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.

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.

My biggest question picking this book up, at least 15 years since it was a nonfiction phenomenon, is would it still be relevant in 2017? Would her data be relevant, especially after a recession, an economic boom, and a disgruntled white working class swinging further and further to the right?

As I finished this in literally the last hours of 2017, I found that the book was not entirely what I expected. It is not facts, figures, charts, or the typical research that I find in my social science texts. It's stories. It is one woman's attempt to take on an identity she never had; single, working class woman without the education or connections to get her anything other than a minimum wage job. The stories were by no means obsolete. They are maybe better-told these days, in part because of Ehrenreich's book, but we have heard them and I think there's more of a general awareness that no one, literally no one, can scrape themselves out of poverty and live the American dream with the labor system we have set up in this country.

Having been in a non-research role similar to Ehrenreich's, I cleaned houses and worked retail after obtaining my master's degree. Before grad school, I had days where I literally taught French at a college in the morning and scraped dog poo out of cages at a shelter in the evening. She and I both had an important distinction from the majority of Americans: if things got really bad, we could call family to feed us or pay medical bills, and we knew this life was temporary. I do not think the importance of that frame of mind, or the knowledge of a wealthy family as safety net, can be underestimated.

This book made me think of an interesting moment from those days. I was cleaning a man's house in Richmond, Virginia, when he came home early and had a brief conversation with me. The look I remember on his face upon meeting me was utter confusion. What was it, I wondered? Was I older or younger than he expected? Whiter? Better spoken? More or less attractive? Dirtier? What was it that made him walk away frowning and chewing his lip in concentration? Assumptions are made about maids, and most of them are wrong. No one I worked with ever even thought of stealing. All of us were white. Most of my co-workers were well under 30. Ehrenreich does an excellent job sprinkling research and observations from other books about the kind of demographics that we expect to see in certain roles, and how those change with culture. One of the things I appreciate about her book is her awareness of race and the fact that her own gets her into a better position (especially in the South) than she would have as a non-white.

The weaknesses of this book is that Ehrenreich is a little too preoccupied with her own "status" and likes to remind the reader repeatedly that she has a PhD and doesn't have to do this. I try to understand why she would share this, but it becomes tedious and reads as pretentious. It is almost as though she is subconsciously trying to insert the differentiation between herself and the people that she is supposedly an advocate for. It reeks of white savior.

I do think she shows incredible sympathy toward one of the less-understood aspects of poverty and that is the emotional and psychological toll of working constantly without adequate respect or compensation. She details her own anger, depression, anxiety, lost sleep, commitment to the approval of abusive supervisors...even though none of this is her reality. And she nails this part.

The only other true criticism I have of the way this book is set up is that she went in with an objective. She knew what she would find, and this is more or less her documentation of finding the thing she knew was there. I would love to see this journalistic experiment repeated and written about by someone who believes welfare-users are moochers, the poor are lazy, and there are millions of opportunities to make it in America without race privilege, an inherited access to education and/or wealth, and perfect health. Let's add children to that mix, as well, since most people that live in poverty are women with children. I would love to see what comes out of that experiment, and how they justify the fact that they are unable to demand anyhing other than the lot they are given.

In short, this oral history of the working class still carries a lot of weight. It is by no means obsolete. However most of these stories are well-known at this point, and I ask myself...what difference did it make REALLY?

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.

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.

I think the entire point of this book was to 'prove' that minimum wage jobs by their very nature and pay scale CANNOT support people, even people with all the advantages she had (and none of the additional disadvantages the poor often have.)

I don't see this book as even trying to be any kind of an exhaustive look at all the difficulties facing those truly living in poverty and attempting to get by.

What I do see it as is an attempt to prove to middle-income Americans that even with all the benefits she has, even she cannot make it work under the current system, and thus neither would they.

