Book Review: Nickel and Dimed

Book: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Edition: Paperback

Description:

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategems for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.



Rating: 1 star

Review:

I don't know what to make of Nickel and Dimed because it had a good premise of the author trying to understand how someone could try to make a living with a low wage job by undergoing an experiment. For three months she was going to try to live and work in three different cities. However, the thing is, this felt like it was nothing more than a project the author created. Unfortunately for many people, this is their life and they are trying their best to stay afloat in a world that seems designed to drown them while all she was doing was finding material for a book.

She began this experiment in Key West, Florida where she had three different jobs. The first job was as a waitress at a discount hotel chain, she eventually quit. Her second job was as a maid and a third as another waitress which she became so overwhelmed she walked off the job. She next traveled to Portland, Maine, where she worked during the week as a maid for a cleaning service while also working at a living facility serving food to residents in the Alzheimer's ward on the weekend. Her last location was in Minnesota in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul) area where she found work at a Wal-Mart.

Throughout the book, the author had a superior tone (I noticed that she constantly said how educated she is) as well as I found her to be condescending, judgmental, pretentious and racists. She ruled out places like New York City and Los Angeles for her experiment because according to her the working class in those cities are mainly people of color and a white woman with an unaccented English would look in her words "desperate or weird". It's unbelievable that the author actually believed she would stick out as if there were no white people who would be seeking low-wage jobs in those big cities. Yet she chose Maine according to her for its whiteness and it made it easy for her as she put it to infiltrate the low-wage workforce. I don't know why she seems to think that only certain people are working low income jobs and that she would stick out if she applied for jobs in certain cities. There are countless other comments that show how rude and mean she can be.

I found it annoying that after she quit her job at the cleaning service she made a point of telling the other maids that this wasn't her real life and that she was a writer and was writing about how someone can survive on a low-wage job. It was like she wanted to get some kind of surprise out of her former co-workers but they were neither impressed or envious about her project or her real life. They were too busy trying to make a living while she's trying out their lives as an experiment.

After reading this, it doesn't feel like the author truly grasped the meaning of her project because when her jobs and living situation started to become unbearable, she would quit or move to a more desirable housing. Which is not something someone who is working poor can so easily do. With all the rules and stipulations she applied to this experiment, I wonder why she even did it in the first place. It certainly wasn't to get a better understanding of the lives of others because at times she belittled the people she was supposed to be observing and working alongside throughout this book.

I wish she had fully committed to this experiment because as one of her stipulations she always made a point of having a car because she figured a story about her having to wait for buses would not make for an interesting read. I don't know why she thought that because including this experience would have made the situation more real with her having to actually experience what some people may have to go through in order to get to work.

This really could have been a more insightful and in-depth book instead of being this shallow take on the plight of the working poor. I feel like she missed an opportunity to use her position as a writer to elevate the voices of low income workers and give them a chance to speak about their lives. I thought this book would be an interesting read because of the premise that the author was going to look into how people are trying to make a living on low-wage jobs. I thought she would look deeper into the inequalities of the rich and the poor and how businesses seem to purposely offer low wages while the cost of living continues to go up.

However, this was not a complete self-serving book, the author does make a point of stating it doesn't matter how hard someone works, there are quite a few obstacles and deterrents to making a living with a low-wage job. Many companies offering low wages are not trying to better the lives of their employees because all they seem to care about is seeing how much money they can make instead.