Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Paperback)

by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) "Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with..." (more)
Key Phrases: The Maids, Key West, Twin Cities (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.

As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.

So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
In contrast to recent books by Michael Lewis and Dinesh D'Souza that explore the lives and psyches of the New Economy's millionares, Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, etc.) turns her gimlet eye on the view from the workforce's bottom rung. Determined to find out how anyone could make ends meet on $7 an hour, she left behind her middle class life as a journalist except for $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for a month at a time. In 1999 and 2000, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Key West, Fla., as a cleaning woman and a nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and in a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minn. During the application process, she faced routine drug tests and spurious "personality tests"; once on the job, she endured constant surveillance and numbing harangues over infractions like serving a second roll and butter. Beset by transportation costs and high rents, she learned the tricks of the trade from her co-workers, some of whom sleep in their cars, and many of whom work when they're vexed by arthritis, back pain or worse, yet still manage small gestures of kindness. Despite the advantages of her race, education, good health and lack of children, Ehrenreich's income barely covered her month's expenses in only one instance, when she worked seven days a week at two jobs (one of which provided free meals) during the off-season in a vacation town. Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805063897
• ISBN-13: 978-0805063899
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1,096 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,911 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bold and engaging, May 19, 2001

By	Robert Aarhus "ClosetOtaku" (Alexandria VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Hardcover)

I heartily recommend this book as a sobering and engaging look at the trials and travails of low-income workers in America. Ehrenreich captures the desperation, fear, and all-too-frequent fatalism of minimum-wage employees, their demanding and often hypocritical managers, and the indifferent, affluent society that surrounds them. Eminently readable (I finished in just under a day), Ehrenreich handles with humor, insight, and not a few footnotes the problems our economic system has handed the workers at the bottom of the pyramid.

On the downside, Ehrenreich lets her personal politics show through unfiltered, and I wonder if the image of the poverty-level worker she has fashioned is sometimes little more than a strawman. By their own admission, many of the workers she portrays have made poor life-choices; would increasing wages, providing decent benefits, and constructing a more "compassionate" work environment result in workers dumping their abusive partners, perpetually poor money management skills, work habits, or addictions that account for much of their misery? It's a chicken-and-egg question Ehrenreich dances around (or ignores, I couldn't tell which). And, while Ehrenreich holds corporate America largely responsible for the inequitable and inhuman treatment suffered by the workers, she fails to explain how a corporation that tolerated substance abuse, shoplifting or other forms of theft, and absenteeism -- all of which she personally has no qualms about in her co-workers -- could stay in business, let alone not be shut down by a government agency or sued out of existence in a product liability case. Ehrenreich describes reality at the worker level while short-changing realities at other levels.

Nevertheless, it is not Ehrenreich's purpose to debate the complex interactions of the nation's economy. She is, first and foremost, an observer -- and she marvelously succeeds at conveying her first-hand experience as an undercover laborer. Numbers do not lie: she conclusively demonstrates that market conditions do not make "minimum wage" equal to a "living wage". She is not a John Howard Griffin -- when the going gets tough, she unapologetically dips into her previous-life resources while musing how hard this must be for the REAL minimum-wage worker. Her self-imposed one-month stays at each job site left me feeling she hadn't captured the full stories behind many of her reticent co-workers. Yet Ehrenreich must be praised for her willingness to go through this ordeal at any level, and her book is far more illustrative than a stack of journals and articles of reporters who tackle this issue from the outside.

The real story of this book is that a well-educated, resourceful, healthy woman was unable to make her ends meet in low-wage jobs across the country; what should we expect from a portion of the population that lacks one or more of those advantages? Welfare "reform", as we know it, has not dispelled the struggling of the low-income wage earner. While I may disagree with Ehrenreich's proposed solutions, this book convinced me of the need for action.

415 of 502 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walking a Mile, July 4, 2001

By	Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Hardcover)

I know my the name of my UPS delivery man--I know that he likes to play soccer, that he projects a cheerful and energetic personality, and has for the last ten years he's delivered to our office. I know the name of the woman who serves my friend and me breakfast each Friday morning at a chain restaurant. I've bought charity lotto tickets from her sons and know the story of her daughter who died when the insurance company insisted on using a cheaper lab. I know that when minimum wage increased, management cut her hours so her paycheck remained the same, but the workload increased. But I don't know anybody at the copy shop, the fast-food joints, or even the grocery store. They all merge with the background, human servants of the commercial machine upon which my life depends.

NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA tells the story of what a privileged and articulate writer experienced when she attempted to live as an "unskilled" working class person. Barbara Ehrenreich spent time in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota holding down jobs as a waitress, nursing home aide, cleaning woman, and Wall-Mart "associate." She attempted to live on the wages these jobs paid--without drawing on her skills as a PhD, author, or lecturer.

Ehrenreich writes well. Her story engages the reader from the first page of the introduction to the final page of her "Evaluation" chapter. Her frustration leaked through the page and into me. I became enraged at the humiliating bosses and the abusive working conditions--and then I'd close the book and reflect that millions of people endure worse with no hope of writing up their notes and producing a best-seller from their experiences.

