Type of bind: Paperback
ISBN number: 0965187705
Label: Metropolitan Books
Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
Page Count: 225
Printing Date: 2001
Publishing house: Metropolitan Books
Sale Popularity Level: 266224
Studio: Metropolitan Books
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Rated by buyers -
Nickeled and Dimed has an interesting premise: an upper middle class woman tries to live on wages of an unskilled jobs in three different locations in the US. Here Ehrenreich describes her experiences doing just that and tries to relate these experiences to a larger frame of reference by laying out statistics about the US.
From having done this and that over the summers while in college and having spent the past year earning 3.85/hour plus room and board I can sort of compare my experiences in accessing Ehrenreich's book. Two things that made Ehrenreich's experiences harder than they probably would be for a person who was living the life that she was trying to visit are that she moved around frequently and she wasn't as frugal a shopper as she could have been. The moving around means that she was always starting fresh. From my experience after about 2 months in a city I know where to go for this and that and my expenses drop. Also she wasn't the most frugal person. When she had to get khaki pants on short notice for a waitressing job, she spent 40$ on pants with a stain from a discount store. In Florida (the same state) at about the same time I had to get khaki pants on short notice and found them for 15$. I'm kind if fat and so there was less of a selection for me than for someone in a more common size. I doubt that normal people in such jobs would spend 40$ on pants. 15$ felt like alot to me. From Ehrenreich's description she didn't bat an eye at 40$
Ehrenrich's descriptions of co-worker's plights are more realistic. While it isn't so hard to get by at poverty level (unless you get sick like missing work sick) I have trouble imagining how to raise a family on minimum wage. Descriptions of co-workers whose food budget was tiny are common. I kind of wonder how these people felt about being quizzed. I feel that there was too much focus on rent and food. These are big expenses but they are predictable. Once one finds a way to make ends meet that's stable at least.
One aspect of being poor that I feel was neglected was the lack of medical care. Insurance coverage is expensive and if it doesn't come with the job then that is a big budgeting item. Also jobs without benefits are the one that pay less. Also the difficulty in getting sit down work if one gets injured is a huge issue. Ehrenreich kind of touches on these with statistics and concern for a co-worker with a sprained ankle respectively, but she spends most of her time discussing how the nations poor can't buy food or make rent and trying to make poverty an immediate life or death issue. For me poverty is about not having a safety net.
When I was working for 3.85 and room and board (no benefits at all) I had a co-worker with higher pay use this book to explain how easy I had it. At the time I was trying to scrape together enough for a dental visit and pay some work related expenses. (I had switched jobs and underestimated the fees for work related training and equipment.) She was angry that I was having trouble getting cash together because that reflected badly on the company. Which brings me to a point: Everyday you are in contact with someone who is living at poverty level. Because they shower and know how to get by you may not realize this. The starving limping people Ehrenreich describes aren't common, but that shouldn't be used to undercut the problems faced by poor people who are not in an emergency state right now. It seems to me that many of the people I know who have read this book have strange ideas about the poor to begin with. So if you haven't been poor for a while then don't make this your only source for info about it.
I reccommend Nikeled and Dimed, but take it with a grain of salt. Ehrenreich is a tourist of poverty and has a shallow impression not a deep understanding of the issues.
Rated by buyers -
This is a well-written, interesting, anecdotal book about a well-educated woman's sojourn among the working poor. If only the author had stopped there, the book still would have been a hit. Instead, the author chose to claim it to be representative undercover reportage. Unfortunately, she does not do this with any objectivity, as she views all that she does through liberal, rose colored glasses. Nor does she live as the truly working poor do, as her existence is isolated, cut off from all support systems. While the author received raves from the New York Times Book Review, which acclaimed the author as "...the premier reporter of the underside of capitalism", the reader should remember that the New York Times is the bastion of East Coast liberalism, and take such praise with a grain of salt.
The author comes across as a somewhat vapid individual, whose inherent biases and expectations prevent her from being able to live as a true member of the working poor or interact with them on a truly human level. She objects to having to take drug tests in order to secure a minimum wage position, stating that the costs of such a test outweigh the benefits, without any clear understanding, other than the cost of the drug test itself, of what the potential costs of employing substance abusers would be. She authoritatively uses statistics willy-nilly without grounding them in an appropriate context. The author does, however, establish one very important key point that would certainly tend to keep the working poor running in place, and that has to do with the cost of housing. The book leaves little doubt that there needs to be more affordable housing for the working poor. Yet, the author offers no suggestions as to how that would best be accomplished.
Moreover, the author, during her work as a cleaner for a cleaning service company, seems to have a lot of negative things to say about people who have had some demonstrable achievements in life. The author seems to forget that in almost every chapter she does not hesitate to remind the reader that she holds a Ph.D, is middle class, educated, yada, yada, yada. The one positive thing that comes out of her experience as a cleaner is that she points out that some cleaning service companies are doing a pretty filthy job of cleaning people's homes. Thanks, Barbara, for the tip, as I would now never consider using such, preferring to do it myself. Unfortunately, her remarks just might cause some of these companies to lose business, causing them to cut back on personnel, the very working poor of whom the author writes.
While the book is interesting at times, the pretentiousness of the author is generally grating and the books ends up being a poor execution of its promise. The author is the quintessential do-gooder, placed in settings of which she has little understanding other than her own pre-conceived, ideologically based ones. It is true that minimum wage will never allow anyone to flourish without some sort of support system in place. Minimum wage is nothing more than what its name states it is. Minimum wage, however, allows the unskilled, minimally experienced worker to get some job experience and a proven track record in terms of the work world. Moreover, some of the problems that the author mentions are just those of bad management by those in positions of power. This is not, however, a situation relegated to those who hold minimum wage jobs. Corporate America is rife with bad management and bosses that treat their employees, even well-compensated ones, badly.
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