Rating: 
Summary: Unbalanced and not well thought out
Review: I looked forward to this book because I thought the author might provide some insight into the lives of the working poor and/or have some interesting or provocative ideas about how society can respond to a problem that I was well aware existed. Instead, I found a meaningless diatribe against employers, both large and small, and those people who are wealthy enough to afford a maid (you'll understand this if you read the book). By giving herself only one month in each position (each of which is in a different state), the author's experience was, not surprisingly, consumed by the twin problems of finding both a job and a place to live at the same time. All without the assistance of any friends or family and with little or no knowledge of the local area and what services it might offer. This made her investigation and experiences seem extremely artificial. While I have no doubt that the working poor face many unimaginable obstacles, I did not have the sense that the author's experience could possibly be typical and I am left with the feeling that the lives of the working poor is (in different respects) both far worse and far better than the author portrays. This was, in my opinion, very shoddy and irresponsible journalism. Even more troubling, was the gratuitious attack on employers and the rich. This country faces a serious crisis in the gap between rich and poor, but telling anecdotes about insensitive employers hardly helps. The fact is that employers already face a numbing array of state and federal regulations regarding such issues as pay, benefits, privacy, workplace safety, pension, and discrimination (among others); they are, at the same time, trying to survive in a ruthlessly competitive marketplace. These regulations are especially burdensome for small employers like some of the employers the author worked for. The author also ignores the fact that there are significant costs to enacting laws that would call for a higher minimum wage and/or mandatory health and retirement benefits and such laws just might put the working poor in an even worse position (by possibly causing the elimination of many of the jobs they currently hold). It's possible, just possible, that these are not the answers, although you would never know it from reading this book. We could use a book that examines the reality of the working poor and considers how we can improve their situation through not only a reform of the employment laws, but of the tax code, pension law, health care law, child care, etc. For now, we have this, and unfortunately, it isn't much help at all.
Rating: 
Summary: A Major Investigative Work.
Review: Barbara Erenreich is, among other things, a talented muckraker and in "Nickel and Dimed" she rakes enough serious muck to rattle the comfortable cages of those who are ignorant of the existence of the working poor in America today. She does it the hard way; during the height of the economic boom of the '90's she spent three months acquiring and performing menial, "unskilled" service jobs and tries to make ends meet on what she earns. She waits tables in Key West, works for a maid service in Portland, Me. and retails for Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, each for a month. In each community she would find a residence, find a job, keep herself fed and her clothes clean for a month while trying to save enough money for the next month's rent. Finding the residence is the first obstacle (some of her co-workers are unable to accomplish this). She points out that "If you can't come up with two month's rent...you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week." Most of her friends live in motel rooms, flophouses, trailers or with roommates and onoe of these arrangements allow anyone to save enough money to eventually improve their living situations. After a place comes a job. This inevitably involves combing want ads, filling out applications, sitting through mind-numbing interviews, taking useless "opinion surveys" or the "Accucheck test", then the degrading drug test. (in an aside footnote she cites a 1999 ACLU report that mandatory drug testing accomplishes virtually nothing useful in the workplace). Once employed, she finds two things constantly interrupting her "dreamy, proletarian idyll". One is the nature of management. "...I still flinch to think that I spent all those weeks under the surveillence of men...whose job it was to monitor my behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse or worse". The other is "that (these jobs) show no signs of being financially viable". Jobs do come quickly; this is a good thing because Erenreich soon discovers that she is simply unable to meet the most basic living expenses on one paycheck and has to quickly find another. She points out that "There are no secret ecomonies that nourish the poor: on the contrary there are a host of special costs." Aside from the outrageous housing-by-the-week expense there are the added costs of eating largely from convenience stores and uninsured medicine (she mentions one Wal-Mart colleague who cannot afford to buy a Wal-Mart shirt on clearance sale). Erenreich recounts the continuous degradation of working in these settings, and the constant intimidation. The restaurant supervisor seemed particularly dedicated to the notion that the staff must never relax; when, for example, she is caught glancing at a newspaper headline she is told to "vacuum the entire floor with a broken vacuum cleaner". She describes the frantic, sweat soaked pace of cleaning middle class houses for the maid service while pointing out that the houses never really get clean, rather the service sells "the appearance of being cleaned" (she inserts an amusing aside on the cleaning of toilets). Once, when a co-worker steps into a hole and apparently sprains an ankle she explodes. She tries unsuccessfully to convince her to go to an emergence room and verbally savages her supervisor over the telephone while "Holly is hopping around in the bathroom, wiping up pubic hairs". Depressing as this story is it would be even more so if Erenreich