...In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed, she leaves her Ph.D. and money behind and attempts to live in low-wage America. She investigates the hardships of living with such low wages and uncovers the truth about covering the cost of living with a minimum wage job. Ehrenreich exposes the injustices and corruption of living in the economy's lower depths. “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.” (pg. 27) Society preaches that people must eat healthy, what people do not realize is that healthy food is not accessible for all. Stores such as Whole Foods or Trader Joes are out of the question for people living on minimum wage. Throughout her journey through lower class America Ehrenreich did not have access to healthy foods, which is, simply put, an atrocity. During Ehrenreich’s first job as a waitress at Hearthside she works from 2:00pm to 10:00pm for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Throughout her time in Key...
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...Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, is very straightforward and clear throughout her personal account of life as a low-class citizen in the United States. First off, she incorporates statistics, data, and research during her story to back up her point. This technique allows her to successfully make a credible argument and be transparent with her audience. Additionally, the reader does not have to infer what Ehrenreich means by a statement as she continuously writes what she is thinking about. In particular, the author elucidates, “Today the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: 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...
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...There are usually resources available to help people in all sorts of situations. In the US, not only do American citizens have rights but immigrants have them too. Sometimes immigrants are scared and go through hard times because they don't know where to seek help. Fortunately, the help is there and is important to spread the word. If I were a counselor in Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, I would be advising George and Lucy, Barbara’s co-workers at Jerry’s Restaurant to seek help (2001). George needs to find free ESL classes and an attorney to get legal advice. Lucy needs to find medical coverage and look for housing assistance. This book is interesting because it looks at three different industries where its employees each share situations of poverty and hardships...
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...Nowadays, there is an idea of poverty of ambition, people want to drive fancy cars and live a luxurious lifestyle but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize his or her full potential. Throughout Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America, she sets herself up for failure. Most people, no matter what the job of the moment, see it as a way to get ahead later. By starting the experiment with the intention to fail, hence the name “on not getting by in America”, Ehrenreich sets herself up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. This self-fulfilling prophecy/bias is present throughout her whole experience causing her experiment to become tainted with flaws. Ehrenreich did not try...
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...I think Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is thoroughly written in a descriptive style that informs the reader about predicaments in the lives of low-wage workers. Her purpose in this memoir is to investigate the life of working in an “unskilled labor”, as she is in fact an upper-middle-class journalist. One of many issues had to deal with health. In the book, Ehrenreich says “After two days of minor [skin] irritation, a full-scale epidermal breakdown is under way...I wake up realizing I can work but probably shouldn’t, if only because I look like a leper. Ted doesn’t have much sympathy for illness, though; one of our morning meetings was on the subject of “working through it” (87). It’s really not fair that people would rather go to work...
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...Written in 1984 by Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not Getting) Getting by in America is an exposé portraying how it is to live with a minimum wage job in America. This piece is a form of a report on an experiment, which she acted upon. Though it may seem like a mocking action to the financially impaired, it was a genuine effort to bring attention to the issue. In brief, she set out to live first-hand what it was like to live with minimum paying jobs in order to bring awareness to the issue of having a poor class in the economical culture. She writes about the almost deplorable conditions in three different cities, Key West, Maine, and Twin Cities. Throughout the series of events, she ends up working at hotels, restaurants, and Wal-Mart....
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...“All roads that lead to success have to pass through hard work boulevard at some point.” (Eric Thomas) This quote states that no matter with road you chose to take, at some point you can be success if you work at it. We all have to work hard to get there. In the book Nickel and Dimed, author Barbara Ehrenreich goes through many road to see how others get to success. She puts herself in the shoes of others by taking various jobs in different locations. All of this helps her understand the motivation that people need to live, the unfairness of many work conditions and the struggle to get by. In the book, one of the elements that keeps popping up is the unfairness of many work places. People have to endure this because the almost have no choice if they want a paycheck. “They don’t cut you no slack. You give and you give, and they tale.” (Ehrenreich, 22) No matter how hard you try and work, it doesn't seem to help. They will use you for more than what you're entitled to do. And they still won't pay the employee what is deserved. Thats why some never show what they can really do in the work place. While Ehrenreich was in Minnesota,...
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...“The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. A full-time minimum wage employee earns $15,080 annually. In 2012, the poverty threshold for a single person was $11,945. For a family of four with two children, it was $22,283” -University of California-Davis. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich tells a powerful and tenacious story of the day to day survival of low-income workers in America. Her story transcends the disparity that exists between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat society and uncovers the dark truths that lie hidden beyond the popular portrayal of the “American dream”. The book gives the reader an insiders’ view into the world of the proletariat society, a peculiar place to which majority...
