Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Picador Modern Classics)
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Review : Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf. A publishing phenomenon when first published, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is a revelatory undercover investigation into life and survival in low-wage America, an increasingly urgent topic that continues to resonate. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job―any job―can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,†that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you in to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity―a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity†looks from the bottom. You will never see anything―from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal―in quite the same way again. Read more
Review : Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich relates her experiences on the work force in three different states and she opens a clear window onto the struggles of the restaurant, motel workers and store clerks. She works undercover and leaves temporarily the comforts of a life as a journalist and author to join the work force. She relates the financial woes that she lived, and of those fellow workers who provide the essential services that the rest of society enjoys. Except for the last chapter that is a scholarly and thoughtful evaluation of her experiences, the book reads like a diary and is written with passion in which she describes what at times seems a certain sense of self-deprecation and helplessness of the workers before their employers who remain so often insensitive to their daily needs. Ehrenreigh also expresses a unique empathy for the daily battles that she had to endured like those of underpaid and exploited fellow workers whom she encounters along the way. A must read.
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