I passed on buying this book for years because I figured I already knew what Ehrenreich would say. I was mostly right, but it was still a decent read.

Ehrenreich, a highly educated and well-to-do professional writer, here undertakes a social experiment of sorts spending a several months working various unskilled jobs and tries to get by living on the income she earns. She works as a waitress, as a maid, in a retirement home, and at Wal-mart, and reports on her experiences.

Perhaps I had already read too much about this book, or maybe I’ve just had more experience with the working poor than Ehrenreich, but I don’t feel that I learned very much. However, the story is still engaging and well told—she is a “professional writer” after all. Part of the entertainment value of the book is seeing how surprised she seems to be about how the working class lives, and what entry-level work actually involves. She apparently hadn’t spent much time outside her upper middle-class circles and clearly learned a lot more from her experiment than most people would have. I doubt there are very many other Americans who would regard her revelations as terribly eye-opening.

Having said that, I think many of the one-star reviews are unfair. She clearly recognizes—and reports—her own deficiencies. She’s mostly just trying to make people who live in relative luxury understand that for many other people life is just hard.

In the closing analysis, she predictably laments low minimum wages, lack of workers unions, and housing shortages for the poor. She’s not wrong, but she does make a few common mistakes. One is equating the mortgage interest deduction with a tax credit. Another is assuming that if wages for the a particular decile have only increased by X% over the last 10 years that it means those people are only earning X% more now. As Sowell points out, this is only a statistical category. Most workers in this category will move up into higher deciles over time, so after ten years the category contains a different batch of people. Which is really the point with entry-level jobs—the expectation is that with experience and the learning of new skills each worker will gradually earn better wages over time.

Of course this doesn’t always happen, as Ehrenreich clearly describes. And she’s definitely right that this kind of work is hard, often depressing, and sometimes outright degrading. All people deserve better than this. Work shouldn’t be toil. And sure, we hope that there is enough economic mobility that over time workers will gradually move upward from the lower deciles, but there is still much we should do to ensure that those currently in such positions can live decently and with dignity.

For what it’s worth, an interesting counterpoint to Ehrenreich’s experiment is  Scratch Beginnings.  Here the author starts out with much less than Ehrenreich did, doesn’t cheat like she did, yet succeeds impressively at improving his situation. But again, just like Ehrenreich’s book, the top GR reviews are absurdly critical and I would regard these 1-star reviews as similarly unfair. Let the record show I gave both books 3 stars.

Book that comes to mind frequently as I read about current events.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/op...
24June20 - Quotes of quotes in New York Times 'Opinion'
"The American economy has become more ruthless, as declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders, decreasing real minimum wages, reduced worker protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers"
(My emphasis = "Ruthless" "Ruthless!")

“Nationwide, essential employees earn an average of 18.2 percent less than employees in other industries.”

“low-wage workers risk becoming collateral damage.”

“preservation of the status quo,” adding “the forces that seek to maintain plutocratic and corporate dominance are very powerful and influential.”

“Low-wage workers are doing really badly and this will destroy our society.”

“Countries with greater unionization rates adopt more robots, presumably because unions raise labor costs.”

... “equalizing opportunity by reducing the barriers that block progress for African- Americans,” but “I have been around long enough to be a bit cynical about the prospects.”
“Currently 5 percent of doctors in the U.S. are black,”

... the focus should be on a reduction of “the gap in pay between doctors and nurses, nurse’s assistants and home health care workers, jobs that are much more likely to be held by blacks,” which would “make far more difference in the well-being of the African-American community.”
***
***
Tempted to add fifth star ... my mother devoted most of her short life to serving other people for low wages.

As someone who grew up as part of the "working poor," I have had all of these kinds of jobs myself at one time or another. Most of my family members still do. So for me, Nickel and Dimed was kind of a big "DUH." I mean, seriously, does any of this come as a surprise to anyone? Did anyone ever really think it was easy to make ends meet off of a low/minimum wage job? It's a preposterous idea.

