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.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was 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 $6 to $7 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 strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.

: Let's get something out of the way right here and now: Ehrenreich has had a lot of snarky feedback about the fact that, in researching and writing this book, she's "playacting" and her privileged background as a PhD-having writer shows in every "condescending" moment of expressing surprise at how ground down her temporary colleagues are. She is the target of "ghetto tourism" accusations. And so on and so forth. I suppose for the stupider members of the audience the concept "investigative journalism" isn't familiar. She, a journalist, stepped out of her own life to investigate an important situation in American society. So we're clear: Her responses are part of the story. They are MEANT TO BE PART OF THE STORY, YA DIMWITS. Her privilege is showing because she's privileged and she's doing these crap jobs to see what it's like. Guess what? IT SUCKS. So she responds as anyone from her background would.

Not to mention her ancestors weren't middle class, they were the very people she's reporting on...with the important difference that their labor was rewarded adequately to support their families. How things change when the bidness bastards get their greedy mitts on the levers of power:

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

I guess that passage whipped past the haters. Or they just decided it didn't matter for some arcane reason. Anyway, I consider that specious argument laid to rest. Allons-y!

As a nouveau poor person, I can tell you I've never come close to breaking even on any transaction of any sort. The reason:

There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.

You get fat when you're poor because the only food you can afford is shitty, processed, and low-quality store-brand offal. No apartment? No fridge. No fresh anything, even assuming you go pay a buck for an apple (do the math when you're in the produce section). No milk, only "creamer" (terrifying stuff, look at the label sometime) for your coffee, tea, cereal. I personally am incredibly lucky because my most recent roommate left me his fridge when he had to go to the nursing home. Imagine! Frozen veggies!! Luxury.

Ehrenreich brings us to the brink of a hideous cesspit of greed with this ongoing slimy, nauseating sludge of reality soup:

As Louis Uchitelle has reported in the New York Times, many employers will offer almost anything—free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts—rather than raise wages. The reason for this, in the words of one employer, is that such extras “can be shed more easily” than wage increases when changes in the market seem to make them unnecessary. In the same spirit, automobile manufacturers would rather offer their customers cash rebates than reduced prices; the advantage of the rebate is that it seems like a gift and can be withdrawn without explanation.

Salary or wages become expectations, and can't have the hoi polloi expecting a decent living! After all, where will all those scumbag banksters get the extra zero on their bonus checks from if minimum wage is set at a livable level?

So Ehrenreich, an educated woman, has a thunderstruck moment of realization:

To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth.

She realizes that her response is typical of people whose lives are lived at this depth of society. Imagine how someone less able than she is internalizes this hideous reality. To her credit, she thinks about this, even though her genetic privilege of intelligence prevents her from fully experiencing its soul-crushing impact. And it's the bored upper classes who guzzle antidepressants by the fistful. Something's very wrong with that....

Of course, the opiate of the masses is now TV not Jeebus. Even there the poor person is slapped and kicked and punched with the expectation that we're all one big middle-class world:

Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.

Really, what else needs be said? Can you watch your sitcom or your vampire show the same way after being awakened to the impact that its assumptions have on the maid who polishes your moss-covered three-handled family gradunza, the immigrant smiling as she hands over your greaseburger and fries with a molto grandissimo vat of fizzy death juice (which for gods' sweet sake STOP PUTTING IN YOUR BODY NOW!)?

I think the point of this book is best summed up here:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

If this isn't enough to shame you into activism on behalf of the people who mow your, your neighbor's, and the local church's lawn for a lousy $40 or so; bring your lazy ass a pizza in her own car, paying $4 or so for a gallon of gas and insurance and then you tip her $2 or $3; or teaching your snot-nosed privileged peanut-allergied unvaccinated brats while her own kids are a constant worry because the school system doesn't provide daycare, then I have no hope for your soul.

Once upon a time, I was a low-wage worker. I worked long hours in retail for too little pay. Even as a store manager, I made about $10,000 per year in the late Eighties. If I hadn't been able to live with my parents, I don't know how I could have been able to afford rent and childcare, much less food on what I made. Because I was working, I didn't qualify for anything like subsidized childcare or food stamps. The waiting list for subsidized housing was endless. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America explores the world of low-wage workers in Florida, Maine and Minnesota. Surprisingly enough, Minnesota was the toughest place to get by. It sounded almost as bad as California.

