I grew up in poverty and worked minimum-wage jobs for years while paying my way through school. I found this book insulting and privileged at times. It was as if she was on safari observing poor people in their natural habitats. I know Ehrenreich has dedicated a lot of money and time to helping disadvantaged people since she wrote this book, and I know the book raised awareness of the plight of the working poor. Her tone was a little smug for my taste.

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.

I had been meaning to read this book for several years but never got around to it. I am glad that I finally did.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist with a PhD in biology who decided a decade ago to go undercover and see what it was like for those being put off of welfare to survive in a low wage job. In some ways, she cheated. For example, she said that she would use a couple of thousand in start-up money to pay rent and get utilities turned on, use her own car or get a Rent-A-Wreck with her credit card, and admits she had no intention of living in her car or a shelter, riding public transportation or being limited to jobs near where she lives, and no intention of going hungry or without medical or dental care.

In the real world, I wanted to tell Barbara as I read this book, real people don't have a couple of thousand socked away to pay the rent, deposit, and to get utilities turned on. They don't have cars quite often or they have clunkers that are unreliable and they have unexpected breakdowns that they can't afford to repair. In real life, these people HAVE to use public transportation and find jobs near their homes. In real life, people do wind up living in their cars, in a flophouse, in a homeless shelter or out on the street. And oh yes, these people have to go hungry and without medical and dental care because in their real lives, they don't have money for food, meds, dentists, or doctors.

While I wish she had taken it to the limit and hunkered down with the real people living real lives under these circumstances, I am glad she at least went undercover and saw the underbelly of those perky advertisements we see for restaurants, hotels, stores, nursing homes, and maid services that show happy, peppy employees so people can realize the reality. That reality, as Barbara discovered, included having to stay on a job at $2.31 an hour plus shared tips because the manager lets you park the car you live in in the back of the hotel parking lot for free. It includes pregnant women who faint from hunger while trying to carry heavy equipment in a maids' job. It includes the real lives of people most others pass by without really seeing.

I know she wouldn't have done it but I really wish that Barbara had done an updated version in some really hard places like Alabama and Mississippi during the height of the economic meltdown. She wouldn't and couldn't do what so many are forced to do with no other choices.

For those who want to see no minimum wages, no health care program, no social safety net for the working poor, I challenge you to do what Barbara did in this book and walk in the shoes of these people and see how you fare. It might help you do the same as the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge and learn compassion by walking their walk.

When this book came out, I was working in a busy bookstore in a fairly small town. We had a stack of them at the counter, and I read bits on my breaks. While I was glad to see a popular book addressing the problems of the working poor, I couldn't help but feel like she'd taken a vacation in my life and then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could only have achieved because she had already been in a position of privilege. Your average house cleaner, lacking an advanced degree and a publishing advance to live on while writing, couldn't have written it. And while it's unarguably a Good Thing to have anyone speak up for the voiceless masses, did the low-paid workers of America get anything tangible out of it?

At any rate, I was standing at the counter one night when a well-dressed couple came in. The woman pointed at the book with excitement. "Look, honey, that's the book!" she said. "The one where she took all those terrible jobs! I heard she even worked as a WAITRESS!" Her tone expressed incredulous horror. Then, in unison, they both froze and ever so slowly looked up at me. I had on my best customer-service poker face, but they looked mortified and fled without buying anything.

I've had a lingering dislike for the book ever since.

Very quick explanation of the premise of this one: a woman, who is a writer/journalist, is talking to her publisher about what she wants to write about next and says, “someone ought to write a book about how hard it is to get by on the minimum wage in America.” The publisher says, “Okey-dokey (the book is set in the US so I’m trying to give you a feeling of verisimilitude) you’ve hired.” (High fives all around)

Before I started this book I really worried. I mean, I’m a bit of a worrier anyway – but mostly I worried that this would be the sort of book that my mother would hate. The sort of book my mother hates is the sort of book that is written by someone she calls ‘middle class’ (actually, she would probably call them middle-class twits) and these people would then presume to be able to write about what my mum would call ‘the working class’.

These people, these ‘middle-class book writing types’ basically give my mother the shits. It is nothing personal, you understand – it is much more intense than the merely personal. So, it was with gritted teeth that I started this one.

I’m glad to report that not only did I really love this book, I even think my mum would enjoy it.

First of all, Barbara recognises that she is basically an impostor. She recognises that her ‘experiment’ is really only going to be just that – I mean, she is not going to literally endanger her life, health or wellbeing just to make a point. All the same – this is the sort of reality TV program that would never make it to television. Particularly not in the USA.

