Natuurlijk is het een beetje gek dat een hoogopgeleide vrouw gaat doen alsof ze arm is om er een boek over te schrijven. Ze is niet echt arm, en het lijkt misschien alsof ze het doet voor aandacht, alsof het voor haar een uitstapje is.
Toch denk ik dat ze iets iets goeds heeft gedaan. Het boek gaat niet zozeer om haar, als wel om de mensen die ze ontmoet, de mensen die door haar een gezicht krijgen. De verhalen van de serveersters, schoonmakers en winkelmedewerkers. Zoals ze zelf ook schetst, zie je deze mensen niet vaak als je niet zelf ook zulk werk doet.
Tijdens mijn studie heb ik altijd ik de horeca gewerkt. Ik deed een studie, al was het niet zeker dat ik beter betaald werk zou gaan vinden, en toen ik dit laatste jaar ging uitrekenen hoeveel uur ik zou moeten werken om enigszins rond te komen, zou dat een goede werkweek van 40 uur betekenen. Dit is in vergelijking met de verhalen uit dit boek een positief beeld, maar ik schrok er zelf wel nogal van. 40 uur andermans shit opruimen, mijn rug en voeten kapot maken. En dan kon ik net alle vaste lasten dekken en een keer iets leuks doen.
Het is ronduit bizar dat je zo hard en zoveel moet werken voor minimumloon zonder goede arbeidsvoorwaarden, zonder pauzes, zonder vakantiegeld, zonder vaste tijden en dagen.
Dit boek schetst een extremere situatie dan hier in Nederland, maar toch denk ik dat we steeds meer naar dit Amerikaanse systeem toe aan het gaan zijn en dat beangstigd me. Je kan al bijna niet meer rondkomen van het minimumloon, al helemaal niet als je een alleenstaande moeder met twee kinderen bent.. en het rare is dat ik het gevoel heb dat niemand er echt iets om geeft. Er zijn de laatste tijd wel stakingen in het onderwijs en een aantal jaar geleden onder schoonmakers, maar of er nou echt iets verandert? Ik weet het niet.
Alle politici en beleidsmakers zouden dit moeten lezen, zodat ze begrijpen dat het oneerlijk is en er hopelijk iets kan veranderen.

What is the point of having a job? To earn money. That’s bad enough, but it’s more than that, because it’s never enough to just do your job. You job does you: asking for more and more and more until it becomes literally unattainable. That’s capitalism. But there’s the American Dream that dangles in front of you, always out of reach. Why do you think they call it a dream? It’s a trap, and few have proven that fact better than Barbara Ehrenreich, who in NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA, not only embeds herself in the lie of living on a minimum wage but supports her anecdotal experience with research and hard data. She works a succession of entry-level jobs in various states and comes back repeatedly with the same results. Most of these workers, including Ehrenreich, have to work multiple jobs and then still are either living check to check or become chained in debt. Housing, which should be a third of one’s paycheck, ends up eating most of their income, creating a loop in which the worker never escapes. It’s exploitation, plain and simple, an industry built on the backs of the poor. Poverty is profitable in America, and until the system changes this resource will be squeezed until dried and discarded. But don’t worry, capitalism will look for a new resource to exploit. Maybe it’ll be you.

First, a confession: I met Barbara in New York City some years back and we amiably discussed her books, my classes, and her son, who was about to give a talk on his book on the Middle East. NICKLE AND DIMED is her masterpiece. For one year under disguise, she took a series of minimum wage jobs in the USA, from carton packer at Walmart to coffee and doughnuts waitress. Some of what she found is disturbing: her fellow co-workers were highly religious, mostly apolitical, and many anti-union. Yet none come across as unsympathetic nor does BE weave a political theory of the American working class out of her findings.

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.

i hated this book so much but i can't get into why rn lol i'll tell you later

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For all the author says about the greatness of the American blue-collar worker (she even brags about her husband being one), she seems to think the work is beneath her. It seems like she is trying to shock her readers by exposing the harshness of poverty. But is it really that shocking for her employer to tell her she missed a spot when she's working as a cleaning woman? Sure, there are bad bosses out there, but you can't expect your boss to overlook your bad job cleaning a house just because you have a good education. Also, although I agree life can be desperate on a minimum wage, the author makes her own situation more desperate by refusing to share a room with someone else. It also strikes me as a little unrealistic that there are no assholes among the ranks of her heroic underclass, only among the bosses. Come on. Maybe I am just jaded because I feel like she has only written this book to communicate to other wealthy people who just CAN'T IMAGINE being poor, while my life is somewhere in between hers and the people she writes about.

Now, there are probably TONS of first-person stories written by people who are poor or were poor. "Angela's Ashes," anyone? They were literally starving. Even the writer of "Shattered Dreams" has only one suitcase full of worldly belongings when she goes off to get married... And she says she remembers helping her mother pour the concrete for their cellar. These are people I'd rather read about. People who are good writers, but don't brag about their intellect; people who experienced hardships, but made them into a damn good story.

This book was a huge eye-opener for me. My interest was held throughout the author’s chronicle of her personal (research-oriented) experiments with living off of minimum wage jobs. I would definitely (and have) recommend this book.

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

It didn't.



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

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

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

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

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

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