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

~ (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; First Owl Books Edition edition (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805063897
• ISBN-13: 978-0805063899
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,099 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49,479 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 72 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.

56 of 64 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.

28 of 30 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.