Nickle and Dimed in Ameri...
by
Barbara Ehrenreich
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13018 ratings, 3.65 average rating, 1634 reviews
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13018 ratings, 3.65 average rating, 1634 reviews
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published
2008
(first published 2001)
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Read in July, 2006
Here's a down and dirty assessment of Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich:
First the positive:
- Interesting premise: writer decides to try to live on the wages that unskilled workers (waitresses, home/hotel cleaners, department store [Walmart, for instance:] clerks) earn to see if she can do it and see if she learns anything in the process.
- She exposes some very unethical (even illegal) employer practices such as withholding a worker’s first paycheck until the second pay pe...more
Here's a down and dirty assessment of Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich:
First the positive:
- Interesting premise: writer decides to try to live on the wages that unskilled workers (waitresses, home/hotel cleaners, department store [Walmart, for instance:] clerks) earn to see if she can do it and see if she learns anything in the process.
- She exposes some very unethical (even illegal) employer practices such as withholding a worker’s first paycheck until the second pay period.
- She notes some of the problems experienced by low-wage workers that aren’t (or may not be) experienced at higher levels of employment (e.g., lack of healthcare benefits, being unable to live in an apartment because of cost-prohibitive security deposits, almost universal drug testing as prerequisite to employment, etc.)
- Funny anecdotes about her experiences on “the other side.”
- She appears to have done some outside research besides her own experiences and observations.
Then the negative:
- The reader recognizes immediately that this writer is a liberal, specifically a bleeding-heart socialist. To those of us on the right, this is a red flag: we know what in the end she’ll advocate. Besides, the dreck that comes from that ideology is just annoying.
- She makes comments about the nurturing aspects of smoking that I find vomit-worthy. Part of the whole getting-out-of-poverty thing is making some good choices – continuing an expensive nicotine habit isn’t one of them. Ms. Ehrenreich breezes past this obvious expense and instead philosophizes about it. Gaack.
- Ditto for children. I never buy the whole thing that poor people can’t (read: don’t have the brain-power or self-control to) limit their reproduction. Children are expensive and in having them (in a marriage or not) without thought to all the costs associated with merely keeping them alive, not to mention THEIR future, people are essentially dooming them to the same life and poverty that they currently experience. I mean, if you as a parent don’t have reliable healthcare it’s one thing, but your kids will definitely need it – so why are you jeopardizing their health? Oh, yeah – Medicaid.
- She has a permissive attitude toward drug use – and even admits to “an indiscretion” of that sort during her experiment. She buys and uses products that mask or flush evidence of the drug use. That whole business is not going to lend credibility to your whole argument – whatever the argument is. And drugs are an expense.
- She always has a car (“rent-a-wreck” in her words) during her experiment. Expense. Now, some of the locations she works do demand personal transportation, but she purposely steers clear of big cities with public transportation. Hmm.
- She never tries to coordinate/share living arrangements and pool resources. After all, she DOES have her limits in this experiment!
- The biggest problem with her experiment is that it is just an experiment – she can return to her comfy upper middle class life, while demanding that the government do something about the minimum wage and poverty.
Yeah, I could go on, but you get the general picture. I would give this read a C+ - readable, but there are some reservations.
...less
bookshelves:
pastreads
Read in June, 2004
recommends it for:
no one
(warning, a nerve has been touched!)
I have experience working with and researching programs that aid the poor and working poor. I hated this book. The only role it could play is as a weak talking piece for starting up serious discussion about the struggles and needs of the poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich may have stepped outside her comfort zone and into the world of the working poor, but she did it with an educated background, with money "just in case", with a pompous attitude, and with...more
(warning, a nerve has been touched!)
I have experience working with and researching programs that aid the poor and working poor. I hated this book. The only role it could play is as a weak talking piece for starting up serious discussion about the struggles and needs of the poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich may have stepped outside her comfort zone and into the world of the working poor, but she did it with an educated background, with money "just in case", with a pompous attitude, and with the requirement of a car at all times.
She also did it without many barriers that are very real to the working poor:
-a child or children
-childcare costs
-low IQ or other learning disabilities
-an alcohol or drug addiction
-an abusive partner
-lack of transportation
-English as a second language
-bad credit
-felony convictions
-health disparities
-no high school diploma or GED
-experience as an orphan or in the foster care system
-homelessness
-no positive support system (like her husband and editor)
-depression, PTSD, schizophremia or other mental illness
-lack of drive or self-worth, hopelessness
-angst for "the system"
-lack of basic computer skills
-lack of interpersonal skills
-lack of personal hygiene or simple lack of clean clothing
I live in Minneapolis, where she lived when the experiment ended. In the book she says she was struggling to find housing, but she was postive that she would find it. Fantastic! I hope the housing she would of found had heat paid, because heating costs will break even a middle-class budget when the weather drops well below zero.
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recommends it for:
anyone who has never worked a demeaning job
The two sentence summary of this book is: PhD and respected writer decides to find out how the other two-thirds live. To this end she goes undercover as an unskilled laborer at three minimum wage jobs (waitress, Wal-mart employee and Merry-Maid) each in a different city, each for one month.
Things I liked:
The premise.
