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.”
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Tempted to add fifth star ... my mother devoted most of her short life to serving other people for low wages.

I read this in honor of Labor Day.

"Nickel and Dimed" has been on my radar for years. It's considered a modern classic in several disciplines, including journalism, sociology and economics. Starting in 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich spent several months working low-wage jobs in different cities around the United States in an attempt to experience what it was like to be one of America's working poor. She wondered how anyone could possibly live on wages available to the unskilled, which at the time was about $7 an hour.

In the spirit of science, she set some rules for herself: First, she couldn't fall back on skills derived from her advanced education; second, she had to try to keep the job and not blow off the work; third, she had to find cheap accommodations in each city. When applying for jobs, she used her real name and she described herself as "a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years." She did not put her Ph.D. on the job application, however, and instead only listed three years of college. She did allow herself the use of a car, and she ruled out homelessness.

"The idea was to spend a month in each setting in see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month's rent. If I was paying rent by the week and ran out of money I would simply declare the project at an end; no shelters or sleeping in cars for me ... So this is not a story of some death-defying 'undercover' adventure. Almost anyone could do what I did -- look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering."

Barbara started in Key West, Florida, waitressing at two different restaurants. In Portland, Maine, she toiled as a maid. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, she was a "sales associate" at a Wal-Mart. In each place, she worked hard and tried to be a helpful and cheerful coworker. Each job had its share of frustrations, and in each job she got a sense of what it felt like to be an "invisible" worker, sometimes degraded and dehumanized.

Besides finding a job, she also had to find affordable housing, which was difficult even with the small amount of starter money that she allowed herself. And if the housing was affordable, it wasn't necessary safe. She stayed at a weekly rental place in the Minneapolis area that she described as the worst motel in the country, and it cost her $255 a week. It did not have secure windows or a bolt on the door, and she slept anxiously, on high alert, every night she was there.

"Sometime around four in the morning it dawns on me that it's not just that I'm a wimp. Poor women -- perhaps especially single ones and even those who are just temporarily living among the poor for whatever reason -- really do have more to fear than women who have houses with double locks and alarm systems and husbands or dogs. I must have known this theoretically or at least heard it stated, but now for the first time the lesson takes hold."

While the book sounds grim, it was an engrossing read. It was fascinating to read about Barbara's waitress experience, her housecleaning and maid service, and the weeks she spent at Wal-Mart.* I raced through it in a little over a day, impressed with the writing and reporting. I was actually a bit envious and wish I had written it.

After her experiment ended, she wrote an evaluation for herself, and while she gave herself good marks for working hard, she admitted she did not do as well in terms of surviving life in general, such as eating and having a decent place to stay.

"The problem goes behind my personal failings and miscalculations. Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high."

The edition I read was published in 2011, a 10th anniversary reprint, which included a new afterword by the author. She wrote that the situation has become worse for the working poor, especially since the global recession that started in 2008:

"If we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down."

There is so much to talk about in this book! I understand why a lot of instructors have made it assigned reading in their classes. It's very discussable and brings up many different issues of poverty, society and economics. I highly recommend it.

Low-wage workers of the world, unite! Or something like that.

*I had waitressing jobs when I was in high school and college, and that work requires so much energy and effort for so little pay that I swore I would never do it again unless circumstances were really dire. Barbara frequently mentioned how grateful she was that her parents worked so hard to help give her a better life, and I felt a similar gratitude to my parents.

I'm going to step on some toes here and I apologize if I do. I AM one of the working poor that she talks about here and I DO believe in pulling myself up and making a better life for myself. But what I want to know is this. Unless you have been where I am, how can you comment? How can you also call her a bleeding heart? Is this a country for the haves only? And the have nots just have not? uhh uhh, I just don't understand. We got an election coming up and some folks are fussing about this country even entertaining about health care for EVERY American. So let me ask again, this country is not for the free and brave but for those who just have it?
Personally, I found the book factual to a point. On what I make, unless the housing is subsidized, I cannot live there. plain and simple. does that make me proud to say? no, just realistic. You cannot make a living, pay bills and rent and eat on less than $1500 a month much less $1000, unless you really got a little someone to help you here. Her staying in a place didn't seem that realistic to me, although she did make some allowances. but then she had to because after all, you just cannot do it on a minimum wage salary unless you have a roomie or man or both. I have read in Donald Trump and Robert Kiyoski's book that the middle class in this country is shrinking and that we as a people should either stay poor, and that is food for serious thought.FOOTNOTE:I thank each of you whether you were with me or not in this review. that is ok. I never got this MUCH reviews on a book that is interesting to say the least. I am still getting by in this country but Lord knows I am working hard to get away from it. thanks again.

