Rating: 
Summary: No heart, no compassion
Review: I read this book about 7 months ago and it still angers me. I never would have thought that an author taking on such a deep and troubling problem would be such a snob (academically and personally). At each job she built up a relationship just to try and create a shock that she has a Phd (gasp). When they don't react with amazement at her brain power she goes on for pages wondering why. The people she is suppose to becoming one with don't care how smart she is and neither do I. Most of the contacts she had seemed a decent amount smarter than her even though they don't have a piece of paper to prove it. They manage to live their lives in the best possible way given a lot of hurdles. If you want to see how someone really gets into a society and learns about it, thereby passing along to the reader the real story and issues of a particular group of people read a book by Ted Conover. He fully immerses himself into his topics, not just for a month, or a two week job stint in the area where he lives. There is no 'cheating' since he doesn't set up his rules specifically to be broken.
Rating:
Summary: Lousy
Review: A lousy book by a snobbish, undignified, drug abusing author. I don't remember seeing a book written solely to put down the hard working class. What a phony.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be Required Reading!
Review: This book should be required reading for everyone graduating from high school in America, so they know what's in store for them if they don't have the right background, right connections, or right skin color/ethnicity. No wonder the conservatives hate it. It tells them the truth about the world outside their gated communities and the lives about those that serve them, and they don't want to hear about it because it spoils their fun. Most of all, I wish Dick Cheney would sit George W Bush on his lap and read this book to him every night as a bedtime story...
Rating:
Summary: An Important Book
Review: The value of Barbara Ehrenreich's troubling, but remarkable investigation of the dearth of opportunity faced by working class Americans, is evident from the gamut of highly emotional reactions it has raised here. Many readers seem enormously offended simply on the grounds that Ehrenreich was not actually a member of the working class, and only "visited" a life of poverty and toil. These readers take great pains to say that poverty is a serious issue, while discounting the book on the grounds that Ehrenreich - who holds a PhD of all the horrible things! - has no right to raise it. This is a willfully deluded argument which would seem to white wash all kinds of investigative journalism across the board. The attacks on Ehrenreich's credentials appear designed to avoid a discussion of the book itself, a low but familiar critical tactic, shooting the messenger to destroy the message. It is understandable, however, that people would seek to look away from the experiences that Ehrenreich relates from her sojourns in the waitressing, housekeeping, and retailing industries. The pay is meager, the work is often backbreaking, and the management is consistently exploitative. You may already have suspected this to be the case, but the hard details in Nickel and Dimed - of trying to find housing, of applying for community aid, of unpaid overtime, and a thousand other tiny indignities - confront the reader with the vivid reality of how many of their fellow human beings are forced to live.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read, important issues
Review: Ehrenreich brings economic issues to life in this book. The stories flow easily and are peppered with her sarcastic sense of humor. She also brings her own experiences into larger focus with statistics and research, although she could have done some more work in this department. One thing to keep in mind is that she is writing for middle and upper class folks, and these audiences will get the most out of the book. Anyone who has actually worked in the 'unskilled' labor force will find little in the book they haven't already experienced. Even middle class teenagers working for spending cash at McDonald's will know coworkers who tell these kind of horror stories every day. Some working class readers will find this type of journalism exploitive and offensive. I personally found the weaker aspects more silly than outright offensive--particularly Ehrenreich's list of limits on how much poverty she would be willing to tolerate, even temporarily. Despite this, I think some will agree with me that it's gratifing to see this view of the working world in print.
Rating: 
Summary: It's Impossible to Live on "Minimum Wage"
Review: Whatever you think about Barbara Ehrenreich and her writing style, the fact remains that this is an important book to have in existence. And if this book gets picked up for the Oprah book clubs and what have you, I think, better they should read this than yet another fictional account of five generations in a family with a dark secret. At least this is something real. In the book Ehrenreich experiences life in three different cities in America as a single woman working minimum wage jobs. What she finds is that both single people and families do not make enough in a minimum wage job to live anywhere other than a cheap motel or even their car, truck or van. They do not make enough to eat anything resembling healthy and nourishing food, and they have no means to pay for treatment for the resulting health problems that come from their poor living conditions, lack of nutrition, and strenuous labor. Unfortunately, what the book fails to offer is some sort of a solution. Ehrenreich has tackled a problem which is gargantuan, and solutions are probably not forthcoming. But one of the greatest values of a book like this is to not only point out a problem, but to offer its readers something that they can do in their lives to address this problem. This is, unfortunately, missing in this book. Regardless I think that this book is valuable in that it points out the extremity of the hardship that many people are living through in this country. I don't think people realize exactly how bad it is. When people are having their order taken at the fast food restaurant or being rung up at Wal-Mart, I wonder if they realize that the person who is helping them may be living in their van, or saving up their paychecks to buy just one of the five shirts you're buying now, when it goes on sale. At least if more people realize the severity of the situation among minimum-wage earners, this book has done something of value.
Rating:
Summary: Would you like democracy with that?