Things I hated:
1. Her shocked tone of discovery. Newsflash! Living on minimum wage is hard/nigh on impossible! Educated people have it pretty easy comparatively! Entry l...more
The two sentence summary of this book is: PhD and respected writer decides to find out how the other two-thirds live. To this end she goes undercover as an unskilled laborer at three minimum wage jobs (waitress, Wal-mart employee and Merry-Maid) each in a different city, each for one month.
Things I liked:
The premise.
Things I hated:
1. Her shocked tone of discovery. Newsflash! Living on minimum wage is hard/nigh on impossible! Educated people have it pretty easy comparatively! Entry level minimum wage work is kind of demeaning!
2. Her colonial-anthropologist-among-the-natives style that came across (to me) as super patronizing. Don't these people understand that easy office jobs are just on the other side of a college degree? Don't they understand history enough to fight for unions?
3. Her total shock that no one found her out as an educated person! Working in a diner in the next town over, she was never recognized! Shock!
4. This mostly just lost her style points, but she made a point to always have a working car (it wasn't HER car, but she rented a working car in every city she went to) and had a thousand (two thousand?) dollars of start-up capital to pay first and last months rent and eat while waiting for a job. I think her cover story (which again, she was hurt when no one asked for/cared about) was that she was a newly divorced former stay at home wife, on her own for the first time- so I guess it's conceivable she would have had a little cushion- but I would have found it much more interesting if she'd actually committed to the premise a little more. Especially because she was there such a short time. I know that working minimum wage jobs isn't fun, but couldn't you commit to more than a month? What do you find out in a month?
5. This is really the one that gets me- at the end of her time with the Merry Maids she "comes out" to her co-workers, telling them that really, she's a PhD! And writing a book! The main response is "So you won't be here to cover your shift tomorrow." Once again she is shocked and hurt! But man, if there was ever a teaching moment, she's been working with these women at back-breaking, soul sucking work for no pay and she's surprised that they're worried about how they're going to get though the next day? AGH.
(And also, WTF was she spending money on? I'm also a single healthy person with no debt or dependents and a working car, and I spend less than a thousand dollars a month sustaining my life style. I don't think I live THAT cheaply.)
It just seemed like she was writing from this privileged bubble of white upper-crust academia that I didn't know existed. She was presenting as astonishing findings what I assume to be facts of life for a majority of people.
So. That is why I didn't like this book. My mom, on the other hand, who has actually worked as a waitress to support herself, loved it....less
recommends it for:
Paris HIlton's parents
Dear Barbara Ehrenreich,
How do I resent thee? Let me count the ways:
1. You are a wealthy, highly educated person who went on a half-assed, anthropological slumming vacation.
2. When said vacation was over, you told your coworkers: "Surprise! I'm not a poor person after all! I'm going back now to my comfortable life!"...and then you were surprised that those coworkers were mostly worried about the fact that they'd have to work the next shift with one less person.
3....more
Dear Barbara Ehrenreich,
How do I resent thee? Let me count the ways:
1. You are a wealthy, highly educated person who went on a half-assed, anthropological slumming vacation.
2. When said vacation was over, you told your coworkers: "Surprise! I'm not a poor person after all! I'm going back now to my comfortable life!"...and then you were surprised that those coworkers were mostly worried about the fact that they'd have to work the next shift with one less person.
3. You also were surprised that the aforementioned coworkers were neither impressed nor appreciative that you turned out to be a wealthy, highly educated person writing a book about how hard it is to be a poor person.
4. You were slightly offended that nobody saw through your waitress costume; you assumed that smart people are visually recognizable, and it didn't seem to occur to you that real poor people might also be smart and educated.
5. The experiences you had while pretending to be a poor person may have instilled in you some amount of sympathy for poor people, but you will never really know what it's actually like to be poor. It was certainly nice enough of you to decide that you shouldn't judge a class of people until you'd walked a mile in their shoes...but you only managed to walk about three paces before your feet hurt and you decided you had seen enough.
A real poor person does not have a couple grand to "start" with, or to stay afloat between jobs, after finding his or her working conditions intolerable and suddenly quitting. Nor does a real poor person, when he or she develops some nasty rash from said intolerable working conditions, have a private doctor who will phone in a prescription for soothing ointment. Since a poor person does not have access to said doctor, he or she has to just suck it up and go to work itchy.
I'm glad that this book might bring some much-needed insight to middle-and-upper-class people to whom it had never before occurred that it's actually really shitty to make minimum wage, that people working shitty service jobs have bad attitudes for very good reasons, that a person can work very hard and still be very poor, and that there are myriad external obstacles that keep poor people from pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.
What I am NOT glad about is that this could have been an excellent, enlightening book about the less abstract aspects of our country's economic structure...but it was not. Instead, it was just a nauseatingly narcissistic exploration of the author's personality.
What many people seem not to understand is (among other things) that there is not only one kind of poor person (or only one kind of "working class" person), that poverty is not just a condition, but a cycle, and that contemporary poverty is not some ahistorical thing that just recently appeared when people started having poor money-management skills and learned how to make crack. Contemporary poverty is a result of Capitalism, but one doesn't have to be a commie liberal to know that.
Sure, there are many poor people who are crack addicts. There are also many, many rich people who are coke addicts. I'm sure that if poor people could afford real cocaine, they would buy that instead of crack, but alas, good cocaine is too expensive for poor drug addicts who make bad decisions.
