...Andrew H. Nguyen 6-22-16 AP English AP English 3: Nickel and Dimed Notes Argument: Ehrenreich argues that working minimum wage jobs will make it difficult to sustain one’s basic needs. Ethos: Mentions how most of her family are minimum wage workers (miners, factory workers, warehouse worker) giving herself credibility of having knowledge of the lifestyles of impoverished workers. (p. 2). Also is shown credibility by having a Ph.D in Biology (p. 3). Pathos: Talks about her sister’s difficult life with various low-wage jobs and struggling with “the hopelessness of being a wage slave” (p. 2) Co-worker, Gail, is forced to live with an annoying roommate in order to be able to pay rent in for just a cheap hotel. (p. 25) Forced to move to Key West...
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...By reading their conclusions, as a sociologist, I was able to formulate my own conclusions of how economic inequality is connected to social structures. When Barbara Ehrenreich immersed herself into the life of a low-wage worker she discovered how undoubtedly difficult it was to live a life wholly from paycheck to paycheck. She wrote about her experiences from her experiment in an article she named Nickel and Dimed. She starts from the beginning, she takes “a red pen to the want ads, which are suspiciously numerous. Everyone in Key West’s booming, “hospitality industry” seems to be looking for someone like me-- trainable, flexible, and with suitably humble expectations as to pay” (Ehrenreich 1999: 138). She decides she will not put down any advantageous skills she contains to make her experiment more accurate to the everyday low-wage worker. Before she begins her journey, she wonders “if 30 percent of the workforce toils for less than $8 an hour,” which analytically speaking is not enough to actually live off of especially if you take child care into consideration, “according to the EPI,they may have found some...
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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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...Minimum wage in America remains a common topic of discussion throughout the country, mainly because its gradual increase over the years sparks the argument: should pay for blue-collar jobs reach an amount resembling that of a normal career’s? Nickel and Dimed actively investigates that question by seeing if minimum wage in today’s modern world can suitably satisfy all of an individual’s living needs. Ehrenreich targets the working-class and owning-class citizens alike as her book’s audience, but it is certainly the owning-class people who claim that a minimum wage is an acceptable living wage that she aims to persuade otherwise. She occasionally cheats in order to maintain a basic semblance of security throughout her experiences; and had she be willing to explore those kinds of usual difficulties that the working-class unwillingly have to face, it would have supported her case by exposing the absolute worst of the worst of a life hanging onto existence by meager pay. Despite the particular...
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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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...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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...Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America is a novel that Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about her social experiment. She went undercover as a low-wage worker trying to live with the money she earns from work. There were rules that she have set for herself, however, she broke them throughout the experiment. If she had stuck to her rules throughout the experiment, then it could have gone a lot better and it would be more interesting. She would be able to fully experience how living in poverty would be like. As Ehrenreich starts her experiment, the first rule she had set was that “[she] could not, in [her] search for jobs, fall back on any skills derived from [her] education or usual work” (Ehrenreich, 9). Ehrenreich broke this rule when she...
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...After reading about Barbara Ehrenreigh’s plight in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, living as a low-wage worker is almost impossible, especially if issues are present that will impact work. For the amount of money earned, a bare bones lifestyle was extremely difficult to meet. Her standard of living, or “the level of wealth available to acquire material goods and comforts to maintain a particular socioeconomic style” (Griffiths et al., 2015, p. 202), decreased notably from her former occupation, especially when she was working with the maids, suffering rashes and pains. In addition, her income, defined as “the money a person earns from work or investments” (Griffiths et al., 2015, p. 201) left her with a strict budget that left her at the brink of disaster. Throughout all of her jobs, she encountered troubles with management, as they often mistreated their employees, especially in Jerry’s through a manager called B.J. and also in The Maids by a manager named Ted. When she completed her investigation, she realized that living costs were becoming too high relative to wages. Also, she found that the economic boom of the 1990s had little effect on the wages of low-wage...
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...have money to campaign therefore resulting in our political leaders all being rather wealthy citizens. When decisions are made for all citizens by people who have generally only experienced life from one viewpoint, decisions tend to be swayed to benefit the people in within their same socioeconomic status. This problem is also seen in education and the quality of education that one can receive. It is often seen in communities of lower class and poverty that there is a much lower quality of public education than those communities of more wealth. Many Americans drastically underestimate the amount of wealth inequality because they have been hidden from these statistics as people of middle and lower socioeconomic statuses. The book, Nickel and Dimed written by Barbara Ehenreich, is a documentation of Ehenreich’s personal observations. Ehenreich puts her currently life on pause and takes up the life of someone living strictly off of minimum wage pay. Many people have debated that someone could live off of only minimum wage if they worked hard enough and Ehenreich desired to test that theory. She uncovered that it was really difficult to live that life, emotionally and physically. Ehenreich did what she could to cut all unnecessary expenses out of her life and by doing so she finds that it there were still some things that she could not cut out. She discovered that housing was very difficult to find at a decent price in relevance to location of work. I have also found that this is...
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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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...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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...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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...knowing that the federal minimum wage was just too low and waiting was not going to change anything. According to the article, “$10.10 Minimum Wage Could Actually Create New Jobs: Study” from The Huffington Post by Jillian Berman the EPI’s report concludes a growing body of evidence that, “raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour would help a large swath of Americans...that a $10.10 minimum wage would have been enough to push more than half of the nation’s 10-million plus working poor out of poverty in 2011” (Berman Para. 5). The minimum wage that low-waged workers earn for a family of two is not even enough to support basic needs and living expenses. In fact a study from a July analysis from Wider...
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...Professor Armstead SYG 2000 Social Class Paper 20 March 2013 An Analysis of Social Class in the United States As we all explore the outside world, we all see the same traffic, stores, supermarkets, restaurants, and shopping malls. There is just one difference, we all live differently according to social class. The social stratification is a system of structured social inequality. It can be described as one lady going to Macys with her credit card wasting $1,000.00 dollars in merchandise and the other woman going to a store of discounts in clothing with a strict budget of $20.00 paying in cash. Another way I see how there are inequalities in our society is a simple question, can you afford to go buy a Michael Kors bag? If you can’t, then the Payless store it is to buy a look-a-like that can hopefully give strangers the impression that you’re not in the poverty sector. Those that are part of the super-rich see the poor as lazy; they deserve to be with meager needs because they haven’t shown merit to escape the poverty class, and the underprivileged that they have to pay out of their tax dollars to support them. Sociologists say we need the poor it’s good for our economy out of many various reasons that most of society doesn’t realize. At least journalist B. Ehrenreich saw what it was to not make it in America as an experiment to educate us all in the jobs of the working class from the article “Nickel and Dimed.” I know I became well aware of these differences through reading...
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