Rating: 
Summary: Don't like your job? Try this...
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative report from the low-wage heartland of America is an eye-opener. Prompted by wondering what it would be like to live on minimum wage, she set out to actually try and do so. Although her journey was relatively short, as she worked intermittently at six jobs over a period of two years and always had the option of returning to her upper-middle class life, or dipping into cash reserves should it become absolutely necessary, Ehrenreich nevertheless presents a convincing picture of life at the bottom end of the job market.
That picture is not pretty. Working hours are long, the work is tedious and tiring, the pay is abysmal and management is relentless in its demands. Discipline is much stricter than in many white-collar jobs, where employees are free to socialize, run minor errands, surf the Net and so on, without having to keep a weather eye out for the manager if you are talking to a co-worker for thirty seconds or if you have to do something important like make a call to try and find accommodation. In addition to their other disciplinarian foibles, many employers seem to have developed an unhealthy dependence on drug-testing. While this might be justifiable for jobs which involve serious risks, such as air traffic control, it is hard to see why it is required for waitressing or selling plumbing equipment. A more significant cause of lost productivity is probably sleep deprivation, especially for workers who have to hold down two jobs to make ends meet, but this is one issue that does not seem to be on anyone's radar screen.
On the other hand, many workers are able to avoid the risks of driving while underslept or under the influence, by the simple expedient of not having a car. For those without wheels the sparse distribution of public transit combined with urban sprawl and the tendency of cheap accommodation to be far removed from most places of employment not only make getting to work a daily struggle but also represent a serious obstacle to checking out or accepting other employment opportunities. For those who can't stand the idea of losing mobility there is always the alternative: give up the apartment and sleep in your car.
On top of this, it is almost impossible to save money on low wages. One consequence is that many workers cannot save enough for the deposit on an apartment and are reduced to living in decrepit motels, which are actually more expensive in the long run. Saving for retirement, or any other purpose, is out of the question. So are sick days. One of Ehrenreich's co-housemaids soldiers on with a possible broken ankle for fear of missing a day's pay. While America's patchwork medical safety net may catch those with life-threatening conditions, those with lesser but still serious ailments, and their concomitant expenses, are left on their own. Diet is another problem. Much cheap food is processed crap, loaded with fat and sugar but of low nutritional value. This includes the food aid Ehrenreich receives from one charitable agency. Since many motel-living workers lack fridges and stoves, storing and preparing the constituents of an adequate diet are much more difficult than they are for everyone else. Some workers put in a full shift - or more - fuelled by nothing but snack food.
The core problem for the low-wage worker, however, is the lack of affordable housing. Rent, as Ehrenreich puts it, is the deal-breaker. While a Spartan lifestyle in other respects might be maintained on minimum wage, the level of rents constantly threatens to push people - people with full-time jobs - into food banks or homelessness.Ehrenreich has a writer's eye for detail and a strong sense of irony. It should also be noted that, while not heroic, it does take a modest amount of grit for a fifty-something woman to leave a comfortable life and travel alone to strange cities to start out in minimum wage work. She is sympathetic and respectful to her co-workers and a scrupulous observer of her own responses to the various problems and surprises she encounters. While it is clear where her own political sympathies lie, she generally lets the facts speak for themselves. The story they tell is miserable enough. For all the rhetoric that is sometimes heard about the redeeming value of work, the reality is that this kind of labour is nothing but a grind, offering not deferred gratification for the sake of some future reward but simply the opportunity to exhaust oneself again tomorrow, with the prospect of a better life exactly as distant as it was yesterday.
With regard to the big picture, including solutions, Ehrenreich says relatively little. Clearly management has labour over a barrel. Low-wage workers are expendable because they can be so easily replaced. Immigration is an obvious issue here, and so is education, although Ehrenreich doesn't discuss either. But she does home in on the striking, almost catatonic state of political apathy of lower wage workers. There are a lot of them - almost two thirds of the workforce earn less than $15 an hour, and a third make under $9. Given America's low voter turnout, even a fraction of such a group would form a formidable bloc. And it is not as if it is impossible to organize. Politicians live in desperate fear of seniors, for example, because they mobilize so effectively around their key issues. Yet the working poor fight their battles on their own, it seems, often blaming themselves for their failure to live up to the standards set by management, and largely without unions, church organizations or societies of any other kind. This is in part a matter of a deeper social isolation and atomization in American life. Certainly, liberal benevolence alone will not improve the lives of America's working poor. Whether the widening gap in wealth and the hardship of life at the bottom will awaken a sleeping giant remains to be seen.
