Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America

On this now basic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most unique social critic, goes “undercover” as an unskilled employee to disclose the darkish aspect of American prosperity.

Thousands and thousands of People work full time, 12 months spherical, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich determined to affix them. She was impressed partly by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised {that a} job―any job―may be the ticket to a greater life. However how does anybody survive, not to mention prosper, on $6 an hour?

To seek out out, Ehrenreich left her house, took the most affordable lodgings she might discover, and accepted no matter jobs she was provided. Shifting from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she labored as a waitress, a resort maid, a cleansing girl, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart gross sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. In a short time, she found that no job is actually “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting psychological and muscular effort. She additionally realized that one job just isn’t sufficient; you want at the least two should you int to stay indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiousness, and shocking generosity―a land of Large Packing containers, quick meals, and a thousand determined stratagems for survival. Learn it for the smoldering readability of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a uncommon view of how “prosperity” appears from the underside. You’ll by no means see something―from a motel rest room to a restaurant meal―in fairly the identical means once more.