While I did find this book to be very readable and was compelled to keep turning the pages, I often found the author's attitude smug and condescending. Her introduction and conclusion were fairly inane and didn't offer any real insight or solutions other than the usual provided by those who neither struggle to keep businesses running with a modest profit nor are caught in the struggle of trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. She also didn't look at the feminist aspect of this. Now, I'm no big feminist, but even I can see that the big problem is that the low-paying jobs the author explored were ones traditionally held by women: waitressing, nursing home aide, maid, and retail worker. These jobs are not only low paying, they don't offer much room for advancement or leave them with much time or energy to pursue other options. I don't think she even noticed that she was surrounded with a lot of women and not very many men who weren't making it in America.

I've been meaning to read this since it came out, but I think in some ways I arrived at it too late. There's nothing in here that is really surprising to me, except the way that the residential cleaning company is instructed to provide the illusion of cleanliness rather than actual cleanliness. Also, I didn't realize that federal poverty level was still calculated based on food costs, without taking into account rising rents or health care costs or transportation. That makes no sense.

Yes, there are places where Ehrenreich's own middle class privilege shows. I'd have liked her to price a major car repair while she was working, or try a couple of days of public transit. I'd have liked for her to start out without the $1200 nest egg she allowed herself. I'd have liked her to make fewer comments about the type of people who might pay someone to clean their home every once in a while. In other ways it feels like an artifact of its time -- she did her research pre September 11th, pre-economic downturn. She repeatedly made the point that she was looking for jobs during a labor shortage, when the workers should have had some sort of upper hand. Obviously none of that is the case.

Almost everything she brought up is even worse now, exacerbated by the economy. All of the eye-openers about how it may be impossible to live on minimum wage? Those are the people I help every day in my work, except at work every mother that calls is dealing with a disabled child (or her own disability). Many are unable to keep jobs because they get called continually to school to deal with their child's health or behavior crises, or because caring for their child is a full time job. The safety nets are full of holes, and the holes keep getting bigger.

Ehrenreich talks about how people are willing to work, and work hard, but treated at times like a criminal class. Every word of that still rings true, especially in this particular political season, with all of its coded and uncoded talk about the 47% and job creators and getting people off of assistance. This book had its problems, but it's a quick, straightforward read. I'd like all of the Randian politicians and their followers to read this and see if they can still spout the same lines. A job isn't enough if it doesn't cover rent. A job isn't enough if it doesn't cover the cost of real food. A job isn't enough if it doesn't allow the family of an individual with a disability to meet that individual's needs. All of this is to say that while Nickel and Dimed is somewhat dated, the core message is sadly still needed.

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich undertook an experiment. She wanted to see how and if it was possible to get by on low-wage labor, so she decided to do it herself. She traveled across the country, taking a handful of minimum wage jobs and living as cheaply as she could to see if she could make do with the little money she was making, and to get a sampling of what it was like to live as many Americans do.

Though there have been plenty of valid criticisms of this work - the most common being that this author was merely a tourist in low-wage labor with the always-present option of figuratively and literally going home again - but I see a lot of value in this book in the way it opened a lot of people's eyes to how impossible it was (and still is) to get by when working the lowest-paying jobs.

More thoughts on Booktube.

