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

Ehrenreich is a very gifted writer, especially good at the penetrating comment, for example her observation of small white crosses lining the roadside to signify "particularly effective head on collisions."

Her pro-union sympathies come out in her bias for comparing what the employee gets with what the employer is charging to the customer. The Maid gets $6.45/hour, but the franchise owner bills her out at $25/hr. While making critical comments about this, Ehrenreich at the same time notes that the Maid place provides cars, job assignments, cleaning kits, and video training to each employee. Don't forget worker's comp. and personal bonding to allow work in people's homes. Isn't there a cost to these things? But her assignment is not to be a franchise owner for a month, so it's just not her focus.

Staying within her segment of the worker community, she points out that the food store wanted her to give a urine sample with her application, and that more than 80% of U.S. employers now require that. While critical of this, again, she does not point out the destruction that can be caused to any size business by drug-dealing or drug-taking employees, especially when they steal from employers or customers of those employers to support their expensive habits, which the poor really have no way of affording for long.

But let's not make a business-perspecitve counterpoint for everything in this book. It stands on its own and it sends an important message that many people who are desperately poor only appear to be making it, and use the camouflage of their jobs to hide it. This seems to put an even heavier burden on the employers who provide those jobs, and the customers who pay for them, to treat these people fairly. One also gets the sense that Ehrenreich herself experienced a personal wake up call as a result of this project, and that she may not in the future sit in New York restaurants nibbling expensive salads with Lewis Lapham without feeling a little more grateful for the hands that made it, or at least a little more sardonic when thinking back to the scene in this book with the chef in the fmaily restaurant whipping frozen steaks at the wall to thaw them out as quickly as possible.

Her suggestion that economists and welfare reformers actually meet the people who "cook their hash browns and clean their rooms" during their vacations is a sound one. Now I'm looking forward to her book about spending a month with an accountant, an owner of a small HVAC installation company, and a high school principal, whose latent virtues can also be similarly mined.


Nickel and Dimed by Ehrenreich   May 1, 2001
 11 out of 14 found this review helpful

I have over 20 years experience working with poor people in a number of different settings. This is the very best book that I have read in recent years on the topic of the working poor. It is a very quick read--and should be required of every legislator who believes welfare reform or welfare to work is a humane answer to our human obligations.


the bald truth about wage slavery   April 30, 2001
 34 out of 41 found this review helpful

Barbara Ehrenreich in her latest work again sustains her position as one of the United States most effective social commentators. This is a work which calls upon Americans to recognize their tacit exploitation of a substantial number of their seemingly invisible fellow citizens who are trapped in poverty by limited wage jobs.

Ehrenreich's academic background comes through as she proves an excellent teacher. She presents the factual statistics at the end of the book in its conclusion where the reader more likely to appreciate and absorb their meaning after having read anecdotes from the reality they represent. Her brilliant (and somewhat daunting) willingness to experience this gruelling existence in various mileus adds credibility to the outrage which she expresses.

This should be required reading for most Americans in order to instill some sense of social consciousness and demand for justice. As Ehrenreich eloquently states, we should be ashamed, not guilty, as a society for the unconscionable circumstances in which so many in this rich nation are hopelessly trapped.


A must read for anyone who's ever hired a maid   April 22, 2001
 17 out of 19 found this review helpful

It looks like this book hasn't received the attention it deserves--which is too bad. This is a real eye-opener...an exploration of the lives of America's working poor. Instead of just talking about minimum wagers--Ehrenreich joins their ranks, working "undercover" as a waitress, housecleaner, nursing home attendant, and Wal-Mart "associate." Her disturbing findings: she must hold down at least two jobs, even in this "prosperous" economy, in order to barely get by. (Actually, she earns over minimum-wage and still struggles--a fact that should alert people that the minimum wage is not, in fact, a living wage.)Ehrenreich is funny, honest, and really human. I read part of the book as first published in Harper's, and the rest of it in one sitting.