I had to read and annotate this book for an AP English class in High school, and before I tell you about how much I not only disliked the book, but also the authors point of view on EVERYTHING, you must know that I love to read and that it's a rare thing for me to come by a book that I disliked so much I could rip it apart. A book I spent money on, I could easily tear up.

She is so judgmental and rude in this book it's unbelievable.
She CHOSE to give up her "upper class" life for a LIMITED amount of time for journalism, knowing full-well when this is all over with, that she would be making a lot of money- and yet she still complains about EVERYTHING she does. This book doesn't explain the struggles of living on minimum wage- it explains how much this whiny, spoiled woman hates pretending to be poor. This lady thinks she is "oh so superior" compared to everyone else (and by everyone I mean her lower-class companions) that she can't even make friends or keep a friend. Instead she judges everyone she sees for having this lifestyle, huffs-and-puffs in her head, and thinks how she's so glad she's only pretending to have this lifestyle while wishing she could tell everyone "Yeah I'm actually not poor- just a journalist."

NOBODY CARES

It amazes me that she could possibly think so highly of herself that she refuses to even attempt at friends, because she knows that this isn't her real life. She would be embarrassed to be their friends when she goes back to her wealth. She is such a hypocrite about every little thing!

Also there was a certain part in the book that made me lose ANY traces of any IDEAS for respect for her that I MAY have gotten- automatically.
She mentions that she is an atheist, and one night she is bored so she decides to "crash" an event she noticed a church was having.
So, she goes to THEIR church, purely for "entertainment" purposes, to laugh at everyone in her head for believing in a higher power. REALLY? I don't care if you are an atheist, Muslim, Christian, or whatever! Just because you don't agree with other religions, that gives you NO right to go to THEIR property to make fun of them or get a little "laugh". That's so low, and disrespectful. I'm a christian and there're other religions I do not agree with, but do you see me going to THEIR church to tell them they are wrong? To mock them behind their backs and then write a book talking about it?? I may be young, but my maturity level is sky-rocketing next to hers.

I don't care about the big words she uses- ANYONE can do that. If you don't believe it, then go away and mind your own business. It's another thing when you really are considering to go into that religion, but she had NO intentions on doing that, because she is "alwaaaays right" she can never do anything wrong, because she is so perfect! Everything she thinks is true and there's no way around it!
NEWS FLASH LADY- YOU'RE A FOOL.

I'm sorry but this book made me so angry. She had a negative view on everything, she was racist, rude, crude, and most of all a hypocrite. If you're like me and don't like reading books that are all about this kind if character, then don't read this. It was a complete waste of my life.
She doesn't even deserve one star.

What I found most fascinating was the writer's progress through this account. Her first job she couldn't handle, she walked out. Her second job, she decided to organize her co-workers, and they just wouldn't be organized. Her third job, she decided to be the best worker Walmart had ever had, she just knew she could have gotten that raise to $7.75 if she'd stayed.

Be warned: This book nearly started a fight in my book club. Everyone's reactions were really interesting.

One of the best works of immersion journalism in the last century. It was shocking and urgent when Ehrenreich published the first part in Harper's in the late '90s and it is even more relevant now, as the gap between the haves and have-nots shows no sign of ever narrowing. I know people have their issues with the book, but I don't think you can really argue with the energy and resolve it took to report it and write it.

Hoooo boy this did not age well.

This is one of the books I've been meaning to read since it was first published. The author's exploration of low-wage jobs in Modern America is interesting while discouraging. She lightens the mood with a wry sense of humor. She worked at the sort of dead-end jobs I did before I graduated from college. Of course I wasn't trying to live on the peon wages since I lived at home. The pace moves right along, and I never drifted away from my reading. All in all, it met my expectation as a good book to read.

This book addresses what I, and others I'm sure, like to call middle class myths about being poor. Some of these myths include: if you work 40 hours a week you can afford housing, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford health insurance, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford food, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford a savings account, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford to take a day off to take your kids to the doctor, and so on and so forth. It is addressed from a first person account, too, as the book is about what happens when the author decides to live for several months at a time off just the money she earns from "working class" jobs. She starts out with a little start up money, but other than that has to find a job, housing, food, etc on the low wages earned by working as a waitress, for a cleaning company and finally at Wal-Mart.