Rating: 
Summary: Everything I Need To Know I Learned In...Walmart?
Review: A depressing book, not from poor writing, but from detailing the poor (in finances and apparent joy) lives of so many people. The author, while always having her "out" to return home, does a fairly deep job of digging in with the working class of minimum wage. One aspect that I seemed to miss was how she cashed her paychecks - another hassle for thousand's of "unbanked" Americans. People might remember "He who walks between the rows" of Children Of The Corn. Who knew there was the equivilant at Walmart - He who walks between the racks? --Laurel825
Rating: 
Summary: Condescending; Not the reality of low-wage earners
Review: First, the good things. Ms. Ehrenreich is a good writer. She tells a great story and I was absorbed by the narrative. A real page-turner. She is also a good journalist. The applause she gives herself at the beginning of the "Evaluation" chapter is certainly well-deserved. For a gal in her 50s, she definitely did "hold her own" in some tough jobs amongst the "youngsters". She conveyed the stories of a lot of lower income people in an authentic way (I've held nearly all the jobs she studies). She tells an important story about what it's like to "rough it" on dirt wages, of not coming from wealth and really having to bust your butt and sometimes be flat busted. But she falls short of being compelling. I appreciate her thorough disclaimers that she is not really claiming she is/was an authentic low-wage earner. She does a good job of pointing out the "Heidegger's Principle" dilemma of doing a book like this. But after that, she truly cuts a bourgeois shine. I actually dropped my jaw on a few occasions. Start with page 8, first paragraph, where she states "I have been asked by acquaintances whether the people I worked with couldn't, uh, *tell* -- the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones." What???? Or perhaps "they" just didn't care? Certainly there are differences based on traditional education. But "workaday drones"? She uses this kind of belittling prattle constantly -- as if the jobs these people have somehow define who they are. I thought it was poetic justice when, upon revealing that she was their working-class hero in disguise, the response, as she describes it, was anticlimactic. In terms of the book's thesis ... First, let me state this: Having more money is definitely better than having less money. Being "poor" (a subjective term that is hard to define) to the degree of the people she describes is certainly no fun. I should say that my definition of poverty draws from a more holistic (i.e. worldly) and historical viewpoint than Ms. Ehrenreich's seems to. There is absolute poverty and there is relative poverty. Poverty in the United States, for example, is relatively FAR, FAR less worse than poverty in other parts of the world. I'm "relatively" impoverished if, let's say, everyone in my neighborhood has air conditioning and screens in their windows but I do not. Conversely, I would be relatively wealthy, in that exact same situation, compared to some friends I have in Vietnam who do not have windows at all. Put differently, absolute poverty would mean inadequate shelter, food to prevent me from starving or being in incapacitating health, and clothing to shield me from the seasons. From there, Ms. Ehrenreich needs to avoid her wayward ventures into classical economic theory (in the same way that I need to avoid psychology and physics) and start with some better Home Ec 101. For instance: 1. Get rid of the car. For some reason she relegates it to the continuity of story. Dump it. Assume it was a previous asset and use the proceeds for better (more efficient economical) uses. She admits after the fact this might have caused her "mathematics experiment" to work. 2. Stop buying alcohol. Carts full of white wine and beer don't make you look "poor" or "black", as she accuses people of stereotyping in the story. But they DO make you look financially incompetent. Everyone has to have fun -- but she is supposedly emulating people who are trying to make ends meet and that's not, or shouldn't be, in their budget. 3. Stop doing drugs. I nearly fell out of my chair when I found out she had a) smoked pot and b) found herself paying $30 for a "detox" kit. I like to have fun just like the next one -- WHEN THE BILLS ARE PAID. There's a lesson in there somewhere from Marx I do believe. Take care of the functional utilities first, then visit Bacchus. 