That fact is something that really struck me while reading this book – I mean, even before she mentioned it herself. Early in the book she compares herself to Upstairs Downstairs – that is, a British television show about class distinctions. I thought it was very interesting that she had to rely on a British show for a cultural reference to the ‘working class’. Later she points out that working class people may well exist in America – but they definitely don’t exist on American television. I couldn’t help reflect that films like Dockers, Billy Elliot (particularly the themes around the strike – but also the themes of homosexuality), Brassed Off, or Kes simply could never be made in America. Isn’t that incredibly sad?

Now, my dear friend Wendy told me once that in some states the minimum wage can be ‘discounted’ if people earn ‘tips’. It took me a while to believe I had understood what she was saying, but if I’d read this book when I’d first intended to read it – when it first came out – I’d have known this already. Tipping is something I find quite repulsive. I hate everything about it – but then, I don’t like watching dogs beg for food, so I guess getting people to beg in much the same way is only going to make matters worse.

What do you think it is about America – I mean, the land that is supposed to believe in equality of opportunity and democracy – that somehow encourages so many people to get off on making people beg and demean themselves? The discussion in this book about the Maids (house cleaners) is illustrative of this. Companies even advertise that they force their workers to clean floors on their hands and knees. I remember my mother talking about a great-auntie of mine who worked for some rich bastard in Belfast. He would expect her to scrub the street in front of his house on her hands and knees. I believe she ended up not being able to walk. Like I said, hard to see how anyone could get off on this sort of humiliation.

I believe in the value of labour – that people are better off if they can work and if their work can be valued. I believe we are social creatures and that we only feel true self-worth if we believe we are making a real contribution to the society we live in. So, when we create an underclass of untouchables, a caste that must work themselves into ill-health and who never have any hope of being able to make ends meet or of getting out of poverty – then that is a choice that we make and one that says as much about us as people as it says about us as a society.

This book doesn’t offer simple solutions – in fact, besides her suggesting that people join together in Trade Unions and find ways to improve their pay and conditions, she makes virtually no suggestions at all. Even this is not presented as a panacea. If anything she worries that anger and resentment will build to the point where it will become unstoppable.

The pre-employment tests given to people applying for jobs are particularly evil and in Australia would probably be illegal. Now, this is really saying something. We have just had the most reprehensible and obnoxiously rightwing government imaginable but even they would have found reason to pause over the explicit anti-trade union discrimination that seems a common place in these employment tests.

It is hard to imagine the dice being more brutally loaded against these people.

The most memorable line in this book for me was the little girl who pointed to a black or Latino child (I can’t remember which now) and said, “Look mommy, a baby maid”. Aren’t societies with caste systems so terribly interesting?

This book constantly reminded me of Margaret Atwood – there was something about the voice, something about the themes, something about the tone. In fact, think of a non-fiction book written by Atwood and this might well be the book you would end up with.

This book isn’t nearly as bitter and twisted as this review might make it sound – I’m happy to admit that this is a subject which makes me quite bitter and twisted. Parts of the book were very moving and other bits very funny. She has a lovely way about her – I’m particularly fond of self-deprecation, I find it an incredibly attractive feature. I also find intelligent women nearly completely irresistible. That she is both of these had me falling helplessly (and perhaps even a little pathetically) in love.

Barbara produces a list of reasons why the US character would allow this mistreatment of such a large section of its citizenry to exist. All the usual suspects end up on the list – you know, US obsession with ‘success’ and the tendency to blame ‘failure’ on the individual and so on. But one of the things I kept thinking was the way American humour so often seems to come down to a degrading string of insults. Humiliation and insults do seem to play an interesting role in the American psyche and this had me wondering if this is part of the reason why tipping is so embraced there while here in Australia we have no idea what to do in ‘tipping situations’.

Before I get flamed – Australia is just as bad, one would only need to go to Bali for proof of that, and we also treat single mothers, Aboriginals, selected migrants and an endless string of others with utter contempt and loathing. I’m more interested in why – in a country that believes it is self-evident that all people are born equal – that such self-evident inequality of treatment could be so seemingly blindly tolerated.

But then, as Barbara points out – the fundamentalist Christians she has contact with also seem to exhibit the exact opposite of what one would take their core beliefs to be. What would Jesus do? From the behaviour of his followers one can only suspect he would do the complete opposite of the stuff he said in his Sermon on the Mount.

