Rating: 
Summary: Very Insightful!!!
Review: We all know a little bit about the work force in America, but with this book, Barbara takes you to a whole different level. You really get a sense of how hard it is to be working as a low wage employee, and how the people employed at these jobs are really workings their butts off, big time! Barbara makes her readers realize how underpaid the working class really is, and how hard it is to support a sufficient lifestyle.
Rating: 
Summary: This book serves a real need
Review: If you've had the good fortune to be born into a family that didn't live paycheck to paycheck and/or that encouraged you to go to college, maybe even helped pay for it (tuition, room, board, etc.), this book is the one to teach you true gratitude and how to understand the conditions of anyone who wasn't given the early foundation that you might have been lucky enough to experience.From a broader perspective, employment conditions are worsening every day for all of us, but the first to feel it and who are the hardest hit are those who are lowest paid and their children. Ehrenreich demonstrates how the less you make, the more odious the task, plus the less respect you get from your employers. How quickly people have forgotten that up until at least the mid-1970's, most any job included FREE health insurance. Benefits that didn't require co-pays and where you could go to any doctor you chose, not a restrictive HMO. What's more, it was free to include your kids and spouse on your plan. The class schedules of 99.9% of all respected universities are geared for people who don't need to work during the day. Tuition rates are increasing at a frightening pace. How much is it to ask that at the very least, those with money treat their employees with respect and compassion? Is it too much to hope that people with spending power not be obscenely wasteful and polluting while they're at it? Whatever your socio-political stance, this is the book to read if you want to to learn more about this shameful problem. At the very least, it will make you think. At best, it'll get you thinking about how you might choose to become an integral part of the various creative solutions that are so crucially needed.
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Summary: The Truth about Minimum Wage
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich is a great writer whom writes Nickel and Dimed to point out a lot of the poverty our people go threw. I really enjoyed reading this book because it relates a lot towards students, because they wish to find a job and be independent and living on their own, but what ends up happening is that with one job paying only minimum wage isnt enought to survive. They learn that because of the lack of education they are to have two jobs in order to live the life they look forward on living. Barbara teaches us that living in poverty is not a bad thing because you can also live happy without haveing a lot of money.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I thought that this was a great book. I never realized how hard the lower class had to work until now. Barbara Ehrenreich captures the hardness of people working for six or seven dollas a hour. She talks about how it is impossible to make a living on such a low amount and how hard it is for these people. I think this is a book that everyone should read and find out how other people live.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone should read this book
Review: Barbara Erhenreich, a journalist, decided to go to various cities and work in jobs that pay low wages (waitressing, housecleaning, WalMart employee) to see if she can get by. The point of the book is that she, in fact, doesn't get by at all. She has to quit her job at WalMart because she can't find affordable housing and is threatened with living in a shelter. This is excellent social commentary about what life is like for the millions of Americans who are trying to make it on a low wage. I don't care what your political persuasion is, you should read this book. Yes she is liberal. Yes she writes for The Progressive. Doesn't matter. The point in this book should be realized by everyone. You will read this and appreciate the hard work your waitress or maid or (insert job here) is doing FOR NOTHING. Of course Ehrenreich whines in this book! She is doing work that nobody wants to do and she is realizing that she isn't getting jack - not even appreciation- for doing these jobs. She is experiencing what millions of workers (many of them women) experience every day of thier lives.
Read this book. It will change the way you look at work in America.