4. Do shares. Her astonishment at how all her co-workers "did it" is answered by her own inquiry time and time again. They have roommates with whom they share expenses. They often (gasp!) have husbands. That's how you do it on crap wages. That's how I did it. That's how everybody does it. In fairness to her, she did just plop herself down in these situations, which would almost necessitate a vehicle of some sort and would certainly hinder picking up reliable roommates in such a short time. But that's part of the problem with her experiment. It's just not reality. Even when the "poor" have to move, they rarely do it on a whim -- they ensure support networks are available before striking out. That is known as smart economizing, just like my four gripes above. It's something, consciously or otherwise, that everyone does regardless of income, "class" or race. Some people are certainly smarter about it than others. Admittedly, the more wealth you have accumulated, the more frivolous you can be with your economizing (to a point). And I think that's where Ms. Ehrenreich makes a less than optimal candidate for this research. She makes a mistake of not showing her receipts (which would have made this book much more "scientific"). Not literally the proofs of sale, but a spreadsheet or something that would allow *us*, the reading audience, to determine if she could've made income match expenses. When I find out she is wearing a sleeping mask to bed and worrying with makeup in the mornings, I just can't consider her efforts a legitimate experiment. Find someone who can "keep it real" to do a book like this. There are plenty of people who economize smartly on low, low wages. Such a book would actully be beneficial to the folks she tries to highlight in her book, but it may not be as sexy to her NY Times reading audience.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining and Informing
Review: This book was fabulous. The author sets out to study on her own if the average person can make it on minimum wage in this country. The fact that a woman who was financially secure and college educated set out to do this added to the credibility of the book for me. You would expect a person who complains about the working poor is part of that group. This way, the reader may more likely be sympathetic to the plight of the working poor. She also opens the eyes of those ignorant readers who ask, "You don't have to be poor. Why can't they just get a better paying job? This is America, the land of opportunity, why don't they just move up in life?" And it's not a sobering reminder, it's a highly entertaining and humorous story. If you read this book, you could learn a lot about the working poor, and about yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Playing dress-up
Review: I found the idea interesting, but I don't think her personal approach was at all appropriate. Firstly, she bunked her entire "project" from the very beginning with her own "rules" as outlined in the introduction. Secondly, and what I found disturbing was that she had a paranoid, sometimes completely insulting point of view about her jobs, cowokers, customers, managers, and society in general that she found necessary to fill the pages. When she wasn't filling the pages with propaganda and her personal woes, she was relaying information that was completely useless to the book's purpose (i.e. the types of stains left by fecal matter.) The obvious biases, stereotypes, and condescensions the author had toward the "working poor" were also a taint on the book's premise. Frankly, if you must read this book for any reason, I recommend the library, as it is not worth the paper it's printed on.
Rating:
Summary: Ho-Hum. Ya-a-w-w-w-w-n....
Review: A decent writing talent, but unfortunately just another elite class-warfare socialist, using the same hyperbolic vituperation, false assumptions, and questionable statistics that so befoul Das Kapital. She hates the rich because they are (while she deducts $20,000 a year from her tax returns for mortgage interest!). She disdains the middle-class - and tries to hide her disdain of the poor - because they are just too, too banal, doncha know, and lack her intellectual pretensions. This book could have been so much more than just another left-wing piece for massive government intervention.