After I originally wrote this review in 2008, I spent nearly the entire next decade working in employment services helping individuals with barriers to employment (disabilities, mental illness, felonies) find and keep jobs. Viewed in the light of that experience, I find this book even more outrageous. Misguided and offensive, her little social experiment has no basis in reality.
Author Barb Ehrenreich's (as in Third Reich) personal politics seem to lie somewhere on the spectrum between Chairman Mao and Charlie Manson. She truly was born too late, missing equally a career dragging rich people from their homes and sending them to prison for no reason, or being a cult follower and writing "rich pig" in blood on the freshly painted doors of a California mansion. How on earth did this steaming pile of lunatic hypocrisy ever get published? Unless the publisher read it and instantly feared crucifixion from the feel-good people. You know, white Liberals, like the author herself. Her White Liberal Guilt is the size and whiteness of the mariner's albatross. But she lives in Key West, and not in a tar paper shack on the beach. Yet, during her saintly sojourn as a maid, actually berates those who have had the unmitigated gall to escape poverty and live like Rich People. That bothered me a lot. She pokes fun at and analyzes their books. Who the fuck does this twat think she is, pardon my French??? In the course of the book, she manages to make fun of Christians and Christ Himself, rich people, Wal-Mart shoppers, Wal-Mart employees, Latinos, the elderly, and a person in a wheelchair. She openly calls things like Revivals and people-watching the poor her "entertainment". She's a complete and utter moron, stating she doesn't care if her coworkers get high in the parking lot at work, or if they steal. Wow. Hopefully, the person doing your lab test to see if you have cancer isn't tweaked, Barb. Or the pilot of your next plane. She thinks quite highly of herself, noting that when asking a sensitive question of a person from Maine she "takes into account the deep reserve of rural Mainers, as explained to me by a sociologist acquaintance". Kinda like Margaret Mead in Papua, New Guinea. Are these people a sub-species to her? She's a pro-smoking Atheist with a savior complex. She's a wacko, mistakenly believing that low-wage workers are all there by the Fickle Finger of Fate. No, some are there because of Felonies. Or horrifically stupid choices. Or Saying Yes to Drugs. None of this is ever mentioned. She blanketly assumes all workers (Of the World, Unite)are touched by some higher being, but doesn't believe in one. She thinks her presence is a gift to them, a gift of, of.. Agape! Which is pure love. Not like agave, from which you get pure tequila. And is really love, not to mention a better gift. I just felt bad that at the end, she didn't get to mow down a Czar's children and thus make the world a better place for all those Wal-Mart employees.

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”

The author goes undercover to see if she can make a living on a minimum wage job. Lucky for her, she would have her own job back any time she wanted. So she goes out into the work field but finds out that she and others cannot make ends meet. Food cost too much, rents were too high, and no one can come with the first and last month’s rent. So then she goes out and gets a second job and works 16 hours a day. She still can’t make it.

I have heard people say that these minimum wage jobs are for kids, people who will soon be moving up in the world. Some say they are just for married women so they can make a little extra money, you know go out to lunch with the girls, go to a movie, buy a new pair of shoes. These jobs are not jobs that will help you move up in the world, nor are the jobs always for kids. There are low paying jobs in nursing homes, and even teachers. As I have read recently, teachers can’t afford to rent a home or an apartment in some States. Here in Oklahoma we can’t keep teachers.

What the author found was that some people, if not many, are living in motels, with a friend, or their cars.

I thought of how we need rent control in the U.S. like we had in Berkeley, California when I lived there. I actually thought of a lot of things but I don’t see things changing. We live in a Dickensian society, because the greed in America is such that companies don't care if you have to live in your car, sleep in a rundown motel, or live with a friend. They don't care if you get sick, just be at work. And forget medical insurance, there is none.

Speaking of which, I remember reading how Charles Dickens lectured to people about the poverty, but no one listened. Then he began writing books, and that changed things in England, but I don’t know how England is now. We have new books now, ones like this, but they don’t change a thing.

The author takes you with her on her jobs as she listens to her co-workers and tries to struggle with working a 16 hour day. She tried being a waitress, a maid, and worked at Wal-Mart. And just don’t get caught taking any food out of these places.
As I sat and watched the Republican debates last night and heard how people were protesting outside for the minimum wage to be increased to $15 an hour, I heard one candidate say that if he were president there would be no wage increases, and he actually felt that wages were too high. Well, guess what? He is now our president. I shuttered and continue to shutter. Another candidate suggested $15 an hour. Well, if she couldn’t make it on two jobs, she couldn’t make it on $15 an hour, but at least the candidate had a heart.