Rating: 
Summary: ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Upbeat Muckraking
Review: Often authors writing to effect social change follow the Upton Sinclair model: detailed misery, barely suppressed rage, bleak outlook. Not Barbara Ehrenreich. This slim volume is kept lively with its self-deprecating humor and biting wit. True, some of the players are ready made self-parodies, such as WalMart, which urges its employees to think of their managers not as bosses, but "servant leaders", and of goofing off not as goofing off, but "time theft". But Ehrenreich goes beyond such easy pickings in her talks with the "Wal-Martians" to find deeper levels of comic thought. The servant leader at her job interview had read Sam Walton's book and "found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precisely fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can't remember the third". On the personality survey part of the application the servant leader assures Ehrenreich that there are "no right or wrong answers", and tells her ten minutes later that she's gotten three answers wrong. In her time as a maid in Maine, she learns that the trend in cleaning is to keep the use of water to a minimum. The focus is on the "cosmetic touches":fluffing pillows, combing the fringes of rugs, leaving a "fernlike pattern" with the tracks of a vacuum cleaner. The maid in Maine section is unlikely to cause housekeepers in New England to organize, but may welll give pause to those middle class millions who in the nineties go the absurd idea that they were too busy or exalted to clean their own homes. As maid, Ehrenreich notes all the quirks of the maid service system even as she cleans, exercising fully her gift for wry observation. At one point I thought she had veered into homoeroticism as she related scrubbing submissively on her hands and knees at the feet of a dominant rich woman (a certain Mrs.W), but it turned out that Mrs. W. had only come close to the scrubbing maid/narrator to remind her to do the entryway. In each of her jobs--waitress, maid, retail clerk--she details the frustrations and humiliations that anyone who had held such a job knows all too well, then couples this struggle with the struggle to find low cost housing--and never finds a viable match; that is, never finds a place to live that will not break her low wage budget. It should be noted that in this search for housing she only goes to multiplex corporate facilities such as motels and apartment buildings (and once to a trailor park), never exploring the possiblities in non-transient neighborhoods where apartments in houses or small buildings are offered by ordinary people needing additional income. This is odd considering activists' usual passion for community interactivity. Strange, too, is her classification of cigarettes on p.213 as a cost of living rather than an avoidable tax on the poor and ignorant, the very reverse of health insurance. She is silent on other tax matters that affect the poor as well, such as the flat payroll tax which begins gnawing into low wage workers' earnings the moment they pick up the cleaning rag. Nor does she say whether she conscientously calculated and paid (as required by law) the tax on her tip income in Florida. Still, NICKEL AND DIMED is generally thoughtful and a pleasure to read. A good sequel to it would find the author going undercover as a small (or large) business owner determined to make her enterprise successful while at the same time paying a "living wage" to her mostly unskilled and uneducated employees.
Rating:
Summary: This Book Taught Me Something About Life
Review: This book made me think. Right or wrong, good or bad, this book got me to re-evaluate some of the tenets I took for granted. What more can you ask for? Sure, you can complain about how you might think the author can't really know the "shadow class" of people, but that is not the point. All the author is trying to do is to study them as an outsider in their environment, like an anthropologist. With that in mind, I found I learned a lot. From the thankless waitressing jobs at crummy restaurants to the dreary life-passing-before-the-eyes repetition of Wal-Mart shirt restocking, this book reaffirmed my belief that everyone deserves respect. I never realized how impossible it was for low-income workers to get an apartment because they had no savings for the month in advance rent required. Or how they are then forced to blow their money on motel rooms which can cost double an apartment's rent or even more! I never gave a thought to how just not having a car can force you to stick with a job that others would drop in a second. Or how the lack of respect shown by employers can hurt as much or more than the low wages. What does it really mean to not have health insurance when you are breaking your back at a low-pay high labor job? (Of COURSE this is obvious, but as someone who doesn't suffer these tribulations I was ignorant of the true cost -do you eat this weekend or do you go to the doctor? If you don't go to work today you don't have rent for tomorrow.) How can you pick up a donation of food during work hours when you are working 10 hours a day -every day? All I know is that I left this book with more respect for people, and more chagrin at those who treat those with crummy jobs as if they somehow "deserve" the work they are doing. A book that teaches you something is a book to be remembered. Highly Recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money and get this from the library
Review: Perhaps if Ms Ehrenreich had actually lived the life of a minimum wage worker this might be an interesting book.
Rating:
Summary: The story they don't want to hear
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich came down from the ivory tower of academia and lived the life of the working poor. She knows what you know --- that millions of Americans work very hard for very little money --- and she was willing to document it by becoming a waitress, a house-cleaner, and a WalMart employee. Along the way, she learned about going hungry, uncompensated labor, the paranoia of employers over unions, and why so many poor people with jobs can't even get adequate housing. She saves the best for last. Anticipating the critics --- "Your evidence is anecdotal!" --- the final chapter gives you all the statistics. The result is like a smack in the face. You can't escape the personal stories OR the numbers. Of course, Ehrenreich can't win. This important study of reality in America will be disregarded because she didn't become a REAL poor person. She *only* did it for a few months. But that's understandable. Many people don't want this story told and they'll do whatever it takes to avoid it. But if you're reading this review, you can probably handle it. Buy this book, read it, and lend it to a friend.
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