on someone else to pick you up and drop you off pretty much limits you to one place of employment. This book has changed my thinking in so many ways, mostly that the problems that limit their progression are out of their reach. The government needs to step in and provide for more assistance and aids to help the situation. Just based on the difficulty Ehrenreich had when trying to locate food shelter that would feed her disappointed me greatly. It is unbelievable that it is expected from a poor person, who has limited money and resources, to do that much work in order to find food or even shelter! Everyone should read this book in order to grasp the harsh realities of the working poor.
...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
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 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
In the novel Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehnreich, there are many hurtles she must overcome to experience the life of a low income worker. She sets some ground rules for herself, such as always having a car, and starting out with a certain amount of money for her down payment on an apartment. Although the rules are doable, she admits that she broke all of the rules at least once. Even though Barbara didn't hold to her original plan, she was still able to reveal her appeals clearly.
She knows she will never truly experience poverty because this is nothing more than a project but she leaves behind her old life and becomes known as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years. Her main goal is to get enough income to be able to pay for all her expenses and have enough money to pay next months rent.
Many people at one time or another will face some-sort of economic hardship; however it is safe to say that many people do not really know what extreme poverty is like. The Treviño family knows first hand what it is like to work in tedious, mind-numbing jobs for a very little paycheck. The life of a migrant worker is not anything to be desired. Simple things that most would take for granted like food variety, baths, clean clothes, and beds are things that Elva learned to live with. “We couldn’t have a bath every day, since it was such a big production. But [mom] made us wash our feet every night” (125). A simple task to any normal person is a large production for a migrant family that doesn’t have any indoor plumbing. People living in poverty do not often have a large wardrobe to speak of which means that the few clothes they own often remain dirty because washing clothes is a production too. “Ama scrubbed clothes on the washboard while the rest of us bathed. She took a bath last while the rest of us rinsed and hung up the clothes she had washed. This was the only oppor...
She sets out to explore the world that welfare mothers are entered. The point was not so much to become poor as to get a sense of the spectrum of low-wage work that existed-from waitressing to housekeeping. She felt mistreated when it was announced that there has been a report on “drug activity”, as a result, the new employees will be required to be tested, as will the current employees on a random basis. She explained feeling mistreated, “I haven 't been treated this way-lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusations-since junior high school” (Ehrenreich,286). The other problem is that this job shows no sign of being financially viable. Ehrenreich states that there is no secret economies that nourish the poor, “If you can 't put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week” (286). On the first day of housekeeping, she is yelled and given nineteen rooms to clean. For four hours without a break she striped and remake the beds. At the end of the experience she explained that she couldn 't hold two jobs and couldn 't make enough money to live on with one as where single mothers with children. She has clarified that she has advantages compare to the long-term
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
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.
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.
However, she never really experienced the actual life of living in poverty as the majority of people living in poverty experience. Barbara, an educated white women had just that on other people living in poverty, because of the color of her skin and education level that is more often than not restricted from people living in poverty. She was able and more qualified for jobs than other people living amongst the status she was playing. She also was able to more readily seek better benefits than people living in poverty. When she first start her journey in Florida she had a car, a car that in most cases people living in poverty do not have. She was also able to use the internet to find local jobs and available housing in the area that many people living in poverty are restricted from. Another great benefit she had was the luxury of affording a drug detox cleansing her of drugs deemed bad. Many people living in poverty do not have much extra cash laying around much less fifty dollars to afford a detox for prescription drugs. She also had the luxury to afford her prescription drugs, another option that many people living in poverty do not have. Another element that made Barbara’s experience not that genuine was the fact that she was not providing for anybody other than herself. Twenty-two percent of kids under the age of 18 are living below the poverty line (http://npc.umich.edu/poverty/#5) , Barbara did not have to provide for pets or kids which would of changed her experience altogether of living in poverty. Not to belittle Barbara’s experience, but many factors of what life is like living in poverty were not taken into consideration during her
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
In this book, Ehrenreich tries to work in three different places to see what it is like to work as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich worked as a server in Florida, housekeeper in Miami, and sales person in Minnesota, and still she didn’t make enough money to live comfortable. As she says, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rent too high”(Ehrereich’s 199). She notices how hard it is for poor people to try to survive when they have to work with a minimum