I was moved to reskim this book today to write a review, in order to refer to it in my next post, but partly because I discovered that many reviews are so different from mine. In this project, essayist Barbara Ehrenreich tried to survive in low-wage jobs in three different American cities. Acknowledging that she starts with an unrealistic level of good health and cash, she chronicles her back-breaking days as a restaurant server, housecleaner, and Wal-Mart associate, as well as her ultimate failure to make her budget work.

One critique that comes up a lot is that Ehrenreich is flippant, and in particular flippant as an outsider. I don't think that this is unfair, but it never surprised me. Ehrenreich's mordant humor is how she points out the absurd unfairness of it all and engages the reader on her side.

The other critique is that the book is pointless, or just a patronizing frivolity, because who could possibly not already know these things? That's the one I want to respond to: let me introduce you to me, in 2001, when this book came out and I first read it.* I had recently graduated debt-free from Yale and moved to Manhattan; having grown up in a community that people moved to for its public schools, I had hardly ever met anyone without a four-year college degree. Social media and viral content barely existed, so while I spent a good amount of time on the Internet, content published there often consisted of more voices of the privileged. I worked in book publishing, where we got summer Friday afternoons off to escape to our (ha!) country houses before traffic got bad.

The idea that being poor is itself hard work, that it consists of being constantly judged and told what you should have done, that the setbacks pile on each other to ruin your every plan to improve your lot--I've heard these things in a lot of different ways and from different voices, in 2016, but this book is undoubtedly where I heard them first. I've voted, shopped, tipped, interacted with other people, and looked at the world differently since I read this book. In fact, it's one of two or three books that inspired me to reserve five-star ratings for books that really changed the way I look at things.

I can't dispute the reasons other people didn't like it, but I have to rate it based on the effect it had on my life. Read today, the most striking thing about this account is how impossible it was for Ehrenreich to break even, even in the rollicking late Clintonian economy of 1999-2000. In each of the three cities where she tries to make it, rent is the factor that breaks her budget. More on this in my next review.

*There's a ballet ticket stub for 6/1/2001 in my copy of this book.

i hated this book so much but i can't get into why rn lol i'll tell you later

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.

Ergh. I read this book while in grad school, taking an anthropology class.

I was also earning a whopping $5.83 an hour, and reading this book just made me grind my teeth.

Totally fatuous piece of crap. It STILL ticks me off.

I felt like she was so patronizing and rude. It seemed like yet another case of some stupid rich white person talking about the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, all while doing absolutely NOTHING to help alleviate it. Not to mention whining about how hard it is. URGH.

Great. I'm so happy that Ehrenreich lived as a poor slob for a few months and then went back to her well-off, wasteful, middle-class lifestyle having learned nothing other than how to write sensational stuff to sell books. Yay. Go you, Barbara.

The premise was really intriguing, but the execution didn't work. To me there was something unsavory about an educated and relatively affluent woman going under cover to play at being a poor person living on minimum wage so she could write about it.
Others have done a brilliant job of explaining a bit more in their reviews why this was so problematic.

I'm just not moved to write much more except that despite my criticism, this book did make me think about things in a different way, which I guess is not a bad outcome. (For days afterward my husband had to listen to my wild ideas about how to solve the housing problem.)

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.

The first time I read this book was probably in 2002. I was 20 years old and had recently failed out of my fancy, expensive private university - partly because of illness, partly because of bad choices, and partly because I had to work three jobs on top of a full course load to be able to afford that school. By 2002, I was working at Target for around $7 an hour and had spent several months sleeping on my aunt's couch while I saved enough money for first and last months' rent on an apartment in a government-subsidized low-income housing complex. I struggled to pay my rent (which was "only" $365 a month, utilities not included) and got rather familiar with the three-day pay-or-vacate notice, spent a lot of time waiting for Tacoma's inadequate public transportation in the rain, and one of the most exciting moments of my life at that time was when the grocery store across the street put Top Ramen on sale at 10 for $1. I lived next door to a weed dealer, once called 911 when I spotted someone dressed all in black prowling around people's balconies at midnight, got a couple of terrifyingly indecent proposals from men in the parking lot, and spent a lot of time fending off Army recruiters. If I was scheduled for a closing shift at Target, I often got out of work after the buses had stopped running, which meant I either had to find a ride from a coworker or spend 2 hours' salary on a cab. In a nutshell, I was poor and miserable.

So when I read this book, it was like a revelation. I was overwhelmed at the fact that someone many social ladder rungs above me had actually noticed us down there at the bottom and tried to do something about it. The poor in America really are invisible and I usually felt like I was the only person I knew who was struggling that hard (which was probably not true, but these aren't the kind of topics people like to talk about). So to have my experience validated like that, without the kind of judgment that usually came along with it ("Why didn't you just stay in college?" "Can't you manage your money?" "No wonder you're so poor, you just had lunch at McDonald's." "You must be very irresponsible.") was incredible to me.