didn't relate it in an elegant, witty style with a generous dose of self deprecation. She belittles her own experience, knowing that she will get through this experiment successfully and return to her more familiar life extinguishes much of the urgency and desperation that grows out of this hand-to-mouth type of existence. While in Minneapolis she meets a woman who actually did show up in a strange city with no prospects and nothing but a couple of kids in tow and is open in her admiration. Her experiences are, however, no less real for the admitted contrivance and her assessment is insightful (e.g."No job is truly unskilled). Personally I believe that this experience should be mandatory for anyone about to enter middle class life but that's probably not going to happen soon. This book is the nearest most people are going to get and I know a few smug neocons who are going to find this under the tree this Christmas.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprised by Nickel and Dimed
Review: I picked this up in the new non-fiction section of my library. The book, especially the first two sections (Key West and Portland) read like a novel. Not that it was fiction, but it kept my interest that well. The last trip into the low wage world, Minneapolis, was less engaging. It seemed to me that by the third experiment, the author was just plain burnt-out. There was a bit of a logical disconnect in her complaint about having to buy special body flushing substances from GNC at a cost of $30 due to an upcoming drug test; the author made no mention of the cost of the mariajuana and how that factored into her meager budget. In all, a well written and thought provoking trip into a world where, but for the grace of God, any of us might go.
Rating:
Summary: Read the Book/Donate your Tax Refund
Review: This is a well written and thought provoking book. My biggest gripe is that the author writes more about herself than the people who actually work at low wage jobs for real. Barbara Ehrenreich makes a particularly strong case for the difficulty of making ends meet in areas where housing costs don't begin to be affordable with a $7.00 an hour job. Read the book, and you may too feel compelled to donate your tax refund to agencies that serve those who do not earn a living wage.
Rating:
Summary: The problems of the working poor are invisible but real
Review: This short, compelling book recounts the author's three separate one month stints in various low wage jobs (waitress, nursing home attendant, maid, retail clerk) in geographically diverse areas of the U.S. (Key West, Maine, Minneapolis). Her conclusions from each experience are the same--affordable housing is non-existent, the working poor often go hungry, and the entire problem is invisible to mainstream America. Shades of "Fast Food Nation" but the focus is on minimum wage issues only. Very readable and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Exploration of the Life of the "Unskilled" Worker
Review: Nickel and Dimed is a fascinating, engrossing read that sheds light on the dark side of American prosperity. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to see if she could live for three months as an "unskilled" worker in three different locations, Florida, Maine and Minnesota. Her experiences are fascinating and engrossing mainly because she did the whole nine yards. Could she survive at the jobs she could get with no skills, and still be able to find a decent place to live and eat. The answer is, it's really difficult on all fronts. The jobs she had were difficult and physically exhausting, but even more difficult were her housing problems, which was something I wasn't expecting, but it's not that surprising if you think about it. The housing problems also gave way to her eating crisis. If the one room you live in has no refrigerator, it's very difficult to eat frugally and heathily. Ehrenreich's experiences are so difficult and you feel her relief when she returns to her "normal" life, but that leaves us with the problem of the rest of the Americans for whom Ehrenreich's experiment is their life. Her story is engrossing and interesting and told with much warmth and humor. She reflects on where we go from here at the end of the book (although some of her observations about the difficulty of working could apply to any industry at any income level), which hopefully some Washington policy makers will reflect on. Nickel and Dimed is an engaging read, an important read. It does not provide a big sweeping solution to solving the crisis of the low wage working people of America, but what it does is bring the life that crisis, so those who think it does not exist, can no longer deny that something should be done.
Rating:
Summary: A View into the Window of the Working Poor
Review: I could not put this book down and read it in less than a day. Anyone who believes that the working poor can just "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" should read this book. That also goes for those who believe the poor are just lazy people who have ignored opportunities to help themselves. The author assumes that she can work her way up in the various jobs she holds as a maid, waitress, sales associate, and care provider. She discovers that instead these jobs are dominated by harsh, intrusive management types who either treat their employees like dogs or spout corporate slogans. The highlight of the book for me was her employment experience at Wal-Mart, where she describes her employee orientation in hilarious detail. As she watches training videos and listens to management hype, she wonders how any employee making $7.00 an hour can be motivated by such garbage. When she mentions the low pay to another employee, the woman tells the author to hang in there because after a year, she'll be making $7.75 an hour! Sadly, many of the people the author works with during her brief foray into low-wage jobs will never get ahead. Constrained by back-breaking work and long hours, saving money is next to impossible and getting an education or buying a home is out of reach for these workers. A great read and a life-changing book.