Several years ago I started interning at a clinic where we saw homeless and indigent clients, and before I started I imagine smelly, scruffy men off the street coming in for counseling. We did have some of those, but what surprised me is that the majority of the "homeless" or "seriously indigent" people we saw were working mothers who just simply couldn't afford to live in our society and it shocked me into realizing that there are people in my country, and my city, who are working the best jobs that they can find at 40 or 50 hours a week and still can't afford to actually live in our community. Ehrenreich introduces you to these same people- some of them live in their cars, some in hotels, most of them on the couches of family and friends who are in the same position.

While I think a lot of us know, or at least have to assume, that these people exist we like to think its a temporary place to be, until they finally decide to pull up the ol' bootstraps and get serious about life. What this book shows is the grim reality that for the overwhelming majority, though, there really is no way out. Living and working like this only puts you deeper in a hole that, at this point in our country, is almost impossible to climb out of. It is very easy for those of us firmly in the middle class to sit back and feel good about ourselves that we've "worked hard" and "made choices" to have what we have, and to avoid being where "those people" are. However, what I know to be true, and what this book also reinforces, is that the majority, yes I would say 90%-95% of what separates "us" from "them" is circumstances beyond anyone's control- where you were born, who you were born to, the disasters that did or did not befall you, and the hard work done by those who came before in a time where hard work allowed really allowed you to get by.

I heard someone say that the horrible thing about Capitalism is that in order for it to work well, someone has to be going without. This book puts a name and a story to those "someone's", and I think you'll find like I did when I worked at that clinic, that once you have a person attached to the label of "poverty" you can no longer see them the same way. And maybe you really start to examine whether a system that only allows me the possibility of prosperity by requiring someone to be down and out is really worth defending anymore.

I found a used copy of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, last July, in a book exchange box outside of the front entrance of The Peaks of Otter Lodge in Virginia. I like to think that one of the housekeeping staff or wait staff planted it there. I hope so. In fact our lodge maid (sight unseen) left us little messages and sketches on the hotel note pad where we placed her tip each day for the week we were there. In my imagination she's the one.
The book was written way back in 2001 but sadly the premise still holds and, if anything, there are places where a living wage is even more difficult to obtain now in 2017. In a nutshell here's the experiment: Barbara Ehrenreich leaves her successful upper middle class writing career to go incognito as a : waitress, hotel maid, Walmart sales clerk, nursing home attendant and house cleaner in various locations around the country. She challenges herself to find food, housing and clothing on the wages she makes. I shouldn't need a spoiler alert to say, what she found was that, "you could work hard--- harder even than you ever thought possible---and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt." This book was a Notable book of the year when it was written and is now a classic.

I'm all for anyone who takes the time to shine a spotlight on the hellish existence of many folks with low-paying jobs. Therefore, I do appreciate Barbara's book. I spent many years in that life, and it's hard, very hard. At times she came across as being 'better' than the folks she was working with, which kind of rubbed me the wrong way. But, all in all, at least her book draws attention to the plight of the low-wage earner.

Minimum wage jobs in the U.S. suck ... big time ... especially waitressing at any family style restaurant. Enough said.

3 Stars = I'm glad I read it.

The amount of vitriol about the author and this particular book is surprising. I can see the criticism about her basically taking a "vacation" or "holiday" instead of a hard-hitting expose being valid. In spite of getting herself entangled in her employee lives it seems like this is an exercise in play acting. Though I largely agree with her economic takeaways her agenda seems predetermined and hence any methodology seems preordained. Even with all of these annoyances, the overall affect was one of of a shoulder shrug instead of an angry diatribe. Frankly this book did not do much for me and just mere weeks after finishing it I am at a lost of where or what she accomplished.