I studied poverty and social/welfare systems in university, although I found this book much later, and I have heard people actually using the following arguments to support their views of the Bootstrap theory:

"Well, she would be able to make it work if she didn't have out of wedlock children / wasn't a teen mom" (-a child or children, -childcare costs)

"Oh, well, he would be able to make it work if he controlled his addiction" (-an alcohol or drug addiction )

"Well, she would be able to make it work if she took charge of her life and got out of that relationship" (-an abusive partner)

"Oh, well, he would be able to make it work if he just took public transportation." (-lack of transportation)

"Well, she would be able to make it work if she just learned English" (-English as a second language)

"Well, it wouldn't be a problem, if he hadn't screwed up in the first place..." (-bad credit, -felony convictions, -homelessness etc.)

"Oh, well, she would be able to make it work if she just got her GED / took classes." (-no high school diploma or GED, -lack of basic computer skills)

and so on, ad nauseum.

I think her book is very cogent if you read it for what it is - a lesson to all those smug folks out there who think that it is somehow the fault of the person living in poverty because they are not doing/whatever ENOUGH.

Those attitudes are out there, all around us, and this book is a tiny way of showing them that those in this situation can never manage to do enough to 'bootstrap' their way out of it under the current system.

For the most part, this is a really eye-opening read. It describes an experiement by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich where she takes a series of minimum wage jobs (waitress, hotel maid, housekeeper, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart employee) and tries to survive on the earnings from those jobs. "Surviving," it turns out, means living in crappy hotels and eating fast food while trying to keep two jobs. Her descriptions of the dirty secrets of the jobs she takes are really interesting - when she cleans houses, she describes how the maids essentially just wipe away dirt without actually bothering to disinfect surfaces - but I'll be honest, I was a little disappointed by how few explosive behind-the-scenes revelations she gives her readers. Also, she's really reluctant to tell exactly which restaurant, maid service, hotel chain, and nursing home she was employed by, although she had no trouble name-dropping when it came time to work for Wal-Mart. I wanted to know exactly which restaurant that was "part of a well-known national chain" (called "Jerry's" in Ehrenreich's book) makes servers prepare salad with their bare hands and usually doesn't have soap in the employee bathrooms. As muckrakers go, Ehrenreich is a bit of a wimp.
She also can't seem to shake the whole "I Am A Fearless And Noble Journalist Who Sacrifices Everything FOR THE PEOPLE" mindset she starts out with. When she quits each minimum-wage job to move on to the next one, she makes sure to tell her fellow employees that she's (gasp!) NOT actually a divorced woman with no college education, she's actually a JOURNALIST with a PHD who's INVESTIGATING THIS ESTABLISHMENT FOR A BOOK!!!
Ehrenreich is clearly expecting her fellow employees to be shocked and awed by her espionage skills and applaud her for pretending to be One Of Them so she can write a best-selling tell-all, but that doesn't happen. Every single time Ehrenreich reveals her true identity, the response is an overwhelming, "Um...good for you?"
And it is hilarious.

Read for: Surviving the American Dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the Like, Teresa.

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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.

A classic now in the field, and I've long used an excerpt from this in my Intro. Sociology reader for our week on Poverty in the U.S. Still, I remind students that this is the only author we read that doesn't have the "street cred" of a "real" sociologist, some "union card" (Ph.D., mostly) as a behavioral or social scientist, or social theorist or philosopher of some sort, as Ehrenreich is a...gasp....journalist! (I'm reminded of perhaps my own bias about this as I was critical of the layperson sociology that Vance did in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.) Still, our own experiences are all we have, and both are attempts at a more objective, systematic study and explanation for the lives of the poor in the U.S.

Even as a "reporter" or social critic Ehrenreich uses the social science (anthropological, in fact) technique of "participant observation" as she does "undercover" as a poor person in a number of jobs typical for the poor: dead-end, low-pay, no benefits, no security, harassment (including sexual harassment) and mistreatment to be expected, etc.. As Manuel Castells, the Spanish sociologist of globalism noted way back in The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach in our cities the worst, most dirty jobs will always be "held in trust" disproportionately for women and people of color (interesting he didn't name immigrants, but I suspect he meant them, too) and these are the types of jobs someone posing as one with no marketable skills gets such as a hotel maid and in food services, as Ehrenreich did.