Rating:
Summary: We just created 20 million new jobs? Hardly.
Review: Armed with $1000 in start-up funds, a car and her laptop computer cultural critic and essayist, Barbara Ehrenreich sets off on a journey to try to sustain herself as a low-skilled worker for month's time. She decides to do some good old-fashioned journalism to find out just how she was going to survive on the wages of the unskilled. (Roughly $6 to $7 an hour) Her travels take her to Florida where as a waitress in Florida, where she is constantly called girl and trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire with. In Maine, she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant where she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions not to help you but to screw you. In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for any signs of trouble and even gets to experience the humiliation of Wal-Mart's urine test. She eventually discovers behind all those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless of America. Where civil liberties are quite often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its name as the way out of poverty. In her travels she also discovers that no job is truly unskilled, that every job requires exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. Her narrative is moving, very revealing and makes you laugh if your heart were not so heavy the next time our president says we just created 20 million new jobs. This book is the cold hard reality of those 20 million new jobs. FinancialNeeds.com
Rating:
Summary: It makes you think--and sad.
Review: I saw the mention about this book in the Wall Street Journal, and as one who comes academically from a sociological background,and career-wise from one involved in job creation for the poor,I read this book with special interest. While the scientific methodology used in the limited research may have left a little to be desired, I found the book very readable, full of surprises and disappointments, funny in places and poignant in others. The working poor have never had it easy, but the author's experiences trying to make ends meet, tell a lot about how much harder it has become today. At the end of the book she describes the workers at the bottom of the economic ladder as being a form of social philanthropist, andwhile they cretainly don't assume this position out of choice, it is perhaps one of the best descriptors of their lot. You cannot read this book without facing the the important, perhaps critical role that these workers play in our social fabric, and that somehow we have to find ways to make their daily effort at least result in a life that's fuller than the one Ms Ehrenreich experienced during her monthly trials. That her experiences represent the lives of millions in our workforce who have nothing better to fall back on after the trial is over, should give us pause and hopefully a will to make things better. Thanks Barbara!
Rating:
Summary: Superb.
Review: On economic issues (if not necessarily on social issues), I am more or less a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, and what it stands for. Thus, if you told me that I should read a book that touts the wonders of unionism and strongly advocates the need for a higher minimum wage, I normally would have said thanks, but no thanks. But I read it based on a friend's recommendation, and can only say that I could not be more impressed by Mr. Ehrenreich's effort. It is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in a long time. Here were some of the things I admired: 1. Her writing ability. She has a wonderful fluid style that is very easy to read and yet which struck me as much easier described than done. It had an effortless quality about it, but as one who has to write for a living, it was either not effortless, or else she is simply a talented writer. 2. Her sense of humor. Surprisingly, there is quite a bit of humor in this book and I found myself laughing out loud quite a few times. Her humor, appropriately, is always directed at her actual or potential employers rather than her co-workers, to whom she shows nothing but compassion and respect. 3. The force of her message. There was something subtle and understated, or shall we say less than shrill, about the way she presents her case, that merely adds to its impact. In fact, she almost doesn't present a case at all--she simply lays out her own experiences (together with some footnotes showing national statistics) and lets the reader come to their own conclusion. This is not to say that I am suddenly wildly pro-union or advocate an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $14. However, there is no question that what she has to say is serious food for thought, especially as regards the minimum wage. Indeed, by going in there and getting her hands dirty (literally and figuratively) she presented to me a far stronger case for raising the minimum wage then, say, Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer or Dick Gephardt or Maxine Waters and their ilk ever could or did. As for unions (which is of course not the focus of her book), I have always had mixed feelings. They always seem like such a better idea in theory than in practice. 4. I thought the footnotes were an excellent addition to the book and helped put into a macro perspective some of the same experiences the author was suffering on a micro perspective. Finally, I don't even necessary disagree with some of the criticisms I have read below. As but one example, it did seem that she could have made life a bit easier on herself in certain respects, even within the confines of her own parameters which she set for herself. But despite that, I found this easily to be a 5-star effort and applaud Ms. Ehrenreich for the book.
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