Rating: 
Summary: Good but not great - better than average, that is for sure
Review: I must commend Ms. Ehrenreich on a very interesting book as she has provided the reader with great insight into how many Americans have to, unfortunately, live their lives. As part of the project Ehrenreich "leaves behind" her writing profession to see if she can survive on today's working wages. The common thread amongst the jobs she takes it that they were all physically demanding jobs that were mind numbing and typically earned under $10 an hour. She has startup money (first and last months' rent) and a car to use and very quickly discovers that life's basic needs can barely be met on minimum wage. She specifically addresses issues of affordable housing (not plentiful), food (she can't eat healthy or often) and medical insurance or the lack thereof offered in such positions. Ms. Ehrenreich's quickly finds that it is almost a necessity to work two jobs to support herself living alone if she earns under $10 an hour, something that didn't surprise me at all. She definitely sheds some light on the working poor, specifically single mothers re-entering the workforce. My conclusion: I learned a lot and definitely sympathize for working mothers but she never addresses key social and personal issues such as (1) drug use - SHE USES DRUGS - drugs will hold you back in our society (2) Education - if you don't have one you are forced into poverty so graduate from high school, get a loan and go to college and (3) Past mistakes affect a person's future. The book was wonderful but I was driven nuts by the fact that none of these "characters" wanted to move ahead in life via an education. If you don't have a higher education in today's society you will frequently be forced into labor-oriented jobs where you are nothing more than a COG (cost of good) in the corporate machine. The education is used as a signaling effect to people/companies that "I want to get ahead in life," not so much that people with a degree are naturally brighter than others. What about self respect? DREAMS? Working towards those dreams? Measuring progress? All I kept seeing was mindless people that didn't want to take on responsibilities except going through life a day at a time without planning.
Rating: 
Summary: It is a matter of values
Review: Some of the reviews mentioned that education is the key to NOT become a low-paid worker, and other implied that it is in fact the fault of the individual person to end up in a low-paid job. Wake up: Many people don't have the necessary education that it takes to get a better job not because they did not want to get further education, but because they weren/t able to - money, health, family situation are just a few of the reasons that may be an obstacle to some. There are also other people out there who just don't have the skills to aquire further education - and the only repsonse from us is: bad luck??? I can only say: I am happy that I have a high paid job, and you would have to pay me more money than I am earning right now to get me to work in a low paid job - even though my job requires way more skills, I would be very reluctunt to do a low-paid job that usually consistent of the same few routines. The US prides itself as being one of the riches countries in the world, but in fact it only few are rich. And what about "United we stand"? United in what? Being American? Many European country, and even our friends up North are doing a much better job in taking care of each other - yes, you can't make as much money as you can here, but the majority of the poeple there have a much better life and a higher standard of living than we have.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, infuriating book
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent expose couldn't have been more perfectly timed. Although many of us already had an inkling about the pathetic situations facing the new working poor (which used to be the middle class), her book puts the facts right under everyone's noses. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to offer any answers, but at least she finally gets the public discussion rolling. Anyone who's scrimped and scraped and starved their way through college, then through their first low-paying "professional" job and then finally graduating to a "real" job that pays a living wage can clearly grasp and understand the desperation working mothers face in our exploitative low-wage jobs. The big difference is that most college students can expect their situations to improve over the years as they graduate to an active consumer, middle-class lifestyle, whereas the majority of working mothers, frankly, do not stand a chance of any such advancement. In our rich, highly productive society, that is a damn shame.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of time
Review: This woman is out of touch with the reality of most of working Americans-not just the working poor. She writes: "What surprised and offend me most about the low-wage workplace was the extent to which one is required to surrender one's basic civil rights and what boils down to the same thing-self-respect." Well I've got news for her-its not just the low wage workplace where the civil rights are being stolen. My high wage employers also demand drug testing and a couple of them have finger printed me, too.