Rating:
Summary: A great read, and an important book
Review: This is a terrific social commentary on the state of the American workforce and a severe indictment on the state of American society. It will also shatter all your preconceived notions about low wage earners because Ehrenreich deftly shows that the "working poor" are making an invaluable contribution to society. Through Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich has really solidified many of the problems facing the "underclass" of America. She raises many important issues in this book, particularly the disparities that exist between low wage earners and the more affluent middle classes in America. Through her adventures in waitressing in Key West, scrubbing in Maine and retailing in Minnesota we get to see a side of life and a way of living that unfortunately analogous to many Americans. Her story is, at times, funny and heartfelt, but it will also make you sad and angry at the conditions that she's forced to endure. Ehrenreich's style is easy to read and flows well and she has a remarkable sense of humor which will really make you laugh at some of her observations at the jobs she has to do - cleaning toilets of the affluent in Maine is just one example! It's not just the economic gulf that exists in America that will shock you; it's also the way that Corporate America manipulates and belittles their employees and potential employees through creepy personality tests, drug tests and orientations seminars, which are really little more than illegal brainwashing. Ehrenreich also shows the remarkable lack of "choices" that low paid workers have and that getting access to some kind of government assistance, be it food stamps, emergency money etc., getting this access can be fraught with topographical and bureaucratic problems, for example, she has problems getting help in Maine when she really needs it. A low wage earner really need two have two jobs to survive, that is, if you want to be able to eat AND pay the rent. She also presents the economic disparity that exists between rents and wages, as the working poor are gradually being shut out of rental markets - witness her time in Minnesota where vacancies for rent were next to impossible to find. It's also no longer enough to work hard - working hard doesn't guarantee you a life of luxury and comfort and these days you have to have an angle and make money work for you through investments etc. Ehrenreich also stresses the importance of unionism, and that although unions aren't perfect; they are still the only protection that exists between workers and managers. Her time retailing shows the startling disempowerment and non-unionist attitude that many young employees have. Ehrenreich provides no easy solutions to the problem of too-low minimum wages, and she ends up raising more questions than she answers. This is an important book, a powerful story, and a must read for everyone. Michael
Rating:
Summary: This book should be on the curriculum in high school!!!
Review: Please, please..if you know of a student who is considering dropping out of school, or considering not attending college, do something kind and buy them this book. This is what will happen to them. They will be doomed to a life of minimum-wage jobs, and will never have society's respect. This book is a message to all. GET SOME SKILLS!
Rating:
Summary: A petty self indulgent psuedo-ethnography
Review: When I picked up this book, I thought I was in for a treat. Having read works of actual anthropology dealing with poverty in America (MacLeod's "Ain't No Makin' It," Kozol's "Savage Inequalities"), I was intrigued by the notion of a writer actually joining the lower class and seeing how it all added up. What I found was a gross parody of the American poverty literature that does more to harm perception of the underclass than to help. The provisions Ehrenreich grants herself instantly make any point she tries to make moot. The most immediately discrediting advantage she gives herself is use of a car in the cities she works in. One of the HARDEST parts of being poor is getting to work; many people have to take god-awful jobs simply because the radius of options is directly limited by our countries pitiful public transportation. Granting yourself a car instantly gives you access to the very best jobs in the area and allows you to dodge the truly horrible low paying jobs. To be frank, the jobs the writer takes are not miserable. They're not even all that bad. To make up for this fact, Ehrenreich loads her tale with melodrama and self righteousness. She speculates that the owners of houses might enjoy knowing that "their floors are cleaned only with the freshest of human tears." Lest the reader be mislead, she's not being whipped or beaten, she's not working 14 hour days picking berries in the scorching California sun, all she's doing is wiping down floors in air conditioned suburban mansions. Her regular smattering of Marxist references coupled with the inevitable self-righteous rants she spouts at the end of each of her jobs do little to advance her thesis and much more to ruin her credibility as an impartial researcher. Further, much as she tries to convince the reader how she is truly integrating into the poor lifestyle, Ehrenreich does a shoddy job of making any friends among her co-workers. She exchanges idle banter at work, but does a very poor job of taking the relationship outside of the workplace and identifying with these people in their real lives. Once more, where the writer has a chance to soar, she falls flat. Ultimately, Ehrenreich fails at her mission and tries to make up the deficit between reality and fantasy with melodrama. It's a sad case where I agree with the premise, agree with the conclusion, and totally disagree with her actual research. Yes, people are working at starvation wages in the US, just not the ones Ehrenreich is working with. I give "Nickel and Dimed" a generous two stars only on merit of its technically solid though often heavy handed story telling.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable Book
Review: Nickel and Dimed is interesting and entertaining. The book gives a look into the pink collar ghetto without being condescending or preachy. It is also an easy read while keeping the reader interested.
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