People who are not poor make many of the same decisions that poor people do (like acquiring a drug habit, or having children, or quitting a job). One big difference is that people with enough money can afford to make bad decisions.
Another big difference is that your life feels a hell of a lot different when you don't have an easy out. Maybe working as a waitress is kind of fun and interesting and not too stressful if you know you'll only be doing it until you get bored. It's another thing entirely when your only other real, long term option seems to be some other kind of awful service job, and when you know that this is your life, not a break from your "real" job and "real" life. When you feel tired and desperate and angry and resigned all the time, when every day you perform the emotional and physical labor of serving people who treat you like shit and pay you practically nothing, how are you supposed to gather enough energy and hope to seek out a better life? You probably can't. Instead, you probably are going to buy some beer or weed and enjoy the few moments of your life that you can. Maybe that's a "bad decision"...or maybe it's just a survival strategy....less
bookshelves:
culture
recommends it for:
Anybody and everybody.
I would love to write a flowery description of how much I loved this book, how vital it is for understanding our society, how every person under the American sun should read it, but I think simpler is better here.
Barbara Ehrenreich left the comforts of her upper/middle-class lifestyle for a story. She was brainstorming casually with her editor and discussing how difficult it must be for working class single mothers to raise their children on minimum wage. So she decided to work these minimum...more
I would love to write a flowery description of how much I loved this book, how vital it is for understanding our society, how every person under the American sun should read it, but I think simpler is better here.
Barbara Ehrenreich left the comforts of her upper/middle-class lifestyle for a story. She was brainstorming casually with her editor and discussing how difficult it must be for working class single mothers to raise their children on minimum wage. So she decided to work these minimum wage jobs, without any of her former comforts (such as the money in her banking accounts) and see just how liveable the living wages are.
She worked as a waitress, maid, and most notably, Walmart girl. The stories she tells along the way are sad and disheartening: tales of co-workers who can't afford to put the first and last month on an apartment so they're forced to live in cheap motels and pay daily (which is basically all they make during the day), the lack of humanity and empathy the supervisors have for their workers, the mundane existence of literally living paycheck to paycheck.
The part that Ehrenreich can't get over is this concept of the "invisible worker". How can a worker be invisible when they're so THERE, so prevalent, clearing your dishes, washing your floors (under severe scrutiny, in some cases), clearing the pile of clothing you dumped on the floor of Walmart? Because Americans in the upper/middle-class WILL IT SO. These workers are invisible because they're no longer on the same level. They're barely human. Ehrenreich's accounts of working at Walmart are depressing at best, horrifying at worst. The way those women treated Ehrenreich, as some form of escape from their own miserable existences, made me want to go back and apologize to every retail worker who had to straighten my discarded clothing in the fitting room.
This book is so simple but so powerful. Ehrenreich doesn't try to impress with her language; she's a brilliant sociologist, but her work doesn't need to be flaunted. She makes it easy for the reader to understand the worlds she lived in because she HAS to. It's a universal message. As Sean Morceau says, "If we start today, maybe we can affect a change".
Please read this....less
Read in February, 2008
TO GET TO THE POSITIVE REVIEW, SCROLL DOWN TO THE HOWEVER IN CAPPS. Id heard a lot about this book, interviews of the author, etc. and recommended it a few times before even reading it. I was pretty disappointed for the first 200 pgs (223 pages in total) as early in the preface, ehrenreich admits that for her "experiment" in taking blue-collar jobs in the hope of affording blue-collar rent, she allots her self 1)a rental car throughout the entire experiment, 2)periodic visits to her h...more
TO GET TO THE POSITIVE REVIEW, SCROLL DOWN TO THE HOWEVER IN CAPPS. Id heard a lot about this book, interviews of the author, etc. and recommended it a few times before even reading it. I was pretty disappointed for the first 200 pgs (223 pages in total) as early in the preface, ehrenreich admits that for her "experiment" in taking blue-collar jobs in the hope of affording blue-collar rent, she allots her self 1)a rental car throughout the entire experiment, 2)periodic visits to her house, 3)the buying of food outside of her budget whenever hungry, and 4)hospital visits outside of her budget whenever sick or injured. Oh, and 5)a laptop computer. By definition, no matter what she does from this point, she will not get close to poverty. Its like "Oh, Ill play poor, only without any of the inherent dangers." Furthermore, throughout her experiment, she does and assumes a number of naive things, such as 1) takes a unit in a trailer park for more than $100 more in rent per month than apartments available, for the pure experience. Also this move puts her 30 miles away from work, making her depend on her rental car. She consults with apartment search agents instead of doing her own hoofwork. She lives off a diet of fast-food that not only is unhealthy, but costs more than staples from the groceary store would. Her depiction of her life as struggling and her momentary delusions of proletariansism are pretty insulting to me, as Ive had some meager experiences in poverty. I could only imagine that the persistantly poor would either be downright offended, or view the book as an attempt at comedy. HOWEVER- in the last 20 pages, she points out all the mistakes she made, her incorrect assumptions and flaws of methodology. Then writes a concise and thoroughly foot-noted argument for the economic paradox that faces those at the bottom of the ladder. If only this material, supplanted and expanded, had been interspersed throughout the account, I would have enjoyed the book in its entirety. The fact that it became a NY Times bestseller suggests that a number of affluent people at least purchased this book, which is important. If even a third of those people read the book, then the merit of her experiment lies here. While a good read and a rich source of secondary sources for me, I would recommend this book only to anyone who is completely ignorant about poverty, or knows or is related to people who are completely ignorant about poverty. This is the books target audience, and to this audience it is extemely relevant. ...less
Very quick explanation of the premise of this one: a woman, who is a writer/journalist, is talking to her publisher about what she wants to write about next and says, “someone ought to write a book about how hard it is to get by on the minimum wage in America.” The publisher says, “Okey-dokey (the book is set in the US so I’m trying to give you a feeling of verisimilitude) you’ve hired.” (High fives all around)
Before I started this book I really worried. I mean, I’m a bit of ...more
Very quick explanation of the premise of this one: a woman, who is a writer/journalist, is talking to her publisher about what she wants to write about next and says, “someone ought to write a book about how hard it is to get by on the minimum wage in America.” The publisher says, “Okey-dokey (the book is set in the US so I’m trying to give you a feeling of verisimilitude) you’ve hired.” (High fives all around)
Before I started this book I really worried. I mean, I’m a bit of a worrier anyway – but mostly I worried that this would be the sort of book that my mother would hate. The sort of book my mother hates is the sort of book that is written by someone she calls ‘middle class’ (actually, she would probably call them middle-class twits) and these people would then presume to be able to write about what my mum would call ‘the working class’.