Mrs. Ehrenreich, an author of 13 previous works to this one and an activist, after the Welfare Reform Law went out to see if it was possible for an unskilled laborer to be able to afford any sort of subsistence. What she found was not terribly surprising to anyone whose head is not in the sand. Namely, that even in the best of times where the economy is roaring and the unemployment rate is low, still provides little for those on the bottom rungs. She goes about this in three locales, Key West, FL, Portland, ME, and Minneapolis, MN. She takes various hard labor jobs such as a waitress, home health aide, cleaning person and retail worker (Wal-Mart). Unfortunately, despite certain advantages such as having access to a vehicle and a healthy lifestyle, she is unable to sustain a reasonable standard of living. Even without any major hindrances such as a young child (daycare is quite expensive) or a health scare, she is faced with the realization that the system is not sustainable.

For better or worse, my biggest gripe of this expose was how often that Mrs. Ehrenreich seemed out of touch. As anyone who has worked a low paying menial job understands most of the management in these places are idiots. Yes, there are good ones out there but they tend to be few and far between. Most fall in either the gungho variety, where the company is never wrong and you just need to work smarter not harder. Customers are not obstacles to be dealt with but clients who are never wrong. The other camp are those that are burned out and just trying to make it through the day. Overall, they are easier to deal with and placate but some of those types can be the biggest snakes in the grass. I guess as newspaper columnist and acclaimed writer, Mrs. Ehrenreich does not have to deal with many of these archetypes. She also tries to score brownie points by saying she never has had a maid service and repeatedly claims she is in the middle class. I do not know at what income level she thinks the middle class stops at, but there seems to be few people in that class who could wantonly take 3 months off in the hopes of some 21st century muckracking.

Overall, I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich's conclusion that the Welfare Reform Bill ended up doing more harm than good. I wish she took the Clinton administration to task instead of pawning it all in the Republicans in Congress, who I have NO respect for either (especially Gingrinch). Her anecdotes were fairly entertaining. Affordable housing/lodging still seems to be the biggest issue in regards to people having sustainability. She set out to be a muckracker like Jacob Riis or Ida Tarbell but merely wrote a book whose impact is only superficial.

The two sentence summary of this book is: PhD and respected writer decides to find out how the other two-thirds live. To this end she goes undercover as an unskilled laborer at three minimum wage jobs (waitress, Wal-mart employee and Merry-Maid) each in a different city, each for one month.

Things I liked:
The premise.

Things I hated:
1. Her shocked tone of discovery. Newsflash! Living on minimum wage is hard/nigh on impossible! Educated people have it pretty easy comparatively! Entry level minimum wage work is kind of demeaning!

2. Her colonial-anthropologist-among-the-natives style that came across (to me) as super patronizing. Don't these people understand that easy office jobs are just on the other side of a college degree? Don't they understand history enough to fight for unions?

3. Her total shock that no one found her out as an educated person! Working in a diner in the next town over, she was never recognized! Shock!

4. This mostly just lost her style points, but she made a point to always have a working car (it wasn't HER car, but she rented a working car in every city she went to) and had a thousand (two thousand?) dollars of start-up capital to pay first and last months rent and eat while waiting for a job. I think her cover story (which again, she was hurt when no one asked for/cared about) was that she was a newly divorced former stay at home wife, on her own for the first time- so I guess it's conceivable she would have had a little cushion- but I would have found it much more interesting if she'd actually committed to the premise a little more. Especially because she was there such a short time. I know that working minimum wage jobs isn't fun, but couldn't you commit to more than a month? What do you find out in a month?

5. This is really the one that gets me- at the end of her time with the Merry Maids she "comes out" to her co-workers, telling them that really, she's a PhD! And writing a book! The main response is "So you won't be here to cover your shift tomorrow." Once again she is shocked and hurt! But man, if there was ever a teaching moment, she's been working with these women at back-breaking, soul sucking work for no pay and she's surprised that they're worried about how they're going to get though the next day? AGH.

(And also, WTF was she spending money on? I'm also a single healthy person with no debt or dependents and a working car, and I spend less than a thousand dollars a month sustaining my life style. I don't think I live THAT cheaply.)

It just seemed like she was writing from this privileged bubble of white upper-crust academia that I didn't know existed. She was presenting as astonishing findings what I assume to be facts of life for a majority of people.