This is a wonderfully thought-provoking book and one that I enjoyed very much.

Ehrenreich, a woman who has a Ph.D., goes "undercover" working low-paying jobs to see if one can earn a living with such work in America.

One can't.

She tries to make ends meet on the following jobs: waitressing, hotel housekeeping, Maid Service, nursing-home attendant, and Wal-Mart employee, often working two jobs at a time.

This shocking exposé reveals the horrific conditions that the "working poor" toil under. Well, at least they're shocking to someone who's never had to struggle to make ends meet and put food on the table.

There's always this niggling knowledge that Ehrenreich can pick up and leave at any time - that this is still an experiment to her. Of course, people who work two minimum-wage jobs and live out of their car do not have this luxury. However, I feel like Ehrenreich realizes this and is respectful of it, not that she's looking down on the poor or "slumming it."

There's no way, for example, to pretend to be a waitress: the food either gets to the table or not. People know me as a waitress, a cleaning person, a nursing home aide, or a retail clerk not because I acted like one but because that's what I was, at least for the time I was with them.

This book could be brutal and very depressing. Luckily for the reader, Ehrenreich has a wonderful sense of humor that she employs to great effect - and this takes some of the edge off of the horrible things she is relating.

There were some folks - mainly managers and bosses - who I wanted to punch in the face after reading this. It's obscene what some corporations get away with and how greatly they take advantage of and exploit their workers.

Of course, people in third-world countries probably think the life Ehrenreich is describing is 'easy living.' So it's all relative, I guess.

Ehrenreich frequently employed fantasies and daydreams to get her through the hell of her daily life during this time period. For example, when she was a waitress:

Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand.

Or when she is a maid, she thinks about some rich people who pay to go to monasteries and do labor to 'cleanse their soul.'

But she almost breaks when she sees people in real, human suffering around her, and realizes she is helpless to do anything to ease their suffering. One of the most crushing scenes in the book is when a teammate maid that she works with breaks her ankle on the job and just keeps cleaning, hobbling around the house and refusing to go to the hospital because she can't afford not to work. It's heart-rending, and Ehrenreich goes through so many emotions, unsure of what to do - or even what she CAN do.

There's a lot of this, but that section was the hardest to read about.

Ehrenreich is stunned when she realizes that people who work two jobs and have zero luxuries are still in poverty and can't even afford food and shelter.

I thought the book was amazing, and highly recommend it for everybody who is an American or lives in America. Or is interested in America. Whether you are nodding your head because you know what it's like to live in this kind of hell, or whether you - like Ehrenreich - are shocked and appalled by what is really going on with the poor in America - this book is a great read.

This is definitely a book I will buy - I had post-it notes on almost every single page, and it was brimming with truth, humor, and emotion.

P.S. She only touches briefly on sexual harassment, but let me add as a personal aside that there are thousands of women who just 'grin and bear it' and have no recourse but to tolerate this kind of crap on the job because they feel that they have no other choice. Despite what the media would have you believe, not many people care and certainly no one is going to rescue you or take you out of that situation. It is SO damaging and humiliating and degrading and tons of women are just stuck with these kind of working conditions.

P.P.S. Again, Ehrenreich only briefly touches on this - but the food provided to the poor by food pantries is NOT fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy stuff. It really grates my cheese when people start hating on fat people of any class, but ESPECIALLY when they are poor people.

When my friend (who is morbidly obese) was raising her five kids as a single mom and living on welfare, working two jobs and struggling every day to make ends meet went to the food pantry she was invariably presented with doughnuts, bread, cookies, refried beans, etc. etc. etc. That's just what was available/what was donated - and, like Ehrenreich mentions - many poor people do NOT have refrigerators or freezers to keep more perishable food fresh.

The idea that my friend was a.) raising her 5 children, as a single mother b.) working, and c.) trying to educate herself in order to get a better job WHILE facing hatred, prejudice, and judgment for being obese just makes me BEYOND FURIOUS. Really so, so angry.

Ehrenreich herself, being a thin woman, exhibits signs of fat-hatred in this book, ranting internally against "corpulent Minnesotans" and bemoaning fat people for being a burden on her and society. I didn't like this.

Ehrenreich's thinness and how it helps her in this world is never mentioned, but let me tell you - I think it helped her A LOT and that things would have been vastly different if she were obese and looking for work/performing the same jobs. It would have been eviscerating.

