Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Barbara Ehrenreich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2003

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 311 pages
• Publisher: Wheeler Publishing (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587243687
• ISBN-13: 978-1587243684
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,264 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,635,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia, USA.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 119 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, but ultimately worthless as a social experiment, April 5, 2006

By 

GadgetChick - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

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

This was the first Barbara Ehrenrich book I read, and it will probably be the last. I am concerned about matters relating to America's working poor and was drawn to the book because I thought it might provide some insight about how people really can live on the income low-wage jobs provide. The last time I worked a job that came close to minimum wage was a number of years ago, and back then I was in college and had campus housing, student loans etc. as a backup. There are many people in the U.S. trying to subsist on low wages, and I thought maybe this book would help me understand what they're going through and what they need to better their situations, so that I can use that information in my own advocacy.

Instead, I found that this book is mainly about Ms. Ehrenrich and her prejudices, insecurities, and snap judgements about people. Other reviewers have said the same things, but my biggest problems with the book were:
- The whining. This woman whines about everything. The work is physically hard. She's tired at the end of the day and her clothes smell bad. She doesn't sleep well because she's petrified of someone breaking into her room and stealing her laptop. She gets a skin rash and it itches, so she calls her "personal dermatologist" (must be nice to have such a thing) and gets help. Waaah, waaah, waaah. I really wished she had spent more time talking about social impacts of working poverty, or the experiences of the people she worked with who were TRULY poor, than whining about her own discomfort.
- The fact that she regularly took "breaks" from her experiment back to her old life, and she continued to access financial and other resources during the experiment. That's not a luxury the real working poor have - to just step away from their life whenever the going gets tough. The fact that she did seriously undermined her experiment.
- The fact that she just doesn't seem interested in working that hard, or doing things that may be unpleasant. I think this, more than anything else, showed Ehrenrich's true colors as a privileged middle-aged woman who has very little capacity to understand the very people she's writing about. She's shocked at how dirty the kitchens where she works are, and how the smells of the restaurant "cling" to her when she gets home. She gets unreasonably angry when patients in a dementia unit throw food at her (hello, the patients have DEMENTIA, they aren't doing it on purpose). Cleaning houses is nasty because you have to deal with cleaning up people's body hair and bodily waste. Her shifts at Wal-Mart and her job cleaning houses make her tired because she's on her feet so much, and she expresses surprise, because after all, she works out and is in good shape! There were many times during the reading of this book that I wanted to roll my eyes at Ehrenrich's privileged cluelessness. Yes, work is not always easy or fun. What a revelation! You get the sense that not only does Ehrenrich want employees to be paid more for their work, but wants the work these people do to be clean, pleasant, involve no bad smells, and be psychologically rewarding at all times also. Sorry, but the world does not work like that. Ehrenrich works as an academic and author and so it's no surprise she's been shielded from the harsh realities of life, but the whining and hand-wringing she did over her 'dirty jobs' was really over the top, if you ask me.

Ultimately I felt the book did a poor job of getting Ehrenrich's point across. What I took away from the book is "poor people have to work nasty, stinky jobs that are awful. Oh, and by the way, they don't get paid enough." As another reviewer mentioned, civilizations are built on the backs of unskilled, low-wage workers, but the U.S. has evolved to the point where we should be able to provide at least a living wage and health care to everyone and bear the costs of those things. But that's not Ehrenrich's issue. She seems indignant about the fact that people have to serve food or clean houses or stock retail shelves AT ALL and seems to believe humans should not be subjected to such indignities. What Ehrenrich would have those people do for money instead, I am not sure, as we can't all teach in private colleges and write books for a living. There will always be services that need to be performed and a need for service workers, and many times the same people working service jobs are the same people CONSUMING services from other service workers, something that Ehrenrich completely ignores - in her world, only overprivileged yuppies or fat white people consume services like restaurant food or discount store clothing. Ehrenrich would have done better if she cut the whining in this book in half and focused more on the economic realities of the poor. As it stands, she just ends up reinforcing the conservative idea of "the liberal in the ivory tower" and does little to advance concerns about the plight of America's working poor.

113 of 133 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I really wanted to like this book but..., March 11, 2002

By 

Cherie Clark (Morrisville NC) - See all my reviews

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

I'm not sure I'll be able to adequately explain my feelings about this book. While I expected to love it, it left me disappointed. But I can't understand all the anger I've seen in reviews I have read. Barbara Ehrenreich's heart is in the right place, I'm just not sure that she has the proper attitude or experience to write a realistic picture of what it's like to try to survive on a low paying job. She tried, though, and I suppose I need to give her more credit for that. Her premise is that no one can have a decent standard of living while working for minimum wage, and I agree it's very difficult. But she believed that before she started her experiment, and I don't think she learned anything new from her adventures in the world of low paying jobs. She only searched for details that confirmed what she already believed, and in the end, she persists in placing blame on the workers who probably feel trapped in a situation they don't know how to leave.

