Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: This is essentially a modern remake of 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. I was quite interested in the subject, but the author always wrote in a detached me-vs-them tone that I found distracting. It was also frusterating how easily she gave up, or would not go to the depths that normal wage-earners have to go to... effectively limiting the scope of the book. It is, however, interesting enough to make it a worthwhile read overall...
Rating: 
Summary: A Fantastic Book
Review: This is a great book that everyone should read. Yes, it will spur debate. The author takes pains to point out that she can't really experience this lifestyle as one who was born to, and stuck with, it can....so I don't understand criticisms on that front. And she wraps up by saying that even though her experience only approximates reality, it was bad enough at that. This book made it clear to me that the poor and those on welfare are not getting free money from society -- it's exactly the opposite way around. An excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: All in all it's just another brick in the Wal-Mart
Review: Last week I read an editorial by would-be Secretary of Labor Linda Chavez, extolling the virtues of Congress's 1996 welfare reform bill. Chavez's column was a glowing tribute to her own naivete, talking about how the "welfare rolls" had been "cut in half", as if that were an end in itself. Not discussed was the fate of those cast off the rolls. How is the free job market treating them? Do they earn well? Are they learning job skills? Do they have health benefits? Are they better off today than they were five years ago?Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" nearly answers the above questions, and the answers are all "No!". Ehrenreich enters the private sector and takes on the low-wage jobs that mothers newly off welfare can expect to find: waitressing, cleaning, and retail. The jobs are found in different areas of the country, rural or urban, diverse or all white, but the results are the same across the board: low-wage workers have nothing on their side except their own optimism. One can quibble with Ehrenreich's methodology, or with her politics, or her work ethic, or with the way she chooses to write this book (the frank admission of marijuana use seems rather pathetic in this context). However, I don't quibble with the results. Before entering the professional world I logged time in the retail industry, and certainly the chapter on being a "sales associate" at Wal-Mart struck several chords with me all at once. As Ehrenreich reports, so it is: the pointless staff meetings, the ban on talking to co-workers, the strictly monitored break policy and, worst of all, the corporate videos telling you, "It's a great place to work!". Except for the hourly wage, meager health benefits, and lack of opportunity for career advancement -- not to mention the strikes against the worker trying to raise children or eat well. All together, "Nickel and Dimed" raises far more questions than there are answers. Ehrenreich quotes several meaningful numbers in her final chapter, but alas the book can only conclude with a paragraph that sounds like "Workers of the world may again unite". At best, I enjoyed this book for its undercover reporting, for its portrayal of retail and management -- pay particular attention to Ted, the cleaning-franchise owner, who could carry a whole novel on his own. While Ehrenreich might not have made a better Secretary of Labor than Linda Chavez, she's certainly better at spotting the issues.
Rating: 
Summary: Real and Not Fiction
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich champions the same cause as Ayn Rand's hero in the Fountainhead - Howard Roark. Like Roark, Ehrenreich cites the danger of the individual against the collective. What is sad and scary is that Ehrenreich's book is not fiction and the collectivists - Wal-Mart, Merry Maids, etc. are oh so very real. The policy called "time theft" sounds like it came right out of the novel 1984.
Rating:
Summary: a dead on accurate view of life at the bottom
Review: 5-8-02 I noticed that in many of the reviews of this book, many
were critical of the author - a wealthy woman with a Ph.D,
facing of no real threat of being at the bottom of society
herself. Although this is true, the author states this fact
throughout the book - that this cruise thru the underside
of employment in American was just that - a temporary gig.
She never claimed it was anything more. I thought the book
was exceptionally well written, funny, extremely insightful
and a valuable read. As a person who worked demeaning,
back breaking, minimum wage jobs for many years, including the
years I put myself through college at [money] an hour dumping
bedpans on the nightshift, I can tell everyone that this book
is accurate - a clear and concise view from the lowest rungs
of our economic system. I highly recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: Hard, Essential Look at America's Shadow Side
Review: "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" (King Lear III.iv.28). That's just what Barbara Ehrenreich did. As politicians and pundits hailed the end of Big Government, Ehrenreich wondered how actual people were coping. So she tried her hand (and legs and back) at some low-wage jobs. She was a waitress, a maid, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart "associate." The book is her shocking--to me, at least--account of the conditions endured by millions of Americans. * * * "For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the near-blind you draw in large and startling figures" (Flannery O'Connor). Well, "Nickeled and Dimed" is Ehrenreich's shout on behalf of countless Americans: nannies who can't afford to take their own kids to the doctor, janitors who aspire to efficiency apartments, church ladies who pee in jars to pass drug tests so they can work the graveyard shift at discount stores, maids who fear (with good reason) that customers are secretly taping them, busboys who get accused of stealing ketchup packets. It is, as she says from the beginning, a personal account--sharp, clear, quirky, and gripping. Ehrenreich doesn't offer a systematic analysis of wages and housing in the U.S. Nor does she claim to. She's also well aware that her stints among the working poor were short and artificial. Her goal is to *start* a long-overdue conversation about what Michael Harrington once called "the other America." And that she does--magnificently.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks for stating the obvious.