In my opinion, Ehrenreich's writing has a patronizing undertone, and seeks to make the reader feel pity for the poor, helpless low-wage workers that she somehow manages to dehumanize in the process. It's not a very accurate portrayal of the ingenuity and strength that is takes for people to survive under these circumstances. I'm no fan of pity parties and I think it's a very one dimensional picture of the subject that she paints.

She also doesn't do much to analyze the broader issue and she doesn't offer any alternatives, solutions, or new ideas to deal with the problem.

It was kind of like she wrote the book out of her own bourgeoisie guilt or something and just wanted to give herself a big old pat on the back for understanding poor people.

Raise your hand if you have ever worked a minimum wage job. (It wasn't pleasant, was it?) Now, keep your hand raised if you STILL work a minimum wage job. I suspect a lot of hands just went down, and that is a fact Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't entertain.

While "Nickel and Dimed" is interesting and in some ways eye-opening, it isn’t a particularly well-researched or well-argued economic or social commentary. It’s more of a journalism feature with some editorial opinions thrown in. The rhetoric is well turned, even poetic in parts, and liable to excite emotion. Sometimes it made me feel guilty, sometimes angered, sometimes compassionate.

Barbara Ehrenreich attempts to describe how difficult it is to get by on minimum wage by taking on such jobs herself, but with several advantages – a car, a $1,500 starting fund, and a lack of dependent children. (She doesn’t make mention of her education while applying for jobs.) Her narrative, which is an easy read, does expose readers to the struggles of “wage slaves” as well as to the unique life stories and personalities of the eclectic people she encounters. Her experiment lacks realism, however, not just in the advantages she begins with, but also in the disadvantage she gives herself – she quits every job after a month and starts another, often requiring a different skill set, from the bottom.

This approach ignores two facts. One, that most people don’t drop from the sky into a new town and start from scratch. (She admits this: “True, most of my fellow workers are better cushioned than I am; they live with spouses or grown children or they have other jobs.”) Two, the fact that hardly anyone who *sticks with the same job* for more than a year will stay at minimum wage. Small but regular raises are not uncommon, and assistant managers and managers are generally promoted from within the ranks of wage laborers (she does mention this fact, but without much thought about it). A more realistic experiment on getting by would have involved her sharing rent with a friend or relative and working for a full year at one job and then filing for the EITC with her taxes. She never mentions the EITC. She speaks of how hard it was for her to get a food voucher (multiple phone calls, travel, etc.), but nowhere speaks of the largest wealth transfer for the working poor in existence in the U.S. (unless I missed it?)

The thing is, like most writers on the subject of pop econ, she doesn’t make a firm distinction between the temporarily poor and the permanent underclass or delve deeply into what divides the two. We like to talk about “the bottom 20 percent,” without considering that, of the people *currently* in the bottom twenty percent of income earners, 95% probably will not be there sixteen years from now. (We see this trend when we look at the income of actual individuals over many years rather than merely drawing conclusions from categories, which do not represent people, because people move between categories over a lifetime.) Some people who are minimum wage earners today will even be in the highest quintile sixteen years from now – more, in fact, than will still be in the bottom quintile. And their children will likely spend less time at minimum wage than they did because they will be given advantages by their parents, as this author was. Ehrenreich mentions her own father who “somehow” went from the mines to the suburbs, but she never seems to consider that his experience might be anything other than exceptional or that it might have something to say about what enables people to escape poverty.

