At the beginning of the book, Nickeled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich describes her expensive lunch with a popular editor, she then mentions the reality of her position as a white middle class female with a doctorate degree working an office job. Consequently, she mentions the opposing economic challenges faced by thousands of Americans with unskilled professions. Later on, she explains the effects of refusing social services, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to women working unskilled jobs for unlivable wages. As she mentioned, a waitressing and housekeeping were often paid $7-$8 an hour. A person had to work at least 50 hours per week to be able to afford rent, groceries, daycare, hygiene supplies, and transportation. The reality during 2001 was that jobs were most likely not to offer full time jobs to not provide health care. Therefore, a person working an unskilled job would …show more content…
In most companies, there was a manager, an assistant manager, waitress, buzz boys, hostess, dishwashers, and cooks. Each one of this positions had a certain action to complete and if such failed, then all failed with it. Even was Ehrenreich became a house keeper, there were the owners of the home, the manager, the team leader, and the workers. The house owners would not speak to the ‘maids’ and the housekeepers would do so as well. Wen out in their uniform, others would do the same. For many, and as mentioned in the book, maids were “stupid” and people who had “nothing better to do” (Ehrenreich, pg.100). Even when she began to work at Wal-Mart, there was a hierarchy with people ready to enforce authority over others. Throughout every job in America, one will find itself working within a functionalist perspective, abiding to the rules that somebody else dictates and enforces, and preparing us for the realistic hierarchy of power that our government consists