She sprouts the usual liberal party line about raising the minimum wage because people can't live on it. She complains that rents were out of reach for a minimum wage earner in the cities she lived in. Well then why didn't she move to an area where the rental market was more in line with the wages? Or why didn't she try to get a roommate? Oh wait, then she wouldn't have anything to write about.
Rating:
Summary: Society's Invisible Citizens
Review: This book is based on a bold experiment. Ehrenreich voluntarily placed herself in a highly vulnerable position (one shared with perhaps several million others) and explains what happened next. She knew that her situation would not be permanent. She carefully observed those around her. She asked lots of questions. Most important, she absorbed and digested her and others' experiences which later served as the core material of this book. For me, there are several lessons to be learned and the most valuable of those lessons suggests that getting as much formal education as possible is no guarantee of success in life but it is frequently a decisive factor. I wish this book had been available when my three sons and daughter entered high school. I plan to give a copy of it to each of the grandcildren as a 14th birthday gift. How easy it is for most of us to take what Leona Helmsley once called "the little people" for granted. They serve fast food meals at the counter, they fetch dry cleaning, they dry off cars which emerge from the car wash conveyor, etc. Generally, they are unskilled to do much else. This book helps its reader to gain a much better understanding of those who struggle (with mixed results) to "get by" in our society. To Ehrenreich's credit, she never glorifies nor demeans any of those with whom she was associated. She admires their courage and respects their dignity. At least by implication she suggests that her reader do so also.
Rating:
Summary: Well written, Provocative
Review: Above All, B. E. is an excellent writer whose prose style alone kept me reading. Her topic was as interesting as it gets, although I will admit to be biased in that I was in the situation of having low paying jobs and barely making ends meet (despite my education background, I might add). I am shocked by the poor living conditions and the amount of mental abuse suffered daily by these hardworking people. Of particular interest to me is E's commentary on the health and diet of these "working poor" and how poverty pushes them into, for example, unhealthy, fast-food dominated eating habits that the public generally deplores and characterizes as slovenly and irresponsible. (Consider how society criticizes the overweight.)Not much thought is given to those whose poor diets are dictated by homelessness, lack of a kitchen and utensils, and no health insurance. This book is a must-have.
Rating:
Summary: an enjoyable as well as worthwhile read
Review: I've always known that minimum-wage jobs were demeaning and that large corporations are ridiculously exploitative, even when they position themselves as their employee's families. All the same, Ehrenreich had me fuming over the indignities that she experienced. Her time as a maid was particularly interesting -- I hadn't known just how bad life was for hotel housekeepers or what a superficial job places like "Merry Maids" do. Also, I will no longer shop at Wal-Mart, though I'm sure other such chains are just as bad. It was interesting to learn that it's illegal for employers to prohibit employees from disclosing their wages to each other. I wonder if Banana Republic still does that. I've heard of workers being fired on the spot for that very reason. But the message that I took away from this book was that the need for affordable housing is pressing. I hope that some developers read this book and take Ehrenreich's struggle to heart. Ehrenreich's knee jerks in the liberal direction a bit too easily, but she still doesn't reach any illogical conclusions. She had me rooting for an increase in the minimum wage by the end of the book, which I hadn't supported before I picked it up.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful tale of an unfortunate plurality in the USA
Review: Ehernreich's _Nickel and Dimed_ is expectedly revealing: she reveals the difficulties she had in obtaining cheap housing, the prejudices against her gender and race in her quest to be employed in three cities, and the surprising level of difficulty that she had with low-paying jobs. However, her book excels by touching on a key point in all of her experimental dives into the working poor class: her frightening conclusion is that, after a month, she couldn't make it to the next month or two, either financially, physically, or spiritually. Ehrenreich notes more than once that she had a head start in her attempts to start a new life in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. She was raised well, had an education, and was in good health. Nevertheless, the physical, spiritual, and financial toil that she had to undergo to secure a job, residence, and some sense of order is a seemingly insurmountable goal even for this subject that, in a sense, had an advantage over her low-paid comrades. The strongest take-away from this journalists' plight is that, daily, masses upon masses of people are undergoing her experiences without the escape hatch of an experiment. Despite all of the exposed difficulties, problems, and outright unfairness of beloning in the working poor class of America, the most frightening is that, unlike the author, these people cannot easily escape.