While the anecdotes of Ehrenreich's experience were at least entertaining, her evaluation of the experience became the most interesting part of the book to me. She evaluated her experience through the Liberal lense of class conflict and power dynamics. It would be interesting to read a companion volume written by a "Conservative" journalist who ventured the same experiment.

She discovered that while no job is truly "unskilled," the low wage jobs that she got made physical demands, some of which could be damaging if performed month after month--even for a physically fit person. She found few no rewards for heroic performance, that "the trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day" (p. 195). She found that it is nearly impossible to earn enough money to survive on with just a single job, even during the tight labor market of 1999:

"Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high" (p. 199).

She examines the pressures exerted on workers to keep them subservient and from asserting their power. She challenges the idea that we are a democracy if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts to a "dictatorship" in the workplace. She also speculates on the depressive effects of the disempowerment to which the "working poor" must submit.

Ehrenreich challenges the myth of the American Dream. Even her co-workers subscribed to this myth, working hard so that someday they, too, could live affluent lifestyles, failing to evaluate the extreme unlikelihood that they would ever leave the ranks of the working poor. Our last elected president came up from poverty--so did his opponent, Ross Perot. "This is America, anybody can become a millionaire!" That is the myth--one which keeps the workers docile. Ehrenreich believes that eventually that myth will be rejected:

"Someday ... they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption" (p. 221). Although she never actually uses the word "revolution," her book demand that it's time for the "Compassionate" Conservatives to stop telling the workers to eat cake and to pay attention to the growing inequalities in our society.

Five stars for the courage to do the research and five for writing style. I only give her conclusion four stars because I believe her experiment deserved a better epilogue, more forcefully dispelling the post-Reagan myths about poverty and upward mobility. Regardless of your political/economic beliefs, this book demands to be read. Perhaps you'll evaluate Barbara's experiences and come to different conclusions ... or perhaps you'll find that you start seeing people who had been an invisible part of your life all along. Don't avoid this book, you owe it to yourself and to the people who stock your shelves, run the cash registers, deliver food to your table & clean your hotel rooms.

(If you'd like to dialogue about this book or review, please click on the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Working Without a Net, July 12, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Hardcover)

In an attempt to determine how the roughly four million American women recently "booted into the labor market by welfare reform" are going to make ends meet, essayist Barbara Ehrenreich decides to enter the unskilled labor force herself to do a little old-fashioned hands-on reporting. Surely, she reasons, she will find subtle "hidden economies" that only low-income people know about which help them survive their poverty.

But instead of hidden economies, Ehrenreich discovers that the working poor have to struggle against hidden costs. Unable to scrounge up lump-sum deposits for an apartment, for example, they end up paying a premium for their "housing" by renting motel rooms by the day or week. Without a kitchen or refrigerator, most can't cook inexpensive meals and must instead consume greasy, empty calories at fast-food joints. Unable to pay bills on time, the poor pay penalties and high interest rates. Unable to afford health care plans, they either do without or go deeply into debt when they finally, as a last resort, seek medical attention. And these are people who are working!

Ehrenreich learns that while rent is highly sensitive to changes in the market, wages are remarkably resistant to market forces and seem to hover everywhere at $6 or $7 an hour. "Help Wanted" signs are everywhere, yet wages don't rise to entice workers. Ehrenreich tries three times in three locations to see if she can balance her personal expenditures to her income as an unskilled laborer. And in spite of several advantages, such as an education, a car, and no children to feed, she just can't do it. Not by waiting tables, not by cleaning homes, and certainly not by clerking at Wal-Mart. The closest she comes is in Portland, Maine, where she manages to secure a tiny efficiency apartment that consumes an astonishing 40% of her earnings. To keep it, however, she must work seven days a week at two exhausting jobs. Moreover, had she tried to remain during the summer tourist season, she would have been driven out of town by the seasonal rent increases.

In her quest for a livable wage, Ehrenreich (with a Ph.D. in biology) enters a world in which she is referred to primarily as "baby, honey, blondie, or girl." She meets the maids, clerks, attendants, and short-order cooks who make up the backbone of the nation's indispensable service economy. Although Ehrenreich claims, oddly, that no one she met during her investigation was homeless, some are living in vans and in the backs of pickup trucks. Those with actual roofs over their heads are typically crammed into one- or two-bedroom apartments along with half a dozen friends, acquaintances or relatives. At one point, Ehrenreich tries to get public assistance. She spends 70 minutes and nearly $3 in phone tolls ultimately to receive a voucher for only $7 worth of food. So much of the national safety net.

Despite the grimness of the overall picture, Ehrenriech reveals it to us with a self-effacing humor that keeps her tone sympathetic but not sentimental, potent but not preachy. Nickel and Dimed is an exquisitely well-written book with linguistic gems on every page. The book is also packed with gee-whiz insights into a world that many of us touched upon only briefly in high school and college, back when someone else was still responsible for the bulk of our upkeep. This book is humbling, informative, inspiring and even funny. Highly recommended reading.