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From the perspective of a tourist Jan 16, 2007 (77 of 90 found this helpful)
Nickeled and Dimed has an interesting premise: an upper middle class woman tries to live on wages of an unskilled jobs in three different locations in the US. Here Ehrenreich describes her experiences doing just that and tries to relate these experiences to a larger frame of reference by laying out statistics about the US.
From having done this and that over the summers while in college and having spent the past year earning 3.85/hour plus room and board I can sort of compare my experiences in accessing Ehrenreich's book. Two things that made Ehrenreich's experiences harder than they probably would be for a person who was living the life that she was trying to visit are that she moved around frequently and she wasn't as frugal a shopper as she could have been. The moving around means that she was always starting fresh. From my experience after about 2 months in a city I know where to go for this and that and my expenses drop. Also she wasn't the most frugal person. When she had to get khaki pants on short notice for a waitressing job, she spent 40$ on pants with a stain from a discount store. In Florida (the same state) at about the same time I had to get khaki pants on short notice and found them for 15$. I'm kind if fat and so there was less of a selection for me than for someone in a more common size. I doubt that normal people in such jobs would spend 40$ on pants. 15$ felt like alot to me. From Ehrenreich's description she didn't bat an eye at 40$
Ehrenrich's descriptions of co-worker's plights are more realistic. While it isn't so hard to get by at poverty level (unless you get sick like missing work sick) I have trouble imagining how to raise a family on minimum wage. Descriptions of co-workers whose food budget was tiny are common. I kind of wonder how these people felt about being quizzed. I feel that there was too much focus on rent and food. These are big expenses but they are predictable. Once one finds a way to make ends meet that's stable at least.
One aspect of being poor that I feel was neglected was the lack of medical care. Insurance coverage is expensive and if it doesn't come with the job then that is a big budgeting item. Also jobs without benefits are the one that pay less. Also the difficulty in getting sit down work if one gets injured is a huge issue. Ehrenreich kind of touches on these with statistics and concern for a co-worker with a sprained ankle respectively, but she spends most of her time discussing how the nations poor can't buy food or make rent and trying to make poverty an immediate life or death issue. For me poverty is about not having a safety net.
When I was working for 3.85 and room and board (no benefits at all) I had a co-worker with higher pay use this book to explain how easy I had it. At the time I was trying to scrape together enough for a dental visit and pay some work related expenses. (I had switched jobs and underestimated the fees for work related training and equipment.) She was angry that I was having trouble getting cash together because that reflected badly on the company. Which brings me to a point: Everyday you are in contact with someone who is living at poverty level. Because they shower and know how to get by you may not realize this. The starving limping people Ehrenreich describes aren't common, but that shouldn't be used to undercut the problems faced by poor people who are not in an emergency state right now. It seems to me that many of the people I know who have read this book have strange ideas about the poor to begin with. So if you haven't been poor for a while then don't make this your only source for info about it.
I reccommend Nikeled and Dimed, but take it with a grain of salt. Ehrenreich is a tourist of poverty and has a shallow impression not a deep understanding of the issues.
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Everyone should read this. Mar 14, 2006 (46 of 59 found this helpful)
It should be noted that this book is not, nor does it claim to be, a definitive and expansive report on the plight of the working poor. It functions as a personal memoir and a slice-of-life, an undercover view of a life that is intentionally made invisible to most members of the middle-to-upper classes.
And the view it offers is harrowing.
Ehrenreich allows herself a safety net not available to many of the places she lives among, including a car and a way out if things become threatening to her basic safety. That despite these allowances she finds it difficult to survive causes one to truly wonder about those who, for example, have to rely on systems of public transportation.
Her co-workers live in hotels and trailers, unable to make the first and last month plus deposit that would allow them to move into more cost-efficient, safe, and comfortable housing on their hand-to-mouth wages. This effects everything else in their lives: how close they are able to live to their workplaces is dictated by economy, which in turn effects the time and cost of their commute and how much sleep they can often expect to get in a night. The lack of a stove or refrigerator means they lack nutritious food and are forced to live on overpriced fast foods and processed foods, often on the edge of starvation.
Yes, Ehrenreich is an educated liberal. No, she doesn't miraculously come up with easy solutions. Given the material, she shouldn't have to apologize to anyone with a conservative bias for either of these facts. The information she gives has not been covered at this level and in this detail anywhere else, and that alone is commendable. "Nickel & Dimed" allows the realities of the invisible people who handle our food, clean our homes, and ring up our purchases to be brought to the attention of those who might want to look away.
