Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven dollars an hour. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever job she was offered, from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America.
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Amazon Review
Essayist and cultural critic, now author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialised in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity and verve.
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.
Review
'A superb book' -- Decca Aitkenhead, Guardian
'An extraordinary Orwellian testimony to how tough American working life is for the bottom 20 per cent' -- Will Hutton
'An extraordinary achievement...surely one of the most gripping political books ever written' -- Observer
'Brilliant, gripping and extraordinarily timely, this is a book about collective blindness that will change the way you see' -- Naomi Klein
'This book is about the kinds of relationships we have with other human beings...a book that must be read' -- Geoff Dyer, Independent on Sunday
'This is a book about collective blindness that will change the way you see' -- Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
'We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor.' -- New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
'An extraordinary Orwellian testimony to how tough American working life is for the bottom 20 per cent' -- Will Hutton
'An extraordinary achievement...surely one of the most gripping political books ever written' -- Observer
'Brilliant, gripping and extraordinarily timely, this is a book about collective blindness that will change the way you see' -- Naomi Klein
'This book is about the kinds of relationships we have with other human beings...a book that must be read' -- Geoff Dyer, Independent on Sunday
'This is a book about collective blindness that will change the way you see' -- Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
'We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor.' -- New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Nickel and Dimed is a description of the author's temporary life at or below the poverty line in different jobs in 3 US cities. The book is actually quite short but packs in a fair amount of description, background facts and personality.
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.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you have read, and liked, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London then this is a book for you. The author writes engagingly and informatively on what it is like to part of America's "working poor" and, in the process, punctures a number of middle-class prescriptions for, and misconceptions about, the poor. Why do the poor eat junk food? Because they don't have the facilities - kitchen, pots, cooker - to make lentil soup. Why do the poor live in hotel rooms paying $60 per night? Because they don't have the money for the deposit on the rent of an apartment. Housing always emerges as the single biggest obstacle in the lives of low-paid employees. Did you know that many low-paid employees ($6-$7 per hour) live in their cars and vans? That a perk of a waitress' job with a hotel was permission to park her van-cum-home in the hotel car park? This book is in the best tradition of writing with a social conscience -it does not beatify the poor, nor does it regard them as unter-menschen. Indeed, the messsage that I, surrounded by my bourgeois comforts, took away was: "There but for the grace of God.." If you are not averse to this genre, then you should read this book - it is among the best of this type of writing.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover as an entry-level worker to determine whether or not she can make it on the wages paid to the majority of American employees. She freely admits that she is only dipping a toe into the experience - she will not be homeless, she will have a vehicle, and of course she knows that at the end of the month she will be able to go back to her regular life. The goal is to see if she can earn enough from her various jobs (a waitress, a maid and a clerk in a department store, respectively) to feed herself, house herself and save enough money for the next month's rent. She is healthy and single with no dependent children, and has no chemical dependency issues weighing her down, and even with these advantages, and in a job market that was plentiful compared to the current one, she finds that she is unable to manage it.
I am unable to call this book eye-opening, because I know just how difficult it is to make ends meet, and I was working in what is rather condescendingly referred to as the "pink collar" sector. Even with my "middle-class" earnings, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from being in real financial trouble, and I did NOT live lavishly by any stretch of the imagination. It is no surprise to me at all that $6-8.00 per hour is not enough to keep body and soul together. Especially in America, where necessities of life (health care, food, housing) are, for some people, luxuries, this is a frustrating situation.
What Ehrenreich does is open her own eyes to the drudgery and difficulty of daily life in this grind. She has no pat answers for solving the deeply-entrenched problems that the working poor face; she is only able to shed a light on them. What emerges in her occasionally witty, always gritty prose is confirmation of what I experienced as a worker - even on the somewhat higher rung that I occupied; if you're not one of the top 2%, you're invisible and expendable. It's this attitude that helped me make my decision to leave the United States for more civilized climes, and I have never regretted that choice.
I am unable to call this book eye-opening, because I know just how difficult it is to make ends meet, and I was working in what is rather condescendingly referred to as the "pink collar" sector. Even with my "middle-class" earnings, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from being in real financial trouble, and I did NOT live lavishly by any stretch of the imagination. It is no surprise to me at all that $6-8.00 per hour is not enough to keep body and soul together. Especially in America, where necessities of life (health care, food, housing) are, for some people, luxuries, this is a frustrating situation.
What Ehrenreich does is open her own eyes to the drudgery and difficulty of daily life in this grind. She has no pat answers for solving the deeply-entrenched problems that the working poor face; she is only able to shed a light on them. What emerges in her occasionally witty, always gritty prose is confirmation of what I experienced as a worker - even on the somewhat higher rung that I occupied; if you're not one of the top 2%, you're invisible and expendable. It's this attitude that helped me make my decision to leave the United States for more civilized climes, and I have never regretted that choice.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A shocking document
Ehrenreich's writing is fluid and catching, letting every reader to reflect on modern working conditions in the US
It is essential to notice her capability to describe in... Read more
It is essential to notice her capability to describe in... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Markos Thomadakis
5.0 out of 5 stars
Depressing But Importand Read
Both England and America have a phenomena know as the working poor, these are people that work one or more jobs yet still cannot make ends meet. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Charles
5.0 out of 5 stars
Down but not yet out
This book is full of interesting observations about the underbelly of working America that perhaps we in Britain do not even imagine exists. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Mr. Cwp Keyes
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant and view changing read
Such an eyenopening read, read this for research into the equality element of my employment law module but would have read it anyway. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Bobx
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why I bought and read this book
I read on BookBrowse that Nickel and Dimed was on the list of the most "banned books" this year. I was curious to see why. Read more
Published on 14 May 2011 by BarnaMarg
5.0 out of 5 stars
Small Change...
Barbara Ehrenreich has written a classic account of life in America's underclass, the people who are all around us, whose lives are rarely considered by the ones to whom they... Read more
Published on 26 Feb 2011 by John P. Jones III
3.0 out of 5 stars
Prepare to enter a world that you'll thanks your lucky stars isn't...
A non-fiction work of an American journalist's attempts to live on minimum wages in various parts of the USA (yeah I know you know that already). First person, present tense. Read more
Published on 30 Aug 2009 by Build another bookcase
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside experience of the agony of minimum wage
The most unsettling aspect of Barbara Ehrenreich's eye-opening foray into the world of the working poor is that the situation hasn't improved. In fact, it's gotten worse. The U.S. Read more
Published on 29 Sep 2008 by Rolf Dobelli
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and well researched
I found this book totally fascinating. It's basically the first hand experience of a middle class journalist who goes undercover to see if she can survive living on the minimum... Read more
Published on 28 July 2008 by Zara
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy read on worthwhile subject.
Giving up a comfortable life to research on the job, her only income her wages, sampling motel living with kitchen facilities comprising the local 7-11 microwave. Read more
Published on 15 Feb 2008 by MYB74
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