These people, these ‘middle-class book writing types’ basically give my mother the shits. It is nothing personal, you understand – it is much more intense than the merely personal. So, it was with gritted teeth that I started this one.
I’m glad to report that not only did I really love this book, I even think my mum would enjoy it.
First of all, Barbara recognises that she is basically an impostor. She recognises that her ‘experiment’ is really only going to be just that – I mean, she is not going to literally endanger her life, health or wellbeing just to make a point. All the same – this is the sort of reality TV program that would never make it to television. Particularly not in the USA.
That fact is something that really struck me while reading this book – I mean, even before she mentioned it herself. Early in the book she compares herself to Upstairs Downstairs – that is, a British television show about class distinctions. I thought it was very interesting that she had to rely on a British show for a cultural reference to the ‘working class’. Later she points out that working class people may well exist in America – but they definitely don’t exist on American television. I couldn’t help reflect that films like Dockers, Billy Elliot (particularly the themes around the strike – but also the themes of homosexuality), Brassed Off, or Kes simply could never be made in America. Isn’t that incredibly sad?
Now, my dear friend Wendy told me once that in some states the minimum wage can be ‘discounted’ if people earn ‘tips’. It took me a while to believe I had understood what she was saying, but if I’d read this book when I’d first intended to read it – when it first came out – I’d have known this already. Tipping is something I find quite repulsive. I hate everything about it – but then, I don’t like watching dogs beg for food, so I guess getting people to beg in much the same way is only going to make matters worse.
What do you think it is about America – I mean, the land that is supposed to believe in equality of opportunity and democracy – that somehow encourages so many people to get off on making people beg and demean themselves? The discussion in this book about the Maids (house cleaners) is illustrative of this. Companies even advertise that they force their workers to clean floors on their hands and knees. I remember my mother talking about a great-auntie of mine who worked for some rich bastard in Belfast. He would expect her to scrub the street in front of his house on her hands and knees. I believe she ended up not being able to walk. Like I said, hard to see how anyone could get off on this sort of humiliation.
I believe in the value of labour – that people are better off if they can work and if their work can be valued. I believe we are social creatures and that we only feel true self-worth if we believe we are making a real contribution to the society we live in. So, when we create an underclass of untouchables, a caste that must work themselves into ill-health and who never have any hope of being able to make ends meet or of getting out of poverty – then that is a choice that we make and one that says as much about us as people as it says about us as a society.
This book doesn’t offer simple solutions – in fact, besides her suggesting that people join together in Trade Unions and find ways to improve their pay and conditions, she makes virtually no suggestions at all. Even this is not presented as a panacea. If anything she worries that anger and resentment will build to the point where it will become unstoppable.
The pre-employment tests given to people applying for jobs are particularly evil and in Australia would probably be illegal. Now, this is really saying something. We have just had the most reprehensible and obnoxiously rightwing government imaginable but even they would have found reason to pause over the explicit anti-trade union discrimination that seems a common place in these employment tests.
It is hard to imagine the dice being more brutally loaded against these people.
The most memorable line in this book for me was the little girl who pointed to a black or Latino child (I can’t remember which now) and said, “Look mommy, a baby maid”. Aren’t societies with caste systems so terribly interesting?
This book constantly reminded me of Margaret Atwood – there was something about the voice, something about the themes, something about the tone. In fact, think of a non-fiction book written by Atwood and this might well be the book you would end up with.
This book isn’t nearly as bitter and twisted as this review might make it sound – I’m happy to admit that this is a subject which makes me quite bitter and twisted. Parts of the book were very moving and other bits very funny. She has a lovely way about her – I’m particularly fond of self-deprecation, I find it an incredibly attractive feature. I also find intelligent women nearly completely irresistible. That she is both of these had me falling helplessly (and perhaps even a little pathetically) in love.
