Use of Rhetoric in Nickel and Dime by Barbara Ehrenreich 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. 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. Ehrenreich’s use of statistical information also proves to her audience that she in fact has done her research on this topic. She admits that poverty is a social topic that she frequently talks about. She researched that in 1998 the National Coalition for the Homeless reported that nationwide on average it would take about a wage of $8.89 to afford a one bedroom apartment and that the odds of common welfare recipients landing a job that pays such a “living wage” were about 97 to 1. Ehrenreich experiences this statistic in first person when she set out job hunting in Key West, Florida when she applied to 20 different jobs, ranging from wait tables to housekeeping, and of those applications, zero were responded to.
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.
When you see a man in a suit walking down the street, you automatically think that he is a multi-million dollar owner of a company. That man is not necessarily the owner of a big company, he could just be getting out of a meeting where everyone had to dress nicely because the CEO of the coffee shop was going to be there. The people of America made their assumptions that if people dress a certain way then they are a big time corporate executive. What Ehrenreich does is make a list of “classes” that college students should be taking to inform them of what is happening in the real world once they graduate. These classes include : Elementary Class Structure of the U.S., Presidential Architecture, Race, Gender, and Occupational Preference, Topics in University Financing. The next story that is very closely related to this is called “could you afford to be poor?” This story talks about the high cost of living in low-income urban neighborhoods. Since there is such a high cost of living in these neighborhoods, it is harder to provide for your family if there is low income there. In these low-income neighborhoods, people are less likely to have bank accounts because of the expenses it can cause them to have if they have a low balance. To cash their checks, they have to pay anywhere from $5-$50 just to cash their check. So essentially you are paying more money to cash your check. They are also less likely to have access to a large supermarket store without driving a long way to get there, so they rely on smaller, but more expensive food stores with lower quality for their
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.
In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David K. Shipler tells the story of a handful of people he has interviewed and followed through their struggles with poverty over the course of six years. David Shipler is an accomplished writer and consultant on social issues. His knowledge, experience, and extensive field work is authoritative and trustworthy. Shipler describes a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, health issues, abuse, addiction, and other factors that all combine to create a mountain of adversity that is virtually impossible to overcome. The American dream and promise of prosperity through hard work fails to deliver to the 35 million people in America who make up the working poor. Since there is neither one problem nor one solution to poverty, Shipler connects all of the issues together to show how they escalate each other. Poor children are abused, drugs and gangs run rampant in the poor neighborhoods, low wage dead end jobs, immigrants are exploited, high interest loans and credit cards entice people in times of crisis and unhealthy diets and lack of health care cause a multitude of problems. The only way that we can begin to see positive change is through a community approach joining the poverty stricken individuals, community, businesses, and government to band together to make a commitment to improve all areas that need help.
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s, “Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America,” she emphasizes how difficult it is for the lower class to earn a living. As a middle class worker, she wondered what it was like to work as a lower class. Would she be able to get by? She decided to create a social expe...
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 conducts an experience about people in poverty. Barbara could not imagine how these people survive off $6-$7 per hour paying jobs. She wonders how anyone could survive off a low wage job. Her main focus is to see if she could handle all her expenses just as the poor do day to day. So Barbara goes out her way to perform an experience using her Ph.D. in Biology. She created three rules for her experiment. 1). Accept the cheapest housing or place she could find, 2). She must also try her best to keep a job; especially the job that pays the most and 3). She cannot use her degree or anything from her professional/regular life to get by if something happens to fail. As hard as she tried to follow the rules, she broke them anyhow
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 1950, America’s only female senator, Margaret Chase Smith, was the only representative who dared to challenge McCarthy and his harsh tactics for accusing people high in the American government of working with communists. In her speech, she uses syntactical devices, such as anaphora and asyndeton, to emphasize and reveal her reasons for why the US should reevaluate its current political tactics throughout her speech.
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;.
Barbara Ehrenreich moves to Key West, Florida, a place she selected out of laziness and because it is close to home. By this time in her journey, she realizes that the life of a low-wage worker is always going to be difficult, especially in places where the cost of living is incredibly high and the pay is low. At first, she tries to find a place to live, specifically a trailer home, but at the price of $675 a month it is not within her $500-600 budget. Even the poorest of neighborhoods are more than expected, Ehrenreich decides on a $500.00 trailer home that is quite some way away from her work. The thing that Ehrenreich has that not many others do is a matter of transportation, this allows her to make the drive that is a little under an hour.
Throughout her career, Ehrenreich wrote for several publications, including The New Republic, the New York Times and Time magazine, Ms., Z Magazine, Salon.com, The Atlantic Monthly, and In These Times. Ehrenreich’s work allowed the public to be informed of commonly overlooked social inequalities existing within America. Through this work, she aspired to motivate people to take action and help reform social injustices. One of her highest achievements as a journalist was a story written in Ms. concerning the correlation between feminism and heart disease. Another one of her influential works was The Hearts of Men, which discussed the destructiveness of gender roles on America’s productivity and on men and women’s lives. In order to investigate the lives of America’s working class, Ehrenreich spent a couple of months living as a low-wage worker and accounted her experience in Nickel and Dimed. This book exposed the hardships of low-wage workers in America and the economic and social injustice that they faced, providing a unique perspective on America’s working
Barbara Ehrenreich was faced with many problems in her undercover role as a low wage American worker. Some of the hardships she faced were malnutrition, invasion of privacy, being underpaid, and inequality. Ehrenreich describes the “culture of extreme equality’ as a never-ending cycle.She describes how upper level management is at such a higher economical position to that of the workforce they employ. These people in upper level positions create a repression of the people they employ by using such tactics like searching bags and giving them prescreening drug tests. In return the cost of these services are expensive which keeps low wages low. Barbara even compares her experiences to the larger economy in that of cutting public services to the
This article, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, describes her month-long experiment with living on only minimum wage in June of 1998, shortly before certain welfare programs were to be cut back. She intended to test the viability of living only on minimum-wage jobs, as well as the claim that “work will lift poor women out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self-esteem, and hence their future value in the labor market.” Ehrenreich at first expects her privileges – such as her intelligence, race, health, and transportation – will allow her to easily find a job and survive off of it. Immediately, her expectations are dashed by the difficulty she faces in finding a job she would prefer. She eventually settles on being a waitress, and for a short period works two jobs at once. After a month of exhausting work, she finds she is unable to withstand the physical, emotional, and economical demands of minimum-wage labor any longer.