I have lost all confidence in mankind to do the right thing. The wealthy seldom do things for the right reasons, not that some don’t help. But human rights have always had to be fought for by the dispossessed and those who were right beside them. Roosevelt had no plans on helping the poor until the Socialist and Communist parties talked him into helping them, telling him what could happen if he didn’t. Since then programs were created, but then the fight began to get rid of both the Socialist and the Communist parties by demonizing them, and then they began chipping away at the unions and the programs that could help lift people out of poverty. Get rid of a good education as well. An educated population is a danger to society. And now the Democrats are said to be evil communists by those on the right. I remember a woman that I was acquainted with telling me that Democrats were not Christians.

So what does it mean to not be getting by to this author? She means that you can't afford an apartment, and I don't mean a fancy one, but just a decent one. She also means that you can't get decent food; instead you have to eat prepared junk food because you don't have cooking facilities at the motel or in your car, if you are living in one. She means not being able to get sick without losing your pay or your job, because staying home would put you further into debt, plus it could get kicked out of your apartment or motel room. Forget going to a movie; they can't afford it. Forget doing anything fun. Forget cable TV unless there is one in your motel room. Forget even having a TV. Forget living. Forget trying to move up in the world because you can’t afford to even try since it would take time off your job to even look for work, not that there are a lot of high wage jobs waiting for you anyway.

“There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”

“But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.”

“Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs ... Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.”

Wow, if I could give this book negative stars, I would. This was awful and condescending on so many levels. Ehrenreich seems to be surprised that blue collar workers, and others included in the unwashed masses, can actually read, write, and walk upright. Strangely enough, they don't all bow down to her grand intellect once she announces that she is a *gasp* journalist. And, wow, people who work at Walmart are actually caring towards one another, and the corporate climate encourages a positive attitude - how dare they?? I really found this book inane, particularly in this climate of increased unemployment, and Ehrenreich's constant grumbling and PC labeling of every single person she crossed made it difficult to finish and inhumane. Everyone is a poor, helpless victim to The Man; the worst of the offenders are people who hire cleaning services. In Ehrenreich's eyes, you are a very, very bad person. The best part of the entire book is when a nursing home patient keeps calling her Barbara Bush.

WAA, WAAAA, WAAAAAAA...boo hooooo

What was the publisher thinking? Letting a biology Ph.d write an economics book. There are so many economic inaccuracies in this book they are too numerous to mention. The most important theory she mangles is that she thinks wages she should be raised even if there are enough employees to hire at piss-poor wages. She believes that (she eludes to it, but never makes the point clearly) it is the employers responsibility to provide enough wage to make sure everyone is adaquately housed and has non-worker's comp health care...and, if really considerate of his workers, a car.

Well, what kind of person gets hired for jobs that are low-paying. Ones who need a job! What kind of person gets hired for jobs that are higher paying...ones who have prepared for those jobs. It's kinda like Social Security. It was never set up so people could live on it. It was a supplement. These jobs are not careers, but I think many of the people who work them think they are. You better get the employer's buy-in on that theory before you start working in these fields. Is that the employee's problem about this misconception?the employers? the goverments (yikes)? society's?

The purpose or theme of the book is so unclear that I hope the publisher was not meaning for it to be entertainment...or informative. Was it meant to be a thesis on American economics?? People with low-paying jobs should use this book for warmth...by throwing it in the fire.

But maybe IT WAS meant to be entertaining and informative. Then the publisher should have hired someone who is a bit entertaining and/or a little informative.

This author writes this as though nobody who lives above the poverty line has worked a job that supplies the wages to live below it. It is a degrading and demeaning book to everyone who has ever held one of these jobs...and to the ones who currently work these jobs.

Nickel and Dimed is a big departure from my typical reading, even my non-fiction reading. While I am glad I read it, I can't say I was all that impressed. I decided to read it because someone I love is also a low-wage worker who is not getting by in America. I hoped it might help me understand their experiences and their choices a little more.

It didn't.



This book chronicles a middle-aged woman's experiment as she tries to survive in a segment of America that is foreign to her. The plan was to try to make it on minimum wage jobs. She worked as a waitress, a housecleaner, a WalMart employee - trying to live on only what she earned from those jobs. Of course, she had her personal bank account and the fact that she could walk away at any time. She also took breaks and returned to her "real" life. For example, she began the experiment with first and last months rent as well as a thousand dollar cushion - something most low wage workers never have. She states quite plainly that she knows she is not in nearly as difficult a situation as those she works with. Her point, really, was this: If she, single, healthy, financially secure, loaded with advantages and her PHD to boot, can't survive on minimum wage, how can we expect people with far fewer advantages and more people to support to be able to survive?