Barbara produces a list of reasons why the US character would allow this mistreatment of such a large section of its citizenry to exist. All the usual suspects end up on the list – you know, US obsession with ‘success’ and the tendency to blame ‘failure’ on the individual and so on. But one of the things I kept thinking was the way American humour so often seems to come down to a degrading string of insults. Humiliation and insults do seem to play an interesting role in the American psyche and this had me wondering if this is part of the reason why tipping is so embraced there while here in Australia we have no idea what to do in ‘tipping situations’.
Before I get flamed – Australia is just as bad, one would only need to go to Bali for proof of that, and we also treat single mothers, Aboriginals, selected migrants and an endless string of others with utter contempt and loathing. I’m more interested in why – in a country that believes it is self-evident that all people are born equal – that such self-evident inequality of treatment could be so seemingly blindly tolerated.
But then, as Barbara points out – the fundamentalist Christians she has contact with also seem to exhibit the exact opposite of what one would take their core beliefs to be. What would Jesus do? From the behaviour of his followers one can only suspect he would do the complete opposite of the stuff he said in his Sermon on the Mount.
This is a wonderfully thought-provoking book and one that I enjoyed very much.
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I wanted to like this book. I thought the premise was fantastic. But overall, as someone who actually has lived on minimum wage (even supporting a child on minimum wage back when minimum wage was scary low), this book comes up short in several ways.
First of all, Barbara Ehrenreich has a horribly privileged, ivory tower view of how poor people must live. While she does talk to some people who are scraping by, she assumes the majority of poor people make the same crummy decisions as the few to...more
I wanted to like this book. I thought the premise was fantastic. But overall, as someone who actually has lived on minimum wage (even supporting a child on minimum wage back when minimum wage was scary low), this book comes up short in several ways.
First of all, Barbara Ehrenreich has a horribly privileged, ivory tower view of how poor people must live. While she does talk to some people who are scraping by, she assumes the majority of poor people make the same crummy decisions as the few to whom she spoke.
Throughout her anthropologic immersion into semi-poverty, she makes choices that the savvy poor (of whom there are many!) would just never make. She eats out instead of picking up beans and rice at the bulk section of the supermarket. She rents a pay-by-the-week hotel instead of asking around for a roommate. It's true that people do make these choices, but the only folks I know in my town who chose the roach motel route were also doing meth or had lousy rental references from too many parties or property damage.
I just think this could've been done much, much better, and it was disappointing. It's sort of like the movie Crash, which I also disliked intensely. A book (or movie) with a message shouldn't bash you over the head with the message. It doesn't need to be over the top to make a point, which can actually turn the reader (viewer) off enough that the message is lost....less
Read in August, 2008
"Nickel and Dimed" amounts to a good account of living a back-breaking existence while doing unskilled work. It offers a ground-up view of what it's like to apply for work at Wal-Mart, what sorts of neighbors you have when you live in a pay-by-the-week hotel, and the crap food you're forced to live on when you earn $6 an hour. Barbara Ehrenreich is a biology PhD who decided not to interview poor people or follow them around. Instead she decided it would be more interesting to be a low-...more
"Nickel and Dimed" amounts to a good account of living a back-breaking existence while doing unskilled work. It offers a ground-up view of what it's like to apply for work at Wal-Mart, what sorts of neighbors you have when you live in a pay-by-the-week hotel, and the crap food you're forced to live on when you earn $6 an hour. Barbara Ehrenreich is a biology PhD who decided not to interview poor people or follow them around. Instead she decided it would be more interesting to be a low-wage worker for awhile. It makes for some sensational copy and good anecdotes.
But it's not really a great piece of scholarship. Lo and behold, we are forced to conclude, minimum wage (circa 2000) is not a sustainable wage for any kind of living. Wages are too low and rents are too high. Was there another possible outcome?
Sure, we read the book to confirm our beliefs about low-wage work – that you just can't live on the wages, that a lot of these jobs are exhausting, that you're treated without dignity (both by middle management as well as the public-at-large), that you have to suffer through drug tests, that your first paycheck is often withheld, that the circumstances of the working poor don't improve along with the fortunes of the company, etc. ("The Maids charges $25 per person-hour. The company gets $25 and we get $6.65 for each hour we work?") But don't mistake this book for one that does hypothesis testing.
But what it makes for is a good personal journey. And it is read best as a narrative of her own feelings and impressions. On being a maid, she writes that "even convenience store clerks, who are $6-an-hour gals themselves, seem to look down on us." … "There's no pay for the half hour or so we spend in the office at the end of the day, sorting out the dirty rags before they're washed and refilling our cleaning fluid bottles." … "As far as I can figure, my coworkers' neediness – because that's what it is – stems from chronic deprivation."
And at Wal-Mart, employees can wear blue jeans on Fridays, but they have to pay $1 for the privilege.
But insofar as it's a personal journey, you also have to get through a lot of self-aggrandizement. Of the circumstances of her coworkers, she writes, "it strikes me, in my middle-class solipsism, that there is gross improvidence in some of these arrangements." Upon seeing a church called 'Deliverance', she writes, "Could there really be a whole congregation of people who have never heard of the James Dickey novel and subsequent movie?"
At the end of the book, she has answered her question, "how do these people get by on their pay?" with a resounding, "not well." And so, the main question she wants to know is why the working poor suffers its indignities, both individually and collectively. And she offers some good insight – that there are costs ("friction") to trying to find a new job or moving somewhere, that the working poor are often ill-informed, that corporate and management policies are designed with carrot-and-stick to urge and threaten the submission of its employees. And to the degree that it's universally true, it's fun to ponder.