Rating:
Summary: Shame on us!
Review: The really horrible thing is that so many of us require a well-written book like this one to stir up some empathy for the flesh-and-blood folks whose down-and-out plights we ignore every day! Even the coldest of yuppies will surely feel a twinge of guilt and remorse after reading Ehrenreich's chapter on maids. But how many ever gave their real maids a second glance--except when the work wasn't done to their satisfaction? In a country which consumes 60% of the world's goods, you'd think we could treat fellow citizens a bit better. Reading Ehrenreich's new book ought to make you sad, and guilty, and mad, and then determined to change the way things are
Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening, if skewed, sojourn in the working class
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich has written a compelling, highly readable, at times even entertaining work of investigative journalism. Going undercover in the low-wage service economy, she sets out to argue a thesis: that it is impossible to keep body and soul together working full-time in a job that pays at or slightly above the minimum wage. She makes her point convincingly and with passion. The book's flaws have mostly to do with its pervasive overtone of class warfare and its essentially Marxist worldview on labor and management, because these tend to oversimplify the real problems Ehrenreich documents. At its best, Ehrenreich's writing is by turns eloquent and droll; at its worst, it can be sour and preachy. This book is a narrative, not a formal or quantitative study. But suffice it to say that Ehrenreich provides enough anecdotes and evidence to leave little doubt about her basic point: even allowing herself a few extra advantages at the outset (like a car; no public transportation), she could not as a single woman afford decent housing and a healthy diet, let alone health insurance, on her wages as a waitress, nursing home aide, maid, or Wal-Mart "associate" - at least not without working more than one full-time job at a time. She effectively documents what seem to be endless obstacles - some structural, some simply petty -- that keep low-wage workers from getting ahead. (To name one important example: the inability, when one is living weekly paycheck to weekly paycheck, to save up for a security deposit and a first month's rent on an apartment, thus creating dependence on seedy and overpriced weekly motels). Ehrenreich, a distinguished left-wing journalist, seems to find ample support for her biases. In the low-wage world she chronicles, managers and supervisors (who happen to be mostly men) are invariably creeps, "twerps," or worse; workers (who seem to be mostly women) make up the heroic proletariat. Drug tests, theft deterrence, and employment screening are Orwellian intrusions designed to grind down workers' self esteem and initiative. Though she sometimes gets exasperated by her co-workers' travails (and their lack of class consciousness), had Ehrenreich set out to write a more balanced analysis she would have delved into the dysfunctions and bad decisions (poor choices in boyfriends seem to be a recurring theme) that contribute to the economic and personal pathologies suffered by those whose lives she shared for a few weeks at a time. Ehrenreich concludes after her sojourn as waitress in a greasy-spoon chain eatery: "Cooks want to prepare tasty meals, servers want to serve them graciously, but managers are there for only one reason - to make sure money is made for some theoretical entity, the corporation...." Indeed, the essential goodness, generosity, and work ethic of her co-workers often comes through. Still, as anyone who has actually supervised low-wage help for any period would know, this is a highly romanticized tableau. Oddly for someone who has written extensively in other works about the middle class, Ehrenreich's rhetoric at times leads one to believe the world is mainly divided into two classes: the very well-off who benefit from exploitative work arrangements, and the low-wage laborers who clean their extravagant homes, scrub their toilets (Ehrenreich, in a cheeky mood, devotes entire paragraphs to feces and pubic hair), and tend to their elderly and infirm. Ehrenreich's book was researched and written during the booming prosperity of the late 1990's and its neo-conservative enthusiasm for sending welfare recipients into the workforce. It will be interesting to see whether the current recession focuses new attention on the problems and needs of service workers whom she justly argues have become virtually invisible to the rest of us. Had she set out to write a more objective study, Ehrenreich's book might have been even more persuasive, though it also might have been less interesting.
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