I've moved up in the world quite a lot since then - after having spent my first 25 years living in poverty, I got married to a lovely man who came from a family that was much better off than mine. We struggled financially the first few years we were married, as just about everyone does, but now I'm writing this review on a fairly nice computer in a home that I own, and although my daughter has just outgrown all of her shoes I'm not worried about how we're going to pay for new ones. But I have not forgotten what my early life was like.

Obviously this book isn't a perfect representation of that world, since Barbara Ehrenreich starts her experiment with considerable advantages - some starting capital, a lifetime of good medical care, a car, and no small children, to start with. But it's a reasonable approximation and she does acknowledge these advantages and point out that most people down at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale don't have them. On the whole, though, it's an accurate and compassionate account of what that kind of life is like, accompanied with plenty of broader information about the working poor and the circumstances - personal, economic, and political - that tend to keep them there.

If I mentioned every point she made that made me think YES, EXACTLY, I'd basically be quoting the entire book (my Kindle edition is filled with highlights) so I won't do that. Just, please, read it, especially if you believe that welfare recipients should be drug tested or that these people wouldn't be poor anymore if they would just stop smoking. Do us all a favor and find out what that life is really like.

I had to read this for a class, and since I will have to discuss it there more than I ever wish to, this will not be a full, true review. I must say the following however:

This book offended me more than I ever imagined it could. It offended me as a worker. It offended me as a woman. It offended me as a minority. It offended me as a Christian. It offended me as someone who has worked for minimum wage. It offended me as someone who does not have a PhD. It offended my intelligence.

Nickel and Dimed is not without its interesting observation or two, however it is presented in an insulting, faux-scientific way. Ehrenrich set out to show some truths about the low wage work world and only succeeded in showing us her own bigoted, patronizing thoughts on the low wage work world. It's a story, a poor sampling, offers very few facts and relies on very little evidence.

That her grand conclusion was "not having money is hard?" Congratulations, Ehrenreich. We are all astounded by this conclusion.

This is one of those ubiquitous books, being a national bestseller as well as a staple on labor and feminist reading lists. I was never motivated to read it because I kinda assumed that I was already familiar with the issues and in agreement with the conclusions. I was also a bit reluctant to open it because the methodology struck me as potentially problematic. I feared that Ehrenreich's “going” low-wage would be offensive by claiming an unfounded authority of the subject of poverty by a temporary adventure, or being disingenuous to or even intruding on other low-wage earners with whom she would encounter.

I finally picked up the book as part of an assigned curriculum for a class I was teaching. While I did have a good understanding of the barriers to escaping poverty and its effects on low-wage, and especially women, workers, “Nickel and Dimed” really helped me feel the issues much more. For me personally, the book succeeded in adding a psychological and emotional dimension to poverty labor. At one point she describes being treated by management in a way that made her have the same feelings as when she was bullied in junior high, revealing the sometimes dehumanizing experience of work. There is also the psychological abuse felt by domestic workers who clean extravagant homes but live in substandard housing, or healthcare workers who lack healthcare for themselves.

Ehrenreich shows the “hidden costs” of being poor. The obstacle of security payment to rent an apartment, the lower energy level and higher risk of sickness from malnutrition, and the crushing sensation of insecurity. Indeed, the costs are so much more than monetary. This book really conveys how poverty labor affects one's entire outlook and worldview.

Happily, Ehrenreich's methodology was self-aware and critical. She never forgets that she as a researcher cannot truly know poverty in the same way as the workers she acquaintances and befriends, nor can she fully express their experiences. But the author's participant-observation magnifies both her experience and those of others. The result is something much more penetrating than a journalistic endeavor and much broader than a personal case study. It is clear that Ehrenreich does not ask for the reader's sympathy, but it was difficult for me to not wince at the harrowing descriptions of her attempts to survive as a waitress, a domestic cleaner, a Wal-Mart employee.

Given the integrity to Ehrenreich's approach, the sincerity in her prose, the clarity in her analysis, and the power of stories of the workers she meets, I was dismayed at how many of my students clung to myth that to succeed in America one only needs to work hard. The only time that some of these students became shocked and sympathetic is when Ehrenreich shows the reader of the real risk of homelessness for low-wage earners, and cites the statistic that indeed, it is estimated that almost one-fifth of the homeless are employed. Interestingly, there was something about the issue of shelter that caused some of the class to challenge their accepted ideas about work and prosperity. “Nickel and Dimed” demonstrates how the system of work is stacked against workers, how democracy and civil liberties are “checked at the door” upon entering the workplace, yet some students still believed that the workers themselves were somehow responsible for their poverty. This shows the need to not only fight againat poor working conditions, unregulated sectors, and the disappearance of social services, but also the dominant cultural attitudes towards work.