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bookshelves:
economics-finance,
politics-us
Read in September, 2003
recommends it for:
Readers Interested in Learning More About the Working Poor in the U.S.
A recent conversation about homelessness has prompted me to consider the role that chance plays in our financial well-being. While it is certainly true that there are many factors within our control, from consumption habits to work ethic, I also believe that there are many factors outside of our control. We none of us can choose the family, community, or racial/ethnic/economic group into which we are born - all factors that strongly influence our chances of success. Likewise, we can neither pred...more
A recent conversation about homelessness has prompted me to consider the role that chance plays in our financial well-being. While it is certainly true that there are many factors within our control, from consumption habits to work ethic, I also believe that there are many factors outside of our control. We none of us can choose the family, community, or racial/ethnic/economic group into which we are born - all factors that strongly influence our chances of success. Likewise, we can neither predict, nor adequately prepare it would seem, for those unexpected disasters, whether medical or natural, which can destroy a lifetime of hard work in the blink of an eye.
These reflections reminded me in turn, of Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent book, Nickel and Dimed, in which the author attempts to discover how well she herself could live working unskilled, minimum-wage jobs. Divided into three main sections, the book follows Ehrenreich as she works as a waitress in Florida, a nursing-home aide and cleaning woman in Maine, and a Wal-mart associate in Minnesota. She quickly discovers that she is barely able to live adequately on what she earns, even when working two jobs, and concludes that the conservative mantra of advancement and betterment through hard work is largely an illusion for the working poor.
I have seen Ehrenreich criticized from both right and left, with reviewers accusing her of everything from advancing a socialist agenda to patronizing the working class with her "poverty tourism." As someone who thinks that socialized medicine and education would be of great benefit to our society, I am not unduly disturbed by the former. As for the latter, I am not sure just what it is people would have Ehrenreich do... If she were to live on the street, or temporarily "adopt" a few children, would her experience then seem more authentic? She acknowledges who she is, the privileges that she enjoys, and attempts to learn something about those less fortunate than herself. For that, I think she should be commended......less
recommends it for:
george w. bush
When this book came out, I was working in a busy bookstore in a fairly small town. We had a stack of them at the counter, and I read bits on my breaks. While I was glad to see a popular book addressing the problems of the working poor, I couldn't help but feel like she'd taken a vacation in my life and then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could only have achieved because she had already been in a position of privilege. Your average house cleaner, lacking an advanced ...more
When this book came out, I was working in a busy bookstore in a fairly small town. We had a stack of them at the counter, and I read bits on my breaks. While I was glad to see a popular book addressing the problems of the working poor, I couldn't help but feel like she'd taken a vacation in my life and then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could only have achieved because she had already been in a position of privilege. Your average house cleaner, lacking an advanced degree and a publishing advance to live on while writing, couldn't have written it. And while it's unarguably a Good Thing to have anyone speak up for the voiceless masses, did the low-paid workers of America get anything tangible out of it?
At any rate, I was standing at the counter one night when a well-dressed couple came in. The woman pointed at the book with excitement. "Look, honey, that's the book!" she said. "The one where she took all those terrible jobs! I heard she even worked as a WAITRESS!" Her tone expressed incredulous horror. Then, in unison, they both froze and ever so slowly looked up at me. I had on my best customer-service poker face, but they looked mortified and fled without buying anything.
I've had a lingering dislike for the book ever since....less
bookshelves:
airplane_reads
If you're looking for socialist propaganda - full of rhetorical tricks and short on evidence, then this is the book for you. If, however, you're hoping for an unbiased treatment of the life of the poor, a reasonable economic/policy analysis of poverty, or any sort of insight into American culture, then this book will be profoundly disappointing.
There are some interesting issues covered, such as wage inequalities and the plight of the urban poor, but that's really all I can say in its favo...more
If you're looking for socialist propaganda - full of rhetorical tricks and short on evidence, then this is the book for you. If, however, you're hoping for an unbiased treatment of the life of the poor, a reasonable economic/policy analysis of poverty, or any sort of insight into American culture, then this book will be profoundly disappointing.
There are some interesting issues covered, such as wage inequalities and the plight of the urban poor, but that's really all I can say in its favor. The author early on gives up any illusion of maintaining journalistic impartiality. She interprets all behavior of corporations, managers and employers in the least charitable way possible - often straining credibility. Further, she shows hidden disdain for the poor as well - insinuating that the only reason the poor might take pride in their work is because they've been duped by corporate interests, and denying the possibility that the poor might find any value in their jobs beyond their paychecks.
The author ignores economic realities and the subtleties inherent in an interdependent system like the American Economy and puts forth ludicrously simplistic arguments of what American policy towards the poor should be. It ranges from annoying to infuriating, and is almost certainly not worth the bother of reading....less
bookshelves:
gets-you-thinking,
history-class
Read in April, 2006
In her book Barbara Ehrenreich investigates just how working class people in the United States make ends meet. Ehrenreich goes displaces her self three times, in Key West, Maine and Minnesota, allows herself just over $1000, gets housing and a wage paying job, and tries to live as a wage worker for a month. The result is a sad illustration of what its like for millions of Americans who live at the poverty level, depending on wage...more
In her book Barbara Ehrenreich investigates just how working class people in the United States make ends meet. Ehrenreich goes displaces her self three times, in Key West, Maine and Minnesota, allows herself just over $1000, gets housing and a wage paying job, and tries to live as a wage worker for a month. The result is a sad illustration of what its like for millions of Americans who live at the poverty level, depending on wages.