Students in my classroom get their middle-class validations of the poor as lazy and of circumstances most entirely of their own making blown up by this reading, and I think it does create authentic empathy for those less fortunate (of course, many of my students come from lives with these types of jobs, and even work them themselves) but also an understanding of how our culture is predicated on somebody doing the "dirty work". Students are particularly taken, and it turns into a great conversation on censorship and parental rights and ideas of "protecting" youth form certain ideas when I share with them the power of this book, as detailed in the links below from six years ago. (In short, a "Tea Party" legislator in NH was horrified when his son brought home a copy of this as a required course read in school, and they both agreed it was "un-American" to study poverty in the U.S.. The principal (surprisingly, doesn't always happen!) backed up the teacher that the students had to read it, and the legislator pulled his kid out of the school (who cares) but actually filed a bill with the House that would have allowed a parent to disallow a school from forcing their child to read any book or curriculum that they found offensive. (Luckily, the bill didn't make it out of committee.) There is also coverage of this by FOX news, although I can't bear to look at it as I know my eyes will burn from the comments section...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/...

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/nh...

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

I realize I'm nearly a decade late to the "party". The party being this book. Sonofa... However, the theme is still relevant, especially with the recent downturn in the economy and the high unemployment rate.

The author decides to go "undercover" to get the scoop on getting an entry level/minimum wage job and try to set up a household on the wages from those jobs alone. She tried this in different regions of the country (Key West, FLA., Maine, Minnesota). She tried different work; a maid, a waitress, a WALMART employee. (That takes balls.)

She finds the work often physically draining, sometimes demeaning, and the pay... not worth a damn. She discovers that a trip to the doctor will break your budget. She also found trying to set up a "home" was a challenge, especially finding a home that she felt safe in.

All of this makes me understand, rather sadly, why people decide to become strippers and pimps. I know I'd rather make my money by gyrating in some perverts face a few hours a night rather than work for Walmart. (Who wouldn't?!?!)

As for pimpin'? Well, it ain't easy, but it has to pay better than $7 an hour.

This book has deservedly become a classic because of its premise: Barbara Ehrenreich, the author, spent several months actually trying to live on minimum-wage jobs as a house cleaner, waitress, sales clerk, and nursing-home aide.

I'm in awe of Ehrenreich's courage and originality in taking on this venture, and her writing is readable and vivid: The exhaustion, aching back, itching rash, sweat rolling down her legs, crabby customers, besmeared toilets, never-ending toil; scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, and running back and forth to tables, and folding the napkins just so, while an elderly resident suffering from dementia throws a glass of milk all over her, and the (male) boss snaps at the (female) workers for daring to sit down for one second...Repeated seven days a week. Finally, after a double shift, to collapse in a "home" where she can barely fit into the bathroom.
Ehrenreich combines her narrative with bits of sociological analysis, data, and snippy commentary.

My main criticism is that it feels too detached. I don't get any deep, gut sense of despair, exhaustion, or panic--most notably, no sense of the financial desperation that most of these workers surely must face. Partly, I think that's because Ehrenreich isn't really living this life. As she admits, she always knows that there's a middle-class bank account and home cushioning her, and she can return to her own real world whenever she wants.
Of course that's unavoidable, but maybe the book could have provided more insight if she'd talked with some of her co-workers or their friends. I understand that she couldn't "break her cover" by formally interviewing them. But could she, for instance, have hung out and gone drinking on a weekend?

Although this book was researched and written nearly a quarter-century ago, it is still--unfortunately--relevant today.
I hope that I will have much more appreciation for the workers I encounter the next time I eat at a restaurant or stay at a hotel.