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Disappointing with few insights Aug 28, 2008 (29 of 38 found this helpful)
The only reason I gave two stars to this book is because at least Ehrenreich tried to write about an important topic. But her execution falls well below the mark, and the book turns out to be more about a journalist pretending to be a low-income worker than about the lives of the low-income workers she's supposedly studying. It is, by turns, whiny, preachy, self-righteous, facile, and annoying -- much more often than it's insightful, which it is maybe a handful of times (if that) throughout the book. (The footnotes were actually among the most informative parts.) At times she even seems to be making fun of the workers with whom she briefly shared her life. And the "experiment" is flawed from the start, as the author herself more or less acknowledges, in that someone who knows that she can return to her real life any time is very different from someone who works for $7 an hour and has no choice. One also has to question the ethics of a decision to take a job that someone else really needs. Finally, as the book progresses, the author makes some bumbling attempts at humor that just aren't funny -- it feels like the writing of someone who thinks she's being clever but the jokes are flat or obvious, or someone who utters banalities as if they were profound insights. (Please, leave satire to the satirists.) One line in the book stood out for me as a reflection of everything that is wrong with it, and it was hard for me to keep reading after that. In the chapter on her experience in Maine, Ehrenreich asks the reader, "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-days-plus a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" Well, DUH. As my partner pointed out, that sounds like the kind of idiotic "wisdom" that might show up on Carrie Bradshaw's computer in "Sex in the City."
So Ehrenreich gets some points for effort and for "humping away" at these jobs for as long as she did, I suppose, but as far as offering any real insights into or solutions for the lives of the working poor, this book leaves much to be desired. In the end, it's a book about Barbara Ehrenreich.
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A great example showing how the wealthy in the U.S. have no idea Aug 8, 2009 (4 of 4 found this helpful)
Ehrenreich tries to live like the working poor do in the United States - and in some respects, she does so. She lives in cheap motels, works jobs for barely over minimum wage, and understands the headaches and plights of her coworkers. On the other hand, she does it in a halfway manner - starting out with a fund of money, always having access to a car, purchasing items far out of her price range, and so on.
From my perspective, the book best illustrates how a wealthy white woman can make it somewhat as a poor white woman, but does not fully engage and understand the plight of people who have to live it. She buys expensive belts, clothes, and justifies spending money on things that most poor just wouldn't do. I realize these habits are almost hardwired into our consumer culture - but the criticisms are right - she did a lot of the sabotaging of herself. However, that doesn't reduce the challenges in aggregating the capital to move into a real apartment, at affordable rates, that most poor just can't muster.
Of particular interest to me are the health concerns faced by the poor - from lack of care, to woefully inadequate nutrition (empty calories from convenience stores and overpriced prepared grocery store food), to the rigors of 8-16 hours of manual labor. Barbara, as a fit woman, well fed and exercised throughout the years, struggles after a month - how do people who do it full time for decades manage?
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Revisit, Rehash, Reevaluate Mar 19, 2009 (11 of 14 found this helpful)
When I first read Barbara Ehrenreich's account of trying to live off minimum-wage and low-paying jobs in college, I was outraged. Clearly my moral high horse has shrunk a bit. I revisited the book after watching a recent interview Ms. Ehrenreich did with John Stossel (who, in my opinion, can sometimes grandstand a bit himself) in which she seemed downright flippant about allegations that she was her own worst enemy, and only through self-sabotage did she fail. Well, I've got to say, Stossel had a point. Reading the book as my adult-self, with a fresh eye, and in the midst of an economic downturn, my opinion changed. In many cases, she did sabotage herself, illustrated by moving all of the time (which means deposits, first and last month, etc), staying in a motel(!), and buying $40 pants. Obviously, there is a way to get by on the wages Ehrenreich was making, lots of people do it, but the key is that Ehrenreich simply lacked the tools to make it happen. I could go to the store right now and purchase a pair of unstained, presentable pants for under $10, but that's because I have the know-how to make that happen -- a wealth of knowledge that comes with an empty bank account. Those topics weren't really explored. Perhaps, she could have gone in depth about the folks who worked along side her, who don't get to go back to what one assumes is Ehrenreich's financially secure lifestyle. So while the lifestyle Ehrenreich was temporarily living might not be ideal for anyone, it certainly is a means to an end -- an end in which gaining job skills, being frugal, saving, and moving up the corporate ladder (yes, even Wal-Mart's) is possible if you make it a priority.