P.P.P.S. This is mentioned in passing a few times, but it is SUPER-IMPORTANT to remember that Ehrenreich is white and a native English speaker. She would be living on a lower level of service hell if these things were not true.

...

Of course, if she HAD gone into all this stuff, the book would be about 500 pages and not a quick, occasionally funny read. And it's important that this read comes off as "quick and sometimes funny" because this is an important message that needs to be received by as many Americans as possible. And non-Americans, for that matter.



RE-READ: 01/20/2016
Everyone needs to read this. So relevant, so important.

This book really illustrated what is meant by the "working poor"

The author, in good health, with a car, can barely make ends meet for just a few months. Imagine those who work this way their entire life. What happens if you need dental or medical care? Many low wage jobs offer no inusrance or very poor insurance.

The statement is often made "look for a better job". In what spare time? Get an education? Yes, certainly, IF you can get a loan for tuition.

This book does point out that many people are trapped in poverty. Almost all the women Ms Ehrenreich works with share a rental apartment. Because the number of affordable apartments avialable to low wage workers is a case where the supply available is much less than the demand.

One of the ladies working with MS. Ehrenreich in a maid cleaning job is quoted as saying "It would be nice if I could take a day off--If I had too--and still be able to buy groceries the next day."

Very thought provoking. Well worth a read by anyone.

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?

Here's a down and dirty assessment of Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich:

First the positive:
- Interesting premise: writer decides to try to live on the wages that unskilled workers (waitresses, home/hotel cleaners, department store [Walmart, for instance] clerks) earn to see if she can do it and see if she learns anything in the process.
- She exposes some very unethical (even illegal) employer practices such as withholding a worker’s first paycheck until the second pay period.
- She notes some of the problems experienced by low-wage workers that aren’t (or may not be) experienced at higher levels of employment (e.g., lack of healthcare benefits, being unable to live in an apartment because of cost-prohibitive security deposits, almost universal drug testing as prerequisite to employment, etc.)
- Funny anecdotes about her experiences on “the other side.”
- She appears to have done some outside research besides her own experiences and observations.

Then the negative:
- The reader recognizes immediately that this writer is a liberal, specifically a bleeding-heart socialist. To those of us on the right, this is a red flag: we know what in the end she’ll advocate. Besides, the dreck that comes from that ideology is just annoying.
- She makes comments about the nurturing aspects of smoking that I find vomit-worthy. Part of the whole getting-out-of-poverty thing is making some good choices – continuing an expensive nicotine habit isn’t one of them. Ms. Ehrenreich breezes past this obvious expense and instead philosophizes about it. Gaack.
- Ditto for children. I never buy the whole thing that poor people can’t (read: don’t have the brain-power or self-control to) limit their reproduction. Children are expensive and in having them (in a marriage or not) without thought to all the costs associated with merely keeping them alive, not to mention THEIR future, people are essentially dooming them to the same life and poverty that they currently experience. I mean, if you as a parent don’t have reliable healthcare it’s one thing, but your kids will definitely need it – so why are you jeopardizing their health? Oh, yeah – Medicaid.
- She has a permissive attitude toward drug use – and even admits to “an indiscretion” of that sort during her experiment. She buys and uses products that mask or flush evidence of the drug use. That whole business is not going to lend credibility to your whole argument – whatever the argument is. And drugs are an expense.
- She always has a car (“rent-a-wreck” in her words) during her experiment. Expense. Now, some of the locations she works do demand personal transportation, but she purposely steers clear of big cities with public transportation. Hmm.
- She never tries to coordinate/share living arrangements and pool resources. After all, she DOES have her limits in this experiment!
- The biggest problem with her experiment is that it is just an experiment – she can return to her comfy upper middle class life, while demanding that the government do something about the minimum wage and poverty.

Yeah, I could go on, but you get the general picture. I would give this read a C+ - readable, but there are some reservations.

This was not an eye opener for me, having worked minimum wage jobs in the past and knowing people who are still doing that.

Her core message was a good one, but I got irritated with her sometimes smug attitude about this was not her real life and also how highly educated she was.

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.

I picked this up and read it in one day. I also checked the stats for 2007 since the copyright for this was 2001. It really made my blood boil at times and I have "been there and done that" as an employee. I am currently looking for work and even with a B.A., good paying jobs with benefits are impossible to find. Everyone who reads this will hopefully understand the "working poor" and treat them better.

Ehrenreich turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's bottom rung. Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, she left behind her middle class life as a journalist except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious "personality tests"; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they're vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich's income barely covered her month's expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times.