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.

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.

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.

I read this in honor of Labor Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book that comes to mind frequently as I read about current events.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/op...
24June20 - Quotes of quotes in New York Times 'Opinion'
"The American economy has become more ruthless, as declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders, decreasing real minimum wages, reduced worker protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers"
(My emphasis = "Ruthless" "Ruthless!")

“Nationwide, essential employees earn an average of 18.2 percent less than employees in other industries.”

“low-wage workers risk becoming collateral damage.”

“preservation of the status quo,” adding “the forces that seek to maintain plutocratic and corporate dominance are very powerful and influential.”

“Low-wage workers are doing really badly and this will destroy our society.”

“Countries with greater unionization rates adopt more robots, presumably because unions raise labor costs.”

... “equalizing opportunity by reducing the barriers that block progress for African- Americans,” but “I have been around long enough to be a bit cynical about the prospects.”
“Currently 5 percent of doctors in the U.S. are black,”

... the focus should be on a reduction of “the gap in pay between doctors and nurses, nurse’s assistants and home health care workers, jobs that are much more likely to be held by blacks,” which would “make far more difference in the well-being of the African-American community.”
***
***
Tempted to add fifth star ... my mother devoted most of her short life to serving other people for low wages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ehrenreich works in scut jobs and writes about it. She has been plowing the field for many a year and does another good job here.

So, the author got paid to wait tables in Florida, clean homes in Maine, and organize clothes at Wal-Mart in Minnesota. All right, all of that is completely believable. What's difficult to comprehend is that she also gets paid to write books.

She makes a lot of great points, but the style she does it with is totally condescending. She's so pleased with her own concept that she cannot help but remind readers at least every ten or so pages that she's actually very highly educated. "You might think that the tasks of cleaning a house would be easy for someone with a Phd . . ." Oh really now, would I? She thinks this is some grand undercover scheme and that she's some clever spy and is so excited with her own little game because she really does believe that she is somehow better than the other people working in low wage jobs. "It's so difficult to believe that these people don't realize I'm actually educated and upper-class." The part about "Barbara" versus her mean lower-class Wal-Mart alter-ego "Barb" is outright offensive. "I'm really a better person than this." Okay Barbara, just keep telling yourself that. It's liberal elitism at its most annoying.

I want someone else to write this book with all the same points about worker justice, except the new version of this book needs to also be well-written in addition to making a bunch of good points.

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.

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.

I wanted to like this book. I thought the premise was fantastic. But overall, as someone who actually has lived on minimum wage (even supporting a child on minimum wage back when minimum wage was scary low), this book comes up short in several ways.

First of all, Barbara Ehrenreich has a horribly privileged, ivory tower view of how poor people must live. While she does talk to some people who are scraping by, she assumes the majority of poor people make the same crummy decisions as the few to whom she spoke.

Throughout her anthropologic immersion into semi-poverty, she makes choices that the savvy poor (of whom there are many!) would just never make. She eats out instead of picking up beans and rice at the bulk section of the supermarket. She rents a pay-by-the-week hotel instead of asking around for a roommate. It's true that people do make these choices, but the only folks I know in my town who chose the roach motel route were also doing meth or had lousy rental references from too many parties or property damage.

I just think this could've been done much, much better, and it was disappointing. It's sort of like the movie Crash, which I also disliked intensely. A book (or movie) with a message shouldn't bash you over the head with the message. It doesn't need to be over the top to make a point, which can actually turn the reader (viewer) off enough that the message is lost.

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.