The book is primarily focused on the issue of wages. However, raising the minimum wage to a “living wage” is likely to lead to inflation (if not higher unemployment coupled with a larger black market for illegal labor), which will mean that the new living wage will eventually cease to be a living wage and have to be raised again, and the same problem will recur in endless cycle. There are a variety of factors that make it extremely difficult for people to get by on minimum wage beyond the wage itself. The largest contributing factor to poverty – which we see again in again in the anecdotes in this book - is the disintegration of the family. Divorce, out of wedlock birth, and single parenthood are all expensive propositions. It has been said that the surest way to steadily move upward economically is to get married and, most importantly, to *stay* married, because of the economies of scale and division of labor made possible by marriage and, alternatively, the division of assets and (often) single parenthood resulting from divorce. We also see the effects of the disintegration of extended family, which is a huge contributor to the lack of affordable housing, because multi-family homes become less common. There are obviously many more contributors to poverty, but she focuses primary on hourly wages and on criticizing managers and employers (people who were often themselves low-wage employees five to ten years ago).

What would truly be interesting is to see where *all* of the people she worked with during this time are today. How many are still earning minimum wage? How many are assistant managers? How many managers? How many in jail? How many in college?

I do not think this book is a “Marxist rant” as so many have categorized it, but it does put forth the standard liberal political solutions to the complex problem of poverty without really examining the long-term effects those policies would have and whether or not they would actually achieve their stated goals.

Okay, I suddenly got a Like on my non-review of this book, so I'm going to say a few words about it, which I've thought off and on for a while.

I've seen very put-downish reviews here on GR about the book, and more so about the author.

It's held that Ehrenreich was a fake, had no idea what the working poor face, was just trying to make a buck off them, the book totally discredited because she had money and could just walk away when she was finished, or if she got in trouble, yada yada.

This sort of misses the obvious - that her audience was not the working poor. She didn't write a book saying to them, "Hey, look at me! I took on your world and here I am, fine again, with royalties in my pocket."

Uh, her audience was people like me, people like most of those walking the streets of Manhattan hurrying and scurrying about their frantic but pretty well-rewarded life.

She got to me, that's for sure. In some sense, most people with any knowledge of the world and any empathy at all are not surprised at the hardships that Ehrenreich describes. But until it gets shoved in your face - that these people typically work two jobs, that many or most of them have no love in their lives because they have no time for it, that one sickness or one broken car can spell disaster which could lead to homelessness - you JUST DON'T REALLY UNDERSTAND. And once you do understand, there is a brand new thing in your life which you never forget, a knowledge, not from personal experience, but simply from a book written with feeling, that YOU ARE LUCKY and there are way too many people out there THAT ARE NOT. And that it might be nice if the society you lived in would try to do something about this, for example a $15 minimum wage.

Thanks for the Like, Teresa.

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May you never have to live the life writer Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live as part of a writing assignment. From her admittedly limited experiment she wrote Nickel and Dimed: On not Getting by in America. We are told or reminded of the many ways working very hard in America only promises you the chance to work hard. Not just Recommended but recommended as a critical experience before you can justify having an opinion on policies that effect the working poor.

The assignment Ms. Ehrenerich had was to earn employment in a minimum or near minimum wage job. She was to find housing and transportation appropriate to the position and then see if she could earn enough money to pay her bills. Along the way she experiences what it takes to keep these jobs and experience what kinds of treatment, on the job and off goes with her pretend economic status.
Throughout she is honest about reminding us that she was only sampling a very few weeks of what her coworkers could expect to be doing for years. She always had the choice to end her assignment and return to her significantly more upscale life.

At the time she was writing, there was no law that required employers to allow employees to take bathroom breaks. It is hard to image a world where such a law is required. In one of my first post Navy jobs- I worked several jobs like these; I never had the management problems she did. But I knew an employee from a nearby business who had been hospitalized for lack of access to a bathroom.
Besides the indignities, large and small she was among people who were one accident, or illness away from financial catastrophe. In more than one situation employees seeking to attend schools had the twin problems of not controlling their hours and needing to work extra jobs to pay for the training that might have made it possible to qualify for better jobs.

More than a view from the trenches, Ehrenreich includes research that punctuates the fact that problems she encountered were not unique to her situation. Housing costs for low income people, for example, were then and now increasing faster than wages. Not just what she experienced, but what she documented.

