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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Paperback – May 1, 2002
| Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHolt Paperbacks
- Publication dateMay 1, 2002
- Dimensions5.92 x 0.69 x 7.78 inches
- ISBN-109780805063899
- ISBN-13978-0805063899
- Lexile measure1340L
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Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Review
--Diana Henriques, The New York Times [Business Section]
"Jarring, full of riveting grit . . . This book is already unforgettable."
--Susannah Meadows, Newsweek
"Angry, amusing . . . An in-your-face expose."
--Anne Colamosca, Business Week
"With grace and wit, Ehrenreich discovers . . . the irony of being nickel and dimed during unprecedented prosperity."
--Eileen Boris, The Boston Globe
"Ehrenreich is a superb and relaxed stylist [with] a tremendous sense of rueful humor."
--Stephen Metcalf, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Barbara Ehrenreich . . . is our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism."
--Dorothy Gallagher, The New York Times Book
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- ASIN : 0805063897
- Publisher : Holt Paperbacks (May 1, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780805063899
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805063899
- Lexile measure : 1340L
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.92 x 0.69 x 7.78 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #790 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #817 in Poverty
- #2,086 in Economic Conditions (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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.
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Nickel and Dimed is written by a journalist who took a year "off" and joined the entry-level working class as a full-fledged member. She became one of the people who work at the McDonalds and the Wal-Marts, and who are so frequently lampooned with the snooty "and do you want fries with that?"dismissal. They are, in short, the people who do a lot of the dirty work in the bowels of our body politic.
This is a disturbing book. It's meant to be. We can justify (or rationalize) ignoring its message by focusing on the law and on our "business." But we should listen to Jacob Marley: "Mankind was my business!"
The author begins with a premise that seems to make perfect sense: "In the buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one."
The author's travels take her to Key West, Maine, and Minneapolis. She works in restaurants as a server, where this 50 year old Ph.D. is called "waitress" and occasionally is demoted to "girl." She works as a "dietary aide" in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home, where her job is to single-handedly ensure that dozens of incompetent old people are well fed, that the dishes are sanitary and that no mistakes - like a sugary sweet on a diabetic's tray - endanger her charges. She works in the "soft-lines" of a Wal-Mart, where her primary job is to pick up after clothing shoppers who don't return items to the racks. Finally, she signs on with The Merry Maids, one of the leading housecleaning franchisers. There, she cleans other people's houses - and their toilets.
The importance of this book is its new perspective on poverty. Just as John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me shocked a nation of readers with an inside view of racial segregation, Nickel and Dimed is one of the first inside views of the working poor. Generally, the poor don't speak with their own voice - they just have non-poor people who speak for them with (I think) the very deepest of good intentions. Those "in the pits," though, the soup kitchen servers, the rescue mission pastors, the low-end housing providers aren't writing books and speaking out - they're too busy sandbagging against the overwhelming floodwaters of human need
One reviewer compares Ehrenreich to H. L. Mencken. She has the scalpel of Mencken, to be sure. But she also takes a heavy, blunt object to traumatize apathy to these neighbors of ours. Nickel and Dimed is full of enduring images: the vacant stares of nursing home patients wearing only their adult diapers; the pregnant housecleaner who gets faint every afternoon from inadequate nutrition; and the three kinds of [feces] stains in a toilet bowl. When asked if a particular middle class family is rich, one housecleaner replies, "If we're doing the cleaning, they're rich" And the cleaners sometimes seem grateful to be wiping up after others: "After all, if there weren't people who have far too much money and floor space and stuff, there could hardly be maids." Nickel and Dimed drums away on the class theme that we seem only comfortable with living, not talking about. But what we have done as a society is what authorities as far apart as George W. Bush and Jesse Jackson say that we never can do - we have left these people behind. "I've noticed that many of my coworkers [at a Wal-Mart] are poor in all the hard-to-miss, stereotypical ways. Crooked yellow teeth are one sign, inadequate footwear is another."
Ehrenreich finds both cruel irony and indignity in the Wal-Mart experience. There, the "family" of employees come and go through a revolving employment door. If someone is lucky enough, they may get to stay long enough to have management lead The Wal-Mart cheer: "Give me a W . . ." Well, there's the indignity. The irony comes about from employee functional poverty in the midst of the retail Mecca. The sales people have to wear (and furnish) shirts with collars. Ehrenreich describes a co-worker waiting, waiting for a $7 shirt to be "clearanced," because "At $7 an hour, a $7 shirt is just not going to make it to my shopping list."
There's no Potemkin-like call to action in Nickel and Dimed. It's "just" an accurate portrayal of the way millions upon millions of people live. As we play our games of golf (which I love), and eat regularly at T.G.I. Fridays (seen by the $7 an hour crowd as an impossible luxury), we can and we do forget the hopelessness of working poverty.
"If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" I think it does, for the poor and the not-poor. And that may be the saddest thing about life today under our American flag.
Top reviews from other countries
The author is a writer who decided to live (by working) on minimum wage for a while. She moves state, finds housing, finds a job, settles into a routine then moves on to start again elsewhere.
It's an uncomfortable read with a vague feeling of the author staring at humans from a different species - most readers will never have experienced conditions in which low paid workers live and, whilst it's very difficult to admit to, there is an underlying feeling of looking through the bars into a zoo. As she gets to know her coworkers at each company and the group is humanised the authors approach softens - a major breakthrough being the acknowledgement that we all want to be appreciated regardless of money being earned.
The author appears to be outraged by the conditions suffered by low paid workers and, as this book is intended to stir up some opinions, then this is entirely appropriate but I'm not quite sure that she should be outraged. How does she think people live on $7 an hour? It's not news that life is impossible on these rates of pay but what is the most engaging element of this book is the insight about the individuals she meets during her travels. Many people generalise the "poor" and these book turns the group into people, promoting an urge to thank waitresses more regularly, smile at check out operators and maybe even just notice maids!
I found the authors attitude a little self righteous but have to admire her greatly for going out and finding out what is actually happening rather than just listening to others.
A criticism would be that the book was published in 2001 and has not been updated since. There is little reference to welfare available in the states that she visits and I would have been interested to know what the position was then and is now. I feel more reading coming on!
This book made me think .... a lot.
These editions are compact hardback books - smaller than the average paperback. The print may be too small for some, but I haven't struggled with reading it; and due to the size of these editions, they are easy to carry and read anywhere.
This book was written by a journalist investigating what's it like to be a low pay worker in America.
The author took various low paying jobs and tried to survive on the wages and had a very tough time.
Jobs such as cleaning turn out to be very demanding physically leaving the workers with permanent damage to their bodys. The cleaning company charged $25 per person hour but only pays the worker $6.65 per hour.
The high cost of housing and low pay means workers cannot just give up their current job and look for another as they will not be able to pay their rent while looking for a job.
Other low pay workers cannot afford health care to fix heath problems, the health problems then cause them to lose their jobs and get even poorer.
Poor public transport in many parts of America means if you cannot afford a car you choice of jobs is limited to your local area only making the choice of work for the poor worse.
It comes obvious that been poor in America actually traps people when vital needs such as health care and transportation are only for people that can afford it. No wonder social mobility in America is so bad and the poor have decreased in wealth in the last 30 years while the rich have gotten even richer.
It opens your mind to something you could always see, always knew was there, but somehow failed to grasp, accept and appreciate.
It resonates in the UK with the Zero hour contract that puts all power into the hands of the employer and appears in most cases to be used to keep the workforce subservient (Im sure in limited cases zero hour contracts are great).
Highly recommended read.