I think that the major fault I find with this book is Ms. Ehrenreich's attitude. She seems condescending towards her fellow employees and resentful towards her employers. And at all times, it's obvious that she can't understand what it really feels like to have to live on what she's making. She knew she would never have to. Her attitude towards her co-workers is perhaps understandable. What seems most inconsistent to me is her opinion towards ALL of her bosses. I was especially disappointed in her description of one of her managers at Wal-Mart. She introduced her boss, Ellie by saying "I like Ellie", but then went on to scornfully describe her style as "the apotheosis of 'servant leadership'...the vaunted 'feminine' style of management." What's wrong with a person in a position of responsibility showing some respect for those she manages? Why couldn't Ms. Ehrenreich just accept her good luck in having a supervisor who was a genuinely nice person? I'm sure Ellie isn't getting rich on what she made at Wal-Mart, either. The pay scale for EVERY job within that store probably compares unfavorably to any work with which the author has ever supported herself!

The author's attitude towards the people whose houses she cleaned in Maine also troubled me. They are not the cause of the low pay and long hours she and her co-workers endured. It was obvious that Ms. Ehrenreich was ashamed of cleaning houses, of being in a role she saw as subservient. It isn't like that for everyone. Friends I have had who cleaned houses for a living, even through an agency, often became friends with the people whose homes they cleaned and I never had the impression that my friends felt inferior to the homeowners. However, it does seem obvious to me that the owner of the agency Ms. Ehrenreich worked for was being very short sighted when it came to his attitude on wages. By refusing to even consider a pay raise for his employees in what seemed to be a tight pool of potential workers, he was guaranteeing that his business would not grow.

Many of my personal feelings about this book come from the fact that from 1980 until 1993, I supported myself with a series of low paying jobs, everything from fast food worker, to telephone sales, to even Wal-Mart. Did I live well? At times I did. Most of that time I worked at least two jobs at a time, often with fewer than one or two full days off each month. But like Ms. Ehrenreich, I had the advantage of being a single woman with no children to support. I have no doubt that had I been raising children, I would have needed some kind of financial assistance. Things I could choose to do without as an adult would not be an option for a mother. Could a mother with children live without a car? Could I have given my children a good life without access to affordable health insurance? Could a mother with children live in a three-room furnished attic apartment with about 300 square feet of space? I have nothing but admiration for all the people supporting themselves and their families on low wages. Often people who knew I worked two jobs would ask why I worked so much, even inquiring if I had children to support. I always laughed and replied, "If I had children, how would I afford all the child care I would need to pay for to work so much? When would I have time to actually spend time raising my own children?" But even working up to 60-70 hours each week, the most I ever made in a year was about $18,000 gross. A careful, single woman (or man) could manage pretty well on that. But how could anyone support a family on those wages? While the author feels sorry in an abstract way for the difficult position of her fellow workers, she didn't come away from her experience with much compassion for them. She still doesn't understand that in the world of workers with few skills or little formal education, there are few choices, yet most of these people work very hard and take some pride in what they do. I expected this book to display more respect for workers who provide very necessary services to our society.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A great example showing how the wealthy in the U.S. have no idea, August 8, 2009

By 

Jason Stokes (St. Louis) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

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

Ehrenreich tries to live like the working poor do in the United States - and in some respects, she does so. She lives in cheap motels, works jobs for barely over minimum wage, and understands the headaches and plights of her coworkers. On the other hand, she does it in a halfway manner - starting out with a fund of money, always having access to a car, purchasing items far out of her price range, and so on.

From my perspective, the book best illustrates how a wealthy white woman can make it somewhat as a poor white woman, but does not fully engage and understand the plight of people who have to live it. She buys expensive belts, clothes, and justifies spending money on things that most poor just wouldn't do. I realize these habits are almost hardwired into our consumer culture - but the criticisms are right - she did a lot of the sabotaging of herself. However, that doesn't reduce the challenges in aggregating the capital to move into a real apartment, at affordable rates, that most poor just can't muster.

Of particular interest to me are the health concerns faced by the poor - from lack of care, to woefully inadequate nutrition (empty calories from convenience stores and overpriced prepared grocery store food), to the rigors of 8-16 hours of manual labor. Barbara, as a fit woman, well fed and exercised throughout the years, struggles after a month - how do people who do it full time for decades manage?