So. That is why I didn't like this book. My mom, on the other hand, who has actually worked as a waitress to support herself, loved it.

In this book, the author moves to three different cities, pretends to be a homemaker re-entering the work force, and tries to survive on minimum wage jobs. It's not easy. She works as a waitress, at a nursing home, as a cleaning lady, and at Walmart. She lives in motel rooms and eats fast food when she has no where to cook.

I really enjoyed this book, partially because it was like a serious flashback to my own life. I went with Dale to South Carolina for 4 months in the fall of, I don't know, probably 2005, when he had a military school to attend. We lived in a hotel room the entire time. I had my college degree, but due to the brevity of our residency, I applied for low end jobs (including Walmart, a process she describes) and worked a couple - one as a cleaning lady, just like in this book - and got to know a cleaning woman at our hotel very well. (She helped me hide my cat in my room from management. :-))

That fall, I was working for pennies, cleaning people's pee off of the walls, and sweeping up dead cockroaches from behind their toilets. The managers at the apartment complexes where I cleaned treated me a certain way. They seemed to look down on me, the lowly cleaning lady. It didn't really bother me. I was pretty sure I was way better than them in my head.

A mere six months later I was back in Utah, working a high end sales job that I kind of accidentally plopped into. It turned out to be a perfect fit for me, and I began making obscene amounts of money. (Seriously, obscene, like more than brain surgeons get paid.)

Side note: I still can't believe they paid me as much as they did because, 1. I just sat and played games on my cell phone all day while talking on the phone to clients, and 2. I so would have stayed and done the same job for $75,000 a year. Or $50,000. Or less. Anything was a big step up for
a girl who was a cleaning lady 2 months earlier!

Anyways, after two years at that job, being rewarded, respected, and getting plaques on the wall in honor of moi, I turned in my high six figure income to be a stay at home mom. Now I have no income, no awards, no high bonuses, and nothing to show for my work other than the silliest monkey of a child on earth. (Which is way better compensation, anyways.)

I have never thought so much about my experience of going from low wage, to high wage, to no wage in such a short period of time before. I think I should write a book about it. I have so much to say!

Anyways, I enjoyed almost the whole book here, until the end where the author did her evaluation about how we should become a socialist country. Okay, so she didn't exactly say that, but I bet she is voting for Barak Obama, if you know what I mean.

Here is why I think she was a little overdramatic:

1. Your first few weeks at a job are always the toughest. I remember that from the cleaning job, the day I was given a hideously dirty 3 bedroom to clean. I almost sat on the floor and cried, realizing that just scrubbing the floor in the utility closet could take hours alone, and I was paid per apartment, not hourly. But I also remember the first couple months of my sales job being super stressful, in a different way. I came home one evening and crumpled to the floor of my pantry, sobbing. I just could only handle the pressure of the job so long before I lost it. You get used to your jobs after awhile though, and it doesn't phase you anymore. It happens no matter what, I think, you just can't expect it to happen in the first few weeks, or even months.

2. You always start at the very lowest rung on the ladder of success. It sucks, because everyone steps on your head and drops stuff on you. But typically, if you work hard, you will move UP that ladder and get to step on other people instead. Stepping on people is better than being stepped on. You just have to stick around more than a few weeks to get that opportunity.

3. You can be happy in any job. It's all attitude! For reals. I have worked sucky jobs. SUCKY SUCKY SUCKY jobs. And I was happy, generally.

One other comment section: I think I forgot to put this somewhere in my review, but I don't remember where I was going to say it. So it's just an end note now:

I got to know the cleaning ladies at the hotel I lived in. Particularly, I became friends with a black lady named Delilah Green. She helped me keep my adopted kitten Romeo (now a grown up cat) under wraps from the evil management who banned pets in the room. She had one grown daughter and a granddaughter who lived in Florida. She and her boyfriend and some of his family shared an apartment across town, and she'd ride the bus in. Occasionally I would give her a ride home when she missed the bus, and I got to see where she lived. She'd been a drug addict for years, until she sobered up and found Jesus about two years prior. She was working hard, and working her way back into a real life. Other soldiers from Dale's class didn't like her, and swore she
was stealing their beer from their fridges. It ticked me off. They were drunk at 3 AM enough for me to be pretty well aware of who was drinking their alcohol.

