Cause and Effect 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 …show more content…
She decides if she could earn $7 an hour, then she could afford $500 rent. She found a place to rent 45 minutes away from work. In order to deal with the financial responsibilities, Ehrenreich took to the streets in search for another unskilled job since she did not want to use her car as a place of residence. She continues her experiment in a new environment which took her to Maine since the area is mostly a Caucasian community. When she realized that Portland was just another $6-$7 an hour town, she picked up two jobs to be practical. She began her quest for lodging at Motel 6. After several disappointments searching for a place to lie; she found a cottage for $120 a week and determined to poor cannot compete with the rich in the housing market. Ehrenreich moved to Minnesota to finish her experiment, where she hoped there would be a satisfying harmony between rent and wages. She locates an apartment from a friend lasting a short period until she finds a place to stay on her own. She found housing to be a struggle as there seems to be a shortage of houses; as a result she transitioned herself into a hotel. Her stay at the hotel proved to surpass her estimated expenses despite the fact this was her only safe
...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 2001 United States Representative Jim Kolbe introduced legislation to Congress to eliminate the penny coin in most transactions. Although this legislation failed, there are still consistent calls to eliminate the penny as the smallest-denomination United States coin. Our nation is founded on passed traditions. Any American can look basically in any place to understand why America has thrived for centuries. Every tradition, sculpture, monument, or artifact gives Americans history about what has occured. The country struggles to destroy any of these long kept traditions. Although some traditions are completely relevant, the use of the penny is of little worth today. Whether the penny is rolling around in your pocket or resting at the
In chapter one of "Nickel and Dimed", Barbara stated that she is renting a room for $500 and having a waitress job which is paying her $2.43 plus tips "from 2:00 till 10:00p.m". After a month, she would get $311.04 without tips and tax. Assume Barbara get $20 tips every day, she would get $711.04 without tax per month. After paying off the rent, she would left with about only $150. This is not enough for food and gas for a month. Which is why Barbara had to get another job where she works at Jerry 's. Meanwhile in the current time, according to an article by Kwelia, it says that "The cost of Bay Area living continues to be a hot topic of discussion in the region. The average asking price for a one-bedroom in San Francisco is now $2,673 a month, up more than 10 percent from last year." Imagine working as a minimum wage worker full time, getting paid 9 dollars per hour for 8 hours a day. The person would earn $1440 without tax. It is almost half of the rent fee. The person is then forced to have two jobs, the only other option is to live with another person to share the renting fee. As a result a person who is unable to get two jobs working at the minimum wage or finding a roommate would likely to be homeless. The person is then forced to move out from the city to find a cheaper place to
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.
As a sociologist we look at two different perspectives, there is structural functional perspective and the conflict perspective. Out of the two perspectives I agree with the conflict perspective more than I do the structural functional perspective, and I’m going to use this perspective throughout my paper. I choose this perspective because as much as we want society to be “fair” and it work smoothly, it just doesn’t. We have struggle for power and I believe there are the groups that are powerful and wealthy, and there are some groups that are the working class and struggle to make it. I also picked this perspective because in the book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich gave up the power and wealth to struggle with the working class to show us how truly difficult it sometimes can be.
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.
Before setting out, she gave herself a list of rules she had to follow so that her experience would be as real as it could be. Her first rule was when looking for a job she couldn't mention the skills she had learned from her education. Second, she had to take the highest paying job that was being offered to her. Third, she had to live in the cheapest accommodation that she could, providing that it was a safe environment. Going hungry and being homeless weren't ever able to be options.
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
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
Ehrenreich feeds the residents at the nursing home then washes the dishes. She meets Pete and Linda which are two very sincere people that show her around. Ehrenreich soon finds out that the maid service she takes on has a lot of rules, has strenuous work and has a limited time frame to do so many rooms. She meets several other maids who don’t look well and definitely have no money. Ehrenreich works harder to pick up Holly’s workload because she is in such bad health and pregnant but unable to miss work because she has no money. Holly ends up tripping and has to call Ted, the owner. Before Ted said anything about shaking it off, Ehrenreich gets on the phone and tells him she doesn’t care what he says that Holly needed to go to the doctor and he didn’t need to push her around. After the conformation with Ted, Ehrenreich and Marge have a deep conversation about Ehrenreich getting fired for the way she talked to Ted. Marge tells Ehrenreich that she would not get fired because she passed the test and without meaning to insult Marge, Ehrenreich screams that anyone could have passed the
After getting the apartment on 116th Street, Lutie didn’t know what her next step would be. She didn’t know how long she would stay there. They had just enough money to pay rent, buy food and clothes. Being locked into poverty enables Lutie to see a future.
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
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a