Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

“If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you,”

In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything.

Maybe, it occurs to me, I’m getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black.

Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society.

The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it’s easy for a fast-food worker or nurse’s aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn’t been invited to the party.

the sorcerer’s apprentice.

What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling

your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.

Each job presents a self-contained social world, with its own personalities, hierarchy, customs, and standards.

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 rents too high.

When the market fails to distribute some vital commodity, such as housing, to all who require it, the usual liberal-to-moderate expectation

The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny

and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”