Anyways, whenever I read about these poor working class blue collar women, I picture my friend Delilah. Granted, she had a lot to learn. I gave her a $50 tip and she told me that she used it to buy food and beer for her old druggie friend who had just got out of jail. She was thrilled to be able to help someone, but I was hoping not to have my tip go to buy a prison reject alcohol. My point is, the people who are in poverty often have a reason. They are in their own way. Maybe they use drugs, or they sleep with lots of different men, unprotected, and not married to any of them. Surprise, they get four kids with no dads to help support them. I KNOW this is not the case with every welfare recipient or low wage worker, but often there is blame they need to shoulder. I liked that Delilah took responsibility for what had happened to her, and was grateful for a second chance.

I would really like to read a book that tells the other side of this argument, not just her socialist-esque opinion. It has me thinking a lot.

PS. Finally, I would like to say the following: there were approximately 579 other things that I read in this book that made me think, "Oh wow - I totally want to comment on that in my review on goodreads.com". This was a very brief (okay, actually it is super long and only my sister will probably read the whole thing, but brief in comparison to what I was THINKING about), and random (because it's what popped into my head while I was typing tonight) discussion of my feelings on this book. Does anyone want to join a book club and read this book then discuss it with me? Please please please? For reals, I just had to stop typing because my review got too long, but this is a fascinating topic, and very interesting book that you can't put down.

Mam z tą książką problem, a właściwie mam problem z autorką. To reportaż wcieleniowy, czyli sytuacja kiedy reporterka by zdobyć informacje na jakiś temat zmienia swoją tożsamość by wejść w sam środek jakiejs społeczności, grupy, etc. Spotykam się z takim rodzajem dziennikarstwa po raz drugi (a moze trzeci?), pierwszym bardzo udanym był „Przyszło nam tu żyć. Reportaże z Rosji” Jeleny Kostiuczenko, przy którym ani przez chwilę nie czułam zażenowania czy niestosowności. A u Ehrenreich było mi niewygodnie i niezręcznie co chwile.
Jest pierwsza dekada lat dwutysięcznych, autorka zatrudnia się jako kelnerka, sprzątaczka, a potem sprzedawczyni w różnych miejscach w Stanach, by dowiedzieć się jak sie żyje za najniższe stawki, i czy w ogóle da się za nie godnie przeżyć. Oczywiście ukrywa swoją tożsamość przed pracodawcami czy współpracownikami (no chyba, że już po zwolnieniu postanawia odkryć karty przed kolegą/koleżanką i wyjawić, że wcale nie jest biedna i to tylko eksperyment). Można się zastawiać nad etyką takiego działania czy rzetelnością doświadczeń, bo autorka wie, że cokolwiek się stanie zawsze może wrócić do dawnego życia. I ok, taki jest zamysł książki i przyjęty rodzaj antropologii - sięgając po nią wiedziałam za co sie zabieram. Ale niestety za dużo tu autorki a za mało merytorycznej wiedzy o gospodarce, prawie pracy, programach pomocowych, etc. I dla mnie zdecydowanie za dużo poczucia humoru (!), klasizmu i wzgardy, i tego wiecznego zdziwienia w stylu „i wy tu tak żyjecie?”.
„Jak ubogie są moje współpracownice? Sam fakt, że ktoś pracuje w charakterze sprzątaczki, można prima facie uznać za dowód desperacji, a przynajmniej skutek błędów i rozczarowań”.
I oczywiście ukazanie perspektywy osób, którym nie starcza na godne życie, nie dlatego, że są leniami, ale dlatego, że system jest jaki jest, jest niezwykle cenne. Niemniej mnie podczas czytania coś uwierało, nieodpowiały mi niektóre reakcje autorki czy wypowiedzi. I na koniec sama nie wiem co mam o niej myśleć