Ehrenreich’s experiment does have circumstances that make her experience much more bearable than people who are really working for poverty-level wages. She admits that if things get too unbearable she can always dig out her credit card for emergency uses. She also just stays in her test locations for a month, half the time is spent finding work and living quarters. This gives the reader insight to just how difficult it is to find housing if you are poor, and a job that can pay for it. The people Ehrenreich meets while she is on the investigative trips also give the reader an insight into the human side of poverty, and how impossible it can be to overcome your circumstances. While Ehrenreich’s writing definitely has a political message, one cannot help wondering why in a country where everyone is created equal, why many living in poverty often don’t even know where they can get their next meal. Food- a basic human right.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America works. Ehrenreich’s message is clear: those working for poverty-level wages in this country are stuck in a vicious cycle that does not allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, basic luxuries that the rest of the United States takes for granted- health care, food, sleep- are not givens for millions of Americans stuck in this cycle.
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In this book, the author moves to three different cities, pretends to be a homemaker re-entering the work force, and tries to survive on minimum wage jobs. It's not easy. She works as a waitress, at a nursing home, as a cleaning lady, and at Walmart. She lives in motel rooms and eats fast food when she has no where to cook.
I really enjoyed this book, partially because it was like a serious flashback to my own life. I went with Dale to South Carolina for 4 months in the fall of, I don't know...more
In this book, the author moves to three different cities, pretends to be a homemaker re-entering the work force, and tries to survive on minimum wage jobs. It's not easy. She works as a waitress, at a nursing home, as a cleaning lady, and at Walmart. She lives in motel rooms and eats fast food when she has no where to cook.
I really enjoyed this book, partially because it was like a serious flashback to my own life. I went with Dale to South Carolina for 4 months in the fall of, I don't know, probably 2005, when he had a military school to attend. We lived in a hotel room the entire time. I had my college degree, but due to the brevity of our residency, I applied for low end jobs (including Walmart, a process she describes) and worked a couple - one as a cleaning lady, just like in this book - and got to know a cleaning woman at our hotel very well. (She helped me hide my cat in my room from management. :-))
That fall, I was working for pennies, cleaning people's pee off of the walls, and sweeping up dead cockroaches from behind their toilets. The managers at the apartment complexes where I cleaned treated me a certain way. They seemed to look down on me, the lowly cleaning lady. It didn't really bother me. I was pretty sure I was way better than them in my head.
A mere six months later I was back in Utah, working a high end sales job that I kind of accidentally plopped into. It turned out to be a perfect fit for me, and I began making obscene amounts of money. (Seriously, obscene, like more than brain surgeons get paid.)
Side note: I still can't believe they paid me as much as they did because, 1. I just sat and played games on my cell phone all day while talking on the phone to clients, and 2. I so would have stayed and done the same job for $75,000 a year. Or $50,000. Or less. Anything was a big step up for
a girl who was a cleaning lady 2 months earlier!
Anyways, after two years at that job, being rewarded, respected, and getting plaques on the wall in honor of moi, I turned in my high six figure income to be a stay at home mom. Now I have no income, no awards, no high bonuses, and nothing to show for my work other than the silliest monkey of a child on earth. (Which is way better compensation, anyways.)
I have never thought so much about my experience of going from low wage, to high wage, to no wage in such a short period of time before. I think I should write a book about it. I have so much to say!
Anyways, I enjoyed almost the whole book here, until the end where the author did her evaluation about how we should become a socialist country. Okay, so she didn't exactly say that, but I bet she is voting for Barak Obama, if you know what I mean.
Here is why I think she was a little overdramatic:
1. Your first few weeks at a job are always the toughest. I remember that from the cleaning job, the day I was given a hideously dirty 3 bedroom to clean. I almost sat on the floor and cried, realizing that just scrubbing the floor in the utility closet could take hours alone, and I was paid per apartment, not hourly. But I also remember the first couple months of my sales job being super stressful, in a different way. I came home one evening and crumpled to the floor of my pantry, sobbing. I just could only handle the pressure of the job so long before I lost it. You get used to your jobs after awhile though, and it doesn't phase you anymore. It happens no matter what, I think, you just can't expect it to happen in the first few weeks, or even months.
2. You always start at the very lowest rung on the ladder of success. It sucks, because everyone steps on your head and drops stuff on you. But typically, if you work hard, you will move UP that ladder and get to step on other people instead. Stepping on people is better than being stepped on. You just have to stick around more than a few weeks to get that opportunity.
3. You can be happy in any job. It's all attitude! For reals. I have worked sucky jobs. SUCKY SUCKY SUCKY jobs. And I was happy, generally.
