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Amazon.co.uk Review
With some 12 million women being pushed into the labour market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at six to seven USD an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do; she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job and tried to make ends meet.
As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl", trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at USD 675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaner and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as, "Some people work better when they’re a little bit high." In Minnesota she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behaviour for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.
So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the people who brought us welfare reform?" No, even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month’s rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week and still almost ends up in a shelter.
As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humour and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are cheap in comparison to the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless.
With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian
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Customer Reviews
I have read some harsh criticisms of the book. However, the author was aware of many of these problems and she does not hide her faults. She is only 'visiting' the world of the poor, she does write more about herself than those she meets and she does make some decisions that, in some cases, make her ordeal needlessly worse whilst others make it easier.
Accept her failings as she does, and read a book that says a lot about US society and has many points that are transferable to the UK.
"I grew up hearing over and over ... 'Work hard and you'll get ahead' ... No one ever said that you could work hard - harder than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever down into poverty and debt." - Barbara Ehrenreich
If you're a middle or upper-income reader, then NICKEL AND DIMED is a vicarious journey to the other side of the wage earning tracks. Author Barbara Ehrenreich describes her 2-year self-immersion in several minimum-wage jobs for the purpose of writing this book. She mostly concentrates on three: waiting tables in Florida at a restaurant belonging to a nationally popular chain, e.g. Denny's, cleaning homes in Maine with The Maids, and sorting clothes in Minnesota on the sales floor of that favorite media whipping boy, Wal-Mart.
Indeed, a good portion of Barbara's narrative, rightly or wrongly, sounds like a Wal-Mart bash.
NICKEL AND DIMED is a lucid, eye-opening, and sympathetic account of the plight facing those millions that earn $7-$9/hour, or less, and still find themselves crushed by inflation and shrinkage of the nation-wide availability of affordable housing. According to Ehrenreich, it's the latter, and not the cost of food, and which is ironically driven by an increase in prosperity for the middle and upper classes, that's driving the working poor to greater levels of desperation. In the last paragraph of the book, the author predicts social revolution.
A criticism of Barbara's approach might be that it was an artificial construct inasmuch as she always had the safety net of her middle-class "real life" to fall back on when in extremis - that she never had to truly experience the outer edges of deprivation and resigned hopelessness. However, the alternative to her book would be one actually written by a minimum-wage earner - and which of those has the time and access to a publisher. No, I give Ehrenreich due kudos for her research and its result.
After reading NICKEL AND DIMED, I'll not view the clothing department of my favorite consumer superstore in the same way ever again, I'll be tempted to tip my restaurant server 20% instead of the minimum 15%, and I'll be more generous to our independent housecleaner at Christmas. Being an hourly employee myself, albeit a well-compensated one, I'm also reminded of the sobering truth:
"... when you start selling your time by the hour ... what you're actually selling is your life."
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