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...In “Introduction: Getting Ready” from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, she describes the experiment she performed in order to expose the conditions of living on minimum wage as well as accredit herself with the prerequisites for reporting on the subject. The introduction of Ehrenreich’s novel, Nickel and Dimed, was written with the intent to inform the audience of some background information that supports the rest of the book. One of the important ways she does this is by providing statistics and facts about the lives of those living on minimum wage. She does this mostly in the beginning of the intro: “were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”(1). In this sentence not only does she mention the sheer amount of people who are forced to live on minimum wage, but she also states the low amount that these women are being paid. By telling the audience this information she can convince the reader that the low class workers of America are not being paid enough. By using data to argue this point she is using the rhetorical device logos in her introduction....
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...Barbara Ehrenreich starts her experiment off somewhere near her hometown which ends up being in Key West, Florida. When she first arrives, her priority is to find housing, which she does for $500 a month and almost thirty miles away from her potential employment. Soon after arriving in Key West, she finds herself waitressing at a restaurant called Hearthside. While working there, she continues to have daily conversations with her customers and coworkers who easily open up about their at home situations, and you can tell she starts to feel for them. Working there for a while, Ehrenreich realizes that she is in need of a second job so that she will be able to keep up with her house rent. She begins work for another restaurant named Jerry’s, where...
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...Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, is a passionate writer. According to her personal website, she was born in Butte, Montana in 1941 to a family that were blue-collar workers. Her father was a miner and through tough work he went to get his degree from Butte School of Mines. From then on, Ehrenreich and her family traveled to various locations in her childhood. When she was in her mid-teens her family reached a middle class status and she was able to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon. That’s where she studied chemistry, but then decided to study physics instead. Ehrenreich made it to grad school at Rockefeller University. There were a couple of times when she switched from various majors, but in the end, she ended up in molecular biology and she received her Ph. D. In 1970, with the birth of her first child, she suffered a political as well as a personal transformation. In the sense when she questioned the prenatal care that she received from the hospital clinic that she was in. Ehrenreich, then became herself involved with the “Women’s health movement”, where woman can have...
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...In the chapter from “Nickel and Dimed” written by Barbara Ehrenreich, low class jobs are discussed as well as the entrapment in them. People working minimum wage jobs deserve to experience a decent standard of living. The jobs they do are necessary. We may think of them as jobs for people with nothing else going for them, but in reality we do need those people working there. Her experiences working menial jobs reminded me of my job at Walgreens. I started working there as a cashier or a “customer service associate” then began working in the cosmetics area basically cleaning things the whole time as a “beauty advisor”. The people would give fancy names menial jobs to make them see more important when in reality you could train a monkey to work there. If you were to have one person to sell the alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs and to help customers find things, you could have monkeys working at the register and cleaning everything....
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...In the nonfiction, Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, focuses on the topic of how the unskilled workers lived with the low payment hat are given to them. To summarize, Barbara Ehrenreich is a middle class woman that works as journalist, but goes undercover, abandoning her old lifestyle to become a low wage employee trying to survive with a payment of $6 or $7. Ehrenreich goes to Florida, Maine, and Minnesota which where she begins to work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aid, and Wal-Mart associate. Major characters that the author has encountered where Gail, Holly, Ted, George, and Marge. Some events that are worth mentioning, is the fact that Ehrenreich has gone through a difficult time looking for an apartment...
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...Nickel and Dimed is a novel written about the life of Barbara Ehrenreich, as an upper class writer, who went undercover to discover the pain and frustration of how so many Americans are not getting by in America. She leaves all her money and clothes and goes city to city trying to find a job and make a living with her laptop in tow. As she finds new jobs, she also finds new companions and learns that their struggle to escape the ominous thought of falling into poverty is large and never ending. Nickel and Dimed proved that It is impossible for minimum wage to provide an ordinary life for those working under a blue collar forcing them to grasp and fight for their survival. In the first part of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich decided to go to...
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...Nickel and Dimed In Barbra Ehrenreich’s novel Nickel and Dimed she gives you a play-by-play analysis of her life as a low-income working. She is setting out to reveal whether it is possible to be a single parent, with a low-income job, and kids. She feels the best way to do this is not to just spit out the already published statistics, but to go on a little adventure and actually becomes a person with a minimum paying job. Nickel and Dimed is her whole experience as an unskilled worker first-hand. And in what I would say is the thesis of the novel, Ehrenreich exemplifies exactly what she is trying discover; how does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? The argument is simple. Can you live on the salary of a low paying job?...
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