Review: The author's observation about workers leaving democracy at the their employers' doorsteps is something that I've also observed. I am now more or less retired. However, I worked as a blue collar worker in light industry for about seven years and as a professional in a white collar occupations for about the same length of time. I was an associate in retail for about four years. I found a four year stint in a job in academia to be the least democratic. I had resisted reading this book because I've lived a more real version of her experiment and knew that I would probably find some of what she chose to do stupid which I did -- why try to live in areas where affordable rents are rare? why not try a small non-tourist oriented city? why not look for a roommate? why buy only one pair of "uniform" pants (two cheap ones for the price she paid for one would have saved laundering time and money). I finally decided to read this book when invited to attend a meeting of a book club which is discussing the book. Actually, I'm dreading hearing professionals lamenting about how bad the working poor have it when it seems to me that many if not most professionals have it just as bad in regard to lack of democracy in the workplace. For the record, I, as a childless and mostly single woman, did not have troubles of the sort that she did in finding an affordable place to live accept during my first year as a totally self-supporting adult. Overall, I am glad I read this book. Despite the author's seeming lack of common sense in some areas, she has the unusual ability to describe the psychology and social interactions of the workplace. To lots of her comments,I wanted to lift up my fist in a resounding "YES." Another thing that I liked about this book is that it is funny. This mostly because the author has the ability to laugh at herself.
Rating:
Summary: self-absorbed 'investigative' report
Review: the only saving grace of this book are the actual facts about the working poor we get. otherwise this well-off rich writer reminds us she is a well-off writer on every page. she disrespects her subjects and basically wastes alot of people's time. this quote says it all...(about the motel she is living in)
"I still haven't found out much about my fellow Clearview dwellers (note: she does not try) -- It's bad enough being a woman alone, ESPECIALLY A WOMAN RICH ENOUGH TO HAVE BED OF HER OWN (thanks for reminding us of your economic abundance-like you dont do that on EVERY PAGE), without being nosy on top of that" i hope you have a nice rest in your rich bed barb-the people at Clearview are still there and other than peeking through the windows at them and relating your spying results-we never got to know them. or any of the other 'working poor' whose names you mention in your 'adventure in slumming'. stick with the "salmon and field greens" at your upscale restaurant... this subject needs to be handled with someone with a grain of objectivity and genuine interest
Rating:
Summary: A call for compassion, a call for conscientiousness
Review: In NICKEL AND DIMED author Barbara Ehrenreich seeks to dispel the myth that a job is "the ticket out of poverty and the only thing holding back welfare recipients [is] their reluctance to get one" [p.196]. She does this by leaving behind her regular job for a few months, traveling from Florida to Main to Minnesota, and taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart saleswoman. In my opinion, she succeeds at her objective. As Ehrenreich discovers, the prevailing minimum wage for such jobs is $7-8 per hour. At this rate, a large percentage of our workforce - those erroneously referred to as "unskilled workers" (as the author points out, there is no such thing, many such jobs take a great deal of training and skill) - lives in poverty. What I found most compelling about Ehrenreich's work was the revelation that such "lowly" jobs do not require any less physical strain or mental concentration than the higher paying jobs. Standing on your feet for eight hours a day in Wal-Mart, lugging around cleaning equipment, serving meals in a diner, can be physically exhausting and, as the author points out, in some cases even physically damaging (and, of course, most of these jobs do not come with health care packages). In addition to this, there is often a pecking order and a psychologically degrading element to such jobs. For example, blue collar workers are screened for drug use at a higher rate than white collar employees. Is it because they abuse drugs more than their higher paid counterparts, or is it because of bigotry, a need to degrade? (...) Reading Ehrenreich's work, I couldn't help but be reminded of something Noam Chomksy says in UNDERSTANDING POWER - that it is a national scandal that the United States of America is the richest and most powerful country in world history, and yet a significant percentage of our population lives at, near, or below the poverty line. This is not the way it should be. As Ehrenreich points out, it is not this way because the low-paid worker is lazy or slovenly, but because the government and corporations are greedy. Andrew Michael Parodi
Rating:
Summary: What a Terrible Country we live in
Review: I had high hopes when I qucikly grabbed this book off the shelf. The premise was great: work some menial jobs, get into the heads of those in those jobs and expose the truth! That's not how it played out. This pampered princess of an author used the people she was claiming to help. She reminded me of someone like Michael Milken. Milken, as you may remember, spent 10 years at a country club prison for securities fraud, only to remain worth tens of millions of dollars when he got out. Ehrenreich toughed it out (on and off) for over a year seeing a huge payday when it was all over. This was quite different than the people she toughed it out with while "researching" the book. I gave the book 3 stars because some of the insights she gained while on assignment were interesting, particularly her experience working for Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, knowing that in between assignments, she was going home to recuperate made her seem shallow and uncaring - the opposite effect that she was hoping to have. Ehrenreich would have been a great Marxist, no doubt. Her post-publishing career has proven as much. If she's as saddened by the way the people she spoke of were treated as she'd have us believe, I wonder if she ever went back to try to help them out? I wonder what kind of customer she is while being waited on in a restaurant? Is she understanding when a sales clerk seems incompetant? Somehow I don't think so. Her intentions may have been good, but you know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, don't you?
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