By Kelsey McConnell
Daily Bruin Contributor
[email protected]
Chronicling the plight of America’s working poor,
“Nickel and Dimed,” maps the daily lives of the
country’s hardest workers.
Barbara Ehrenreich is an author with a Ph.D. who forays into a
working class life in order to see exactly how one can move from
welfare into the job market. To do this, she makes a series of
temporary moves to three cities, taking little money with her. In
each, Ehrenreich writes about the alarming hardships in finding and
working entry level jobs and seeking out “affordable”
housing.
“Nickel and Dimed” has a simple, but effective
structure. There is a brief introduction titled “Getting
Ready” describing how Ehrenreich came up with the idea for
the book and how she prepared to begin her study.
The first chapter of the book is called “Serving in
Florida,” and, in it, Ehrenreich begins the first leg of her
journey in the working class world of the city in which she
regularly resides. Following, is “Scrubbing in Maine,”
which Ehrenreich says she chose to explore “because of its
whiteness.” The third chapter is entitled “Selling in
Minnesota,” detailing her experience in a local Wal-Mart. The
book ends with Ehrenreich’s conclusions about her
experience.
For a presumably educated, middle class readership, what she
finds in each location is startling. Finding a job means completing
frustrating rounds of phone calls, perusing want ads, submitting
applications, showing up for interviews, filling out personality
tests and even taking drug tests.
Ehrenreich ends up securing six jobs ranging from waitressing to
house cleaning to working at a home for Alzheimer’s patients.
She finds that each job comes with an intricate set of physical,
social and managerial complications.
Finding housing is as much or more of a challenge for Ehrenreich
than job hunting. In Key West, Florida, the beginning site for
Ehrenreich’s experience, she lives in a mobile home park. In
“Scrubbing in Maine,” she lives in a motel where rent
is slightly reduced after summer tourists leave. It is in
Minnesota, however, where she finds the most dire accommodations
and is forced into the “world’s worst motel”
after confronting the extreme shortage of affordable housing in
Minneapolis.
Through this experience, Ehrenreich accrues both poignant and
humorous anecdotes which, combined with informational footnotes and
a final chapter called “Evaluation,” weave a true and
compelling story about the bottom rung of American laborers. There
are certain moments of epiphany throughout the book, including
when, after laying in bed terrified of the night because of the
lack of a bolt on her door, Ehrenreich realizes that the lives of
poor women must be chronically filled with such fright.
Her style is more journalistic than conversational but she also
uses the book as a kind of journal, describing not only what she is
doing, but how she feels all the while.
Ehrenreich’s voice is crude and antagonistic at times, but
her overall style makes the book a fast and easily digestible read.
In addition, it unabashedly reveals the saddening and maddening
truths of the nation’s working poor, offering an incredible
amount of perspective on a world many cannot or choose not to
see.
Reading “Nickel and Dimed” provides much food for
thought ““ like how a low-wage worker can get ahead when it
simply isn’t possible to save up enough money for apartment
down-payments or medical attention. The book’s focus strays
from the usual topics like racism in the workplace to venture into
the less talked about aspects of America’s working poor.
Ehrenreich’s book is a must read for anyone interested in
learning more about the working class or anyone who considers an
eight-hour day exhausting. It is a great literary and sociological
achievement.
LITERATURE: “Nickel and Dimed” is
published by Metropolitan Books and is sold for $13.