When she's not busy navel gazing or self congratulating, Ehrenreich shows compassion for her low wage brethren, but no real understanding of how they live. For example, it drove my husband crazy that she bought an eleven dollar watch battery and that really set her finances back. My husband said that anyone who knew how to live on low wages would have bought a five dollar watch from WalMart instead of putting a battery in her nice watch. Good point. From a scientific or anthropological perspective, the construct of her experiment was seriously flawed. Those are not the things that bothered me the most though.

For a journalist who claims to be a reporter of facts and who certainly uses statistics to prove her point, Ehrenreich was pretty obvious in her bias. She started the experiment to prove you couldn't make it on minimum wage in America. Is it any wonder she proved it?

As the book, and her experiment went on, she began to fail to support herself more quickly with each new job and new location. As those failures mounted, Ehrenreich began to blame the bosses and the system more easily and frequently. I got tired of her tirades against people who hired maids, bosses who expected them to work extra, and especially tired of her WalMart hate. Yes, the system is broken. Yes, we need some useful changes in our nation's policiies. What we really don't need is more whining and raging against "the man". How is that helpful? Perhaps it was not her intention, but it just came across as more self-preoccupied navel gazing. We already read her self-congratulation about working circles around her peers. We heard about how she worked so fast she was able to help other people clean. We heard about how she was so efficient at waitressing that she had to actually do less work so she wouldn't alienate her coworkers. Now we get to hear how her failures to get by are someone elses' fault? Geez! She gave me a headache by the end of the book.

And, don't even get me started on her treatment of the poor she worked alongside. Instead read this review. Carrie wrote is perfectly already. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The book probably earned two stars for the engaging quality of her writing, but I had to subtract a star for subjecting the reader to her tirades and her smugness about personal sacrifices far too often. Wasn't it good of her to live in poverty? In a hotel - on her savings. With a car. I mean, all she got out of it was a New York Times bestseller.

I found this book to on-point. I worked in retail stores, hotels, and call centers. I know that every word of this book is true.
Ehrenreich wrote this book as an expose. She made a conscious decision to not work call centers because she knew she would get slightly or significantly more pay, a type of elite of the working class. (I say better pay with sweatshop characteristics). What do Ehrecreich find out? Working-class people are far from lazy and are instead are overworked, paid inadequately, and are underappreciated. In an era where CEOs are paid more and more millions of dollars, service workers cannot even keep up with the cost of living.
While those of who have worked in the service industry already know all this, this book was written as an expose to help others understand the plight of serviceworkers. I hope more employers will read this book, have their hearts and their wallets opened.

In her book  Barbara Ehrenreich investigates just how working class people in the United States make ends meet. Ehrenreich goes displaces her self three times, in Key West, Maine and Minnesota, allows herself just over $1000, gets housing and a wage paying job, and tries to live as a wage worker for a month. The result is a sad illustration of what its like for millions of Americans who live at the poverty level, depending on wages.
tEhrenreich’s experiment does have circumstances that make her experience much more bearable than people who are really working for poverty-level wages. She admits that if things get too unbearable she can always dig out her credit card for emergency uses. She also just stays in her test locations for a month, half the time is spent finding work and living quarters. This gives the reader insight to just how difficult it is to find housing if you are poor, and a job that can pay for it. The people Ehrenreich meets while she is on the investigative trips also give the reader an insight into the human side of poverty, and how impossible it can be to overcome your circumstances. While Ehrenreich’s writing definitely has a political message, one cannot help wondering why in a country where everyone is created equal, why many living in poverty often don’t even know where they can get their next meal. Food- a basic human right.
t Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America works. Ehrenreich’s message is clear: those working for poverty-level wages in this country are stuck in a vicious cycle that does not allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, basic luxuries that the rest of the United States takes for granted- health care, food, sleep- are not givens for millions of Americans stuck in this cycle.