Review: After taking 2 sociology classes this semester at college I've become very interested in various social "problems" and thought picking up this book would provide some education insight into those problems. Boy was I wrong. In the introduction, Ehrenreich said she was insipired to do this project after discussing whether or not welfare mothers could live and support their children without welfare benefits. Although her attempt is noble and of good intention, she does it all wrong. She gives herself $1200 to start off with and maintains contacts with "her world". She keeps a stash of "emergency money" and throughout the book mentions that in a few months, she'll be back to her PhD world writing and chatting it up with friends again. I also found it very offensive when she mentioned at the beginning of the 3rd chapter that she didn't go to California because of "...(her)my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the bad jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they often do." (page 121, paperback) So much for sympathy and finding a solution, eh? Overall, I didn't find her very sympathetic to the problem. She is constantly voicing her pity for those she works with which I also find offensive. My mother worked 80-90 hours a week when I was young to raise myself and my two brothers by herself and I can tell you that those working bad jobs and barely making it don't want your pity. My final problem with her study was that she neglected to delve into the problem that got her into this study - welfare mothers. I am a college student going to school full time and working more than 40 hours a week at fast food to pay for my schooling and everything else with no help and I make it with very little struggle, but what about welfare mothers? Life is much easier when all you have to worry about is yourself. Try adding another mouth to feed and another person to watch over.
Rating:
Summary: a sad commentary on our times
Review: i have tried over and over to make sense of the situation in this country. most of the people subjected to poverty are women and children. ehrenreich tells it like it is and exposes the struggle to make ends meet. this is a tradgedy, especially in the 2000s! what will it take for people to notice?
Rating:
Summary: A really great book
Review: I have been supporting myself and my family for years on minimum wage, sometimes working two jobs. I lived in a one-room cabin with a woodstove and no plumbing or water with my husband and infant daughter for a year and a half. We now have indoor plumbing but cannot afford to pay for car insurance, and often run out of food before we get more money. I felt Barbara dealt with these issues with courage and compassion. How many others would be willing to do what she did if they didn't have to? I could identify with what she wrote. I finally felt understood and even appreciated. True, her experiences were only a scratch on the surface, and she made no attempt to claim otherwise. She is not responsible for providing solutions, as some other reviewers insinuated, but she has gotten people to open their eyes, and that's the first step. Despite how little I have, I also realize that I am lucky to have many of the things I do have. I feel grateful for having been able to go to college, even if I wasn't able to finish. I'm so lucky I have a washer and dryer in my home, and I don't have to share a bedroom with my daughter anymore. I'm lucky to have a bedroom at all. I'm lucky that I no longer have to get up in the morning in a house that is below freezing to start a fire, and hold my tiny daughter close to me to keep her little body from freezing. I hope I am middle class someday, and can afford to go to the doctor when I need to, or fix the car when it breaks down. Until then, I do what I can to make the despair more bearable.
Rating:
Summary: well written and engaging, but brace yourself
Review: Ehrenreich proves that she's an excellent writer with this book. It's engaging and compelling, no question about that. But it's hard to get through at times because of the author's attitudes. Her main point is to bring attention to the plight of the working poor, but she manages to be both insulting and divisive.
Intent on attacking our capitalist system, she fails to notice that the existence of upper classes seems to be what motivates the poor, rather than what dispirits them. She blames capitalism for the injustices of the world, rather than simple bad management techniques. Show me a company that would benefit from a union, and I'll show you one that will benefit even better from decent, humane management decisions. Most annoying, she's unremittingly negative about everything, even the positive experiences she has. When one of her co-workers offers to let her move in with her and her family, not only does Ehrenreich turn the offer down, but she even describes it condescendingly as a "touched by an angel moment." Does she have to drip with sarcasm even when writing about a genuinely kind act? She criticizes "visible Christians," any and all management, yuppies, anyone who hires and therefore exploits maids, welfare reform, and even tosses in a jab at people who read John Grisham. Is there anyone she likes? Her logic is bothersome as well. She begins her experiment to see if the working poor have some economic survival tactics that the middle class don't know about, and decides at the end that no, they don't, as if admitting that this would mean the poor are better off than they appear to be. But how, then do they survive? By attaching themselves to other wage earners; by sharing living space and rent; by accepting the kindness of others. Why don't those count as survival skills? If, God forbid, a low-wage earner moves up to a higher salary, say, as a manager or assistant manager, then suddenly they become objects of her scorn. Ted, her Merry Maids boss, has apparently managed to work his way up the ladder and now owns his own franchise. So suddenly he's a "two-bit entrepreneur." I guess in her book, the working poor have to stay in that category to keep her respect. She wants us to respect how hard the working poor must work just to survive. And in that she succeeds. But Ehrenreich might do better by trying to come up with more than just cricitism; I get the feeling that even in some perfect utopia where no one is poor and food is delivered to everyone's door daily, she would find something to complain about.
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