Nickel and Dimed is a short book and an easy read. It is content rich and should be part of a common knowledge base for anyone taking part in American economic policy discussions.

This was a very readable, if not particularly shocking exposé of some of the realities of living on minimum wage in the US. I wouldn't have thought it could be all that controversial, but looking at other reviews I see it being denounced as a "Marxist rant" and "condescending slumming" and similar. Which makes me think that most of these people have never met a Marxist, and didn't bother reading Ehrenreich's own contextualization of her experiment and its limitations.

But anyway, Barbara Ehrenreich got a number of minimum-wage jobs around the country in the late 1990s, and attempted to live on the proceeds (usually working two jobs at a time, or seven days a week). She struck out every time, though by her own admission there were some things she wasn't willing to do for the sake of the experiment (endanger herself, live in her car, actually go hungry). The audience for this experiment, which some readers seem to have missed, is not minimum wage earners themselves but those who believe that a job, any job, is the path out of poverty.

As someone who worked minimum-wage jobs part-time in high school and university, I could identify with much of what Ehrenreich flagged as being the emotional effects of this kind of labour (snappishness, seeing the bad in other people, becoming a worse person yourself, as well as exhaustion, stress, poor sleep and bad nutrition). Like Ehrenreich, my own experiences were always with a safety net -- living at home, or at least having the option of moving back home rather than put up with certain abuses. Even so, this brought up depressing memories of micro-aggressions, condescension, lowered self-esteem, customer threats, kowtowing to people who weren't very smart but had been promoted to manager because (this being the only theory that made sense) they were a man, rushing impossibly from one job to the next. After reading this, I'm thankful to at least have had my experiences in Canada and the UK, in decent cities, not hideous soulless big-box American urban peripheries.

And of course, the situation has just gotten worse since 2000.

"Nickel and Dimed" amounts to a good account of living a back-breaking existence while doing unskilled work. It offers a ground-up view of what it's like to apply for work at Wal-Mart, what sorts of neighbors you have when you live in a pay-by-the-week hotel, and the crap food you're forced to live on when you earn $6 an hour. Barbara Ehrenreich is a biology PhD who decided not to interview poor people or follow them around. Instead she decided it would be more interesting to be a low-wage worker for awhile. It makes for some sensational copy and good anecdotes.

But it's not really a great piece of scholarship. Lo and behold, we are forced to conclude, minimum wage (circa 2000) is not a sustainable wage for any kind of living. Wages are too low and rents are too high. Was there another possible outcome?

Sure, we read the book to confirm our beliefs about low-wage work – that you just can't live on the wages, that a lot of these jobs are exhausting, that you're treated without dignity (both by middle management as well as the public-at-large), that you have to suffer through drug tests, that your first paycheck is often withheld, that the circumstances of the working poor don't improve along with the fortunes of the company, etc. ("The Maids charges $25 per person-hour. The company gets $25 and we get $6.65 for each hour we work?") But don't mistake this book for one that does hypothesis testing.

But what it makes for is a good personal journey. And it is read best as a narrative of her own feelings and impressions. On being a maid, she writes that "even convenience store clerks, who are $6-an-hour gals themselves, seem to look down on us." … "There's no pay for the half hour or so we spend in the office at the end of the day, sorting out the dirty rags before they're washed and refilling our cleaning fluid bottles." … "As far as I can figure, my coworkers' neediness – because that's what it is – stems from chronic deprivation."

And at Wal-Mart, employees can wear blue jeans on Fridays, but they have to pay $1 for the privilege.

But insofar as it's a personal journey, you also have to get through a lot of self-aggrandizement. Of the circumstances of her coworkers, she writes, "it strikes me, in my middle-class solipsism, that there is gross improvidence in some of these arrangements." Upon seeing a church called 'Deliverance', she writes, "Could there really be a whole congregation of people who have never heard of the James Dickey novel and subsequent movie?"