One other comment section: I think I forgot to put this somewhere in my review, but I don't remember where I was going to say it. So it's just an end note now:
I got to know the cleaning ladies at the hotel I lived in. Particularly, I became friends with a black lady named Delilah Green. She helped me keep my adopted kitten Romeo (now a grown up cat) under wraps from the evil management who banned pets in the room. She had one grown daughter and a granddaughter who lived in Florida. She and her boyfriend and some of his family shared an apartment across town, and she'd ride the bus in. Occasionally I would give her a ride home when she missed the bus, and I got to see where she lived. She'd been a drug addict for years, until she sobered up and found Jesus about two years prior. She was working hard, and working her way back into a real life. Other soldiers from Dale's class didn't like her, and swore she
was stealing their beer from their fridges. It ticked me off. They were drunk at 3 AM enough for me to be pretty well aware of who was drinking their alcohol.
Anyways, whenever I read about these poor working class blue collar women, I picture my friend Delilah. Granted, she had a lot to learn. I gave her a $50 tip and she told me that she used it to buy food and beer for her old druggie friend who had just got out of jail. She was thrilled to be able to help someone, but I was hoping not to have my tip go to buy a prison reject alcohol. My point is, the people who are in poverty often have a reason. They are in their own way. Maybe they use drugs, or they sleep with lots of different men, unprotected, and not married to any of them. Surprise, they get four kids with no dads to help support them. I KNOW this is not the case with every welfare recipient or low wage worker, but often there is blame they need to shoulder. I liked that Delilah took responsibility for what had happened to her, and was grateful for a second chance.
I would really like to read a book that tells the other side of this argument, not just her socialist-esque opinion. It has me thinking a lot.
PS. Finally, I would like to say the following: there were approximately 579 other things that I read in this book that made me think, "Oh wow - I totally want to comment on that in my review on goodreads.com". This was a very brief (okay, actually it is super long and only my sister will probably read the whole thing, but brief in comparison to what I was THINKING about), and random (because it's what popped into my head while I was typing tonight) discussion of my feelings on this book. Does anyone want to join a book club and read this book then discuss it with me? Please please please? For reals, I just had to stop typing because my review got too long, but this is a fascinating topic, and very interesting book that you can't put down.
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bookshelves:
nitty-and-dowright-gritty
I'm going to step on some toes here and I apologize if I do. I AM one of the working poor that she talks about here and I DO believe in pulling myself up and making a better life for myself. But what I want to know is this. Unless you have been where I am, how can you comment? How can you also call her a bleeding heart? Is this a country for the haves only? And the have nots just have not? uhh uhh, I just don't understand. We got an election coming up and some folks are fussing about this countr...more
I'm going to step on some toes here and I apologize if I do. I AM one of the working poor that she talks about here and I DO believe in pulling myself up and making a better life for myself. But what I want to know is this. Unless you have been where I am, how can you comment? How can you also call her a bleeding heart? Is this a country for the haves only? And the have nots just have not? uhh uhh, I just don't understand. We got an election coming up and some folks are fussing about this country even entertaining about health care for EVERY American. So let me ask again, this country is not for the free and brave but for those who just have it?
Personally, I found the book factual to a point. On what I make, unless the housing is subsidized, I cannot live there. plain and simple. does that make me proud to say? no, just realistic. You cannot make a living, pay bills and rent and eat on less than $1500 a month much less $1000, unless you really got a little someone to help you here. Her staying in a place didn't seem that realistic to me, although she did make some allowances. but then she had to because after all, you just cannot do it on a minimum wage salary unless you have a roomie or man or both. I have read in Donald Trump and Robert Kiyoski's book that the middle class in this country is shrinking and that we as a people should either stay poor, and that is food for serious thought....less
Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
everyone
I picked this up and read it in one day. I also checked the stats for 2007 since the copyright for this was 2001. It really made my blood boil at times and I have "been there and done that" as an employee. I am currently looking for work and even with a B.A., good paying jobs with benefits are impossible to find. Everyone who reads this will hopefully understand the "working poor" and treat them better.
Ehrenreich turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's b...more
I picked this up and read it in one day. I also checked the stats for 2007 since the copyright for this was 2001. It really made my blood boil at times and I have "been there and done that" as an employee. I am currently looking for work and even with a B.A., good paying jobs with benefits are impossible to find. Everyone who reads this will hopefully understand the "working poor" and treat them better.
Ehrenreich turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's bottom rung. Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, she left behind her middle class life as a journalist except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious "personality tests"; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they're vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich's income barely covered her month's expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times.
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
crybabies, entitlement wonks, NE1 who is never worked
WAA, WAAAA, WAAAAAAA...boo hooooo
What was the publisher thinking? Letting a biology Ph.d write an economics book. There are so many economic inaccuracies in this book they are too numerous to mention. The most important theory she mangles is that she thinks wages she should be raised even if there are enough employees to hire at piss-poor wages. She believes that (she eludes to it, but never makes the point clearly) it is the employers responsibility to provide enough wage to make sure ev...more
WAA, WAAAA, WAAAAAAA...boo hooooo
What was the publisher thinking? Letting a biology Ph.d write an economics book. There are so many economic inaccuracies in this book they are too numerous to mention. The most important theory she mangles is that she thinks wages she should be raised even if there are enough employees to hire at piss-poor wages. She believes that (she eludes to it, but never makes the point clearly) it is the employers responsibility to provide enough wage to make sure everyone is adaquately housed and has non-worker's comp health care...and, if really considerate of his workers, a car.
Well, what kind of person gets hired for jobs that are low-paying. Ones who need a job! What kind of person gets hired for jobs that are higher paying...ones who have prepared for those jobs. It's kinda like Social Security. It was never set up so peopl 