At the end of the book, she has answered her question, "how do these people get by on their pay?" with a resounding, "not well." And so, the main question she wants to know is why the working poor suffers its indignities, both individually and collectively. And she offers some good insight – that there are costs ("friction") to trying to find a new job or moving somewhere, that the working poor are often ill-informed, that corporate and management policies are designed with carrot-and-stick to urge and threaten the submission of its employees. And to the degree that it's universally true, it's fun to ponder.

First reviewed Oct.1, 2009. I found and corrected a typo...so the dtae changed.


I find sometimes that people are surprised that I would recommend this book (albeit with a couple of reservations). Somehow the fact that I'm a political conservative is supposed to make me unable to identify with low income workers or those called the working poor.

Why? I struggled with long periods of unemployment...with a family. I've flipped burgers in several restaurants and several times. I've worked in family restaurants, fast food restaurants, factories, I've worked part time, temporary and "whatever I could get". I respect and feel for those who struggle against the odds to support themselves and their loved ones.

This book does lay out a lot of the experience. The life of a waitress (who doesn't have to be paid minimum wage because she gets, tips. Of course if the amount of the wages and the tips fail reach the amount of minimum wage the restaurant is supposed to pay the difference. I've never been anywhere the management posted this information or bothered to tell the employees of the fact.)

Read the book, learn the lesson, especially if you haven't been there. It takes a deal of courage and self respect to work at a low paying job and to support your family. If it's all you can get you don't quit, you work and do your best turning in a good job, even in a (so called) menial job.

What are my reservations about the book? Well the author could never actually be what she was going "undercover" to portray herself as. She could always quit and go back to her "real life". This of course slanted her view..and (please forgive me if you don't get this...or if you're Barbara Ehrenreich) it seemed to me that her "voice" was always a bit condescending about the people she was dealing with, the ones she was concerned about. Do these people need "more government intrusion" or simply fairer treatment, a fair day's work and a fair day's wage.

The book holds up an actual view of life even if a bit skewed.

Some people apparently don't like this book because the idea of an educated journalist going undercover as a member of the working class living paycheck to paycheck upsets them. Personally, the premise doesn't upset me, I think a book should be judged on the content of the book, not the initial reaction one has to the idea of the book. There are plenty of books in which educated, wealthy authors attempts to portray the thoughts serial killers for shock and entertainment value and no one criticizes that, even though it's far more offensive than someone attempting to portray a hardworking poor person in the interest of social justice. What better way to research and learn about a culture than to live it?

In this case, the book is loaded with great stories, fascinating characters and important information about the topics covered. There are thousands of academic articles and books written about social injustice every year and no academic work I've ever read has ever come close to the impact of this book. It is an extremely articulate and poignant look into the lives of hotel workers, cleaning ladies, retail clerks, a group of people that are unlikely to have the luxury and perspective to tell their story. The author makes masterful use of footnotes citing statistics about the working poor. If you care about people who wash your car, clean your clothes, serve you coffee, wait your tables, this is a MUST READ book.

This book is not new, but it is highly relevant - particularly considering the strikes going on in the United States at the moment. You think it’s possible to work yourself out of poverty in land of the American dream? Think again. It’s not possible to live on one minimum wage job. The author, Barbara, who tries it out as a low wage worker, soon finds this out. Adequate housing is also nearly impossible to get. Despite the 20+ years since this book was released, the situation has gotten worse rather than better.

3.5, really.

Well-written, funny at times, anger-inducing most times. Although it came out in 2001, and would be dated for certain events (a few months too early for 9/11 and decades of war, the Great Recession, precarity, Obamacare, and so on) and certain facts (wages, housing prices and rents, food costs,), this does what it set out to do and remains relevant in its general theme. No country is good to be poor in. Nothing special about the u.s.a. there. But to see so many low-wage worker unable to live is saddening. Where did all the people Ehrenreich worked alongside go, socially and politically, the 20-year-olds and up?