Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Rating:
Summary: Good investigative report
Review: The author proposes to live the life of a low-income earner for a few months to see whether she could survive under these conditions.

She starts in Key West her hometown (I am surprised no one has recognized her), moves to Portland, Maine, and then Minneapolis. In each city, she barely survives on her minimum wages but has to live in rundown motels or trailer. On one occasion, she has to take on two jobs to make ends meet despite the fact she does not have any dependent.

The low-income earner, she finds out, is a "giver." He/she endures privation, lives in substandard housing, and toils at low wages to keep inflation low and prices reasonable.

Although the study is simplistic, the author is to be congratulated for her courage and sense of adventure for undertaking this project.

Rating:
Summary: Leftist claptrap
Review: "Nickel and Dimed" could have been a good book. Supposedly a tale about how hard it is for the working poor to survive in America, "Nickel and Dimed" is instead a leftist screed that blames business owners, rich people, and even evangelical Christians for poverty in America.

"Nickel and Dimed" readers will be taught that welfare reform was bad, that we don't spend enough on public housing, that universal government-run day care would be nifty, and that Jesus was a socialist. (He wasn't. See Luke 12:13-15)

Author Barbara Ehrenreich writes regularly for liberal publications such as The Nation and Harper's Magazine. A few years after the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill, Ehrenreich decided to take a series of low-wage jobs to see how well the working poor were doing.

Ehrenreich journeys from Key West, Florida, to Portland, Maine, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, on her low-income experiment, working as a waitress, a maid, and a Wal-Mart clerk. Her wages range from $7 to $9 an hour-for hard work. This book does serve the useful purpose of exploding any romantic notions about the nobility of being poor, if anyone still believes that. Poverty sucks, says Ken Hamblin, the conservative black radio host. The fact that it sucks serves as an incentive to improve one's skills and education to find a better job.

Ehrenreich is certainly a vivid writer, telling clearly her travails in trying to rent a room, buy food and clothing, and get transportation on her low-wage earnings. But that's partly the problem with the book. We know that she is merely conducting an experiment. If things get too tough for poor Barb, she can return to her upper-middle-class job as a liberal journalist.

A much more engaging story could have been told about the people she meets and mentions briefly. How about George, a 19-year-old Czech dishwasher? He has been in America only a week when Ehrenreich meets him on her waitress job. What's his story? What would drive him to leave home and seek greener pastures in America? Is he here legally, or illegally? (Now that's a great topic for a book-how illegal immigration may be driving down the wages of working class Americans.)

Holly is the 23-year-old team leader of the maid service at one of Ehrenreich's other jobs. Holly is pregnant, and she "has been married for almost a year, and manages to feed her husband, herself, and an elderly relative on $30-$50 a week," writes Ehrenreich. How does Holly do it? We never find out.

What we do get lots of in "Nickel and Dimed" are Ehrenreich's policy prescriptions on how to help the working poor in America. Her solutions, as you can surmise, are more government spending and more social welfare programs.

For example, Ehrenreich promotes public housing and housing vouchers, because "the market fails to distribute some vital commodit[ies], like housing, to all who require it." But the housing market has not failed. The reason it is so difficult for low-income people to find affordable housing is precisely because the government has meddled in the housing market. Rent control and restrictions on development have made it very difficult to build and lease low-income housing units. Government created the low-income housing shortage, and Ehrenreich can only come up with more government solutions to fix the problem.
Other items on Ehrenreich's list of government do-good recommendations: living wage laws, expanded public transit, government day care. But we've been there, done that.

With the enormous expansion of social programs in the 1960s and 1970s, America waged war on poverty-and poverty won. What we learned from that wasteful experience is that welfare creates dependency, destroys stable families, and causes worse social pathologies, like crime and delinquency, than the poverty that the social programs were supposed to eradicate.

Through the pioneering research of scholars such as Robert Rector and Marvin Olasky, we know what the main factors are that force people down the road of poverty-single parenthood, lack of a strong work ethic, addiction. If single mothers married the father of their children, says Rector, three-quarters of poor children would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

Rating:
Summary: The underside of trickle-down economics
Review: This book is a real eye-opener for people who have never had to worry about how they will feed their families, or whether they will buy food or prescription drugs in any given week. As an attorney for unions, and a child who grew up very poor, I already had an idea of what the author was going to encounter during the course of her experiment. But many other people don't, and this book is for them.

Many people don't realize how absolutely paltry salaries of "unskilled" laborers are. They don't do the math to try to figure out how far a $7.00/hour wage will stretch toward covering bare-bones expenses for a family. They don't factor in the rising cost of housing and health care. And they don't consider the intangibles--like any person's limitations (including mental capabilities and physical disabilities) and family situations.

I am surprised at the scathing nature of some of the reviews of this book I found on amazon.com. The reader who wrote the spotlight review entitled "Have your quiche and eat it too" was particularly harsh. This reader's criticism seemed to be based on: 1) That the author made a lot of money off of this book; 2) That the author did not study any of her co-workers in depth to find out what happened to them in the long term; and 3) That the author was spoiled and snobbish, expressing her fondness for pesto-encrusted salmon and high quality wines.

I respectfully disagree with that reviewer and I find that the reader's criticisms lack merit. To be fair, this book never touted itself as a long-term analysis of a family in crisis (due to low wages and high cost of living). I'm sure there are books like that out there, and I am sure that such a book would be an eye-opening read as well. This book was about trying--in three geographically distinct areas--to make it on a near minimum-wage salary. It was about the reasons that this author was unable to succeed. Arguably it was all the more effective because the author had money before embarking on this journey and therefore was unprepared for the difficulties that awaited her. And I am not offended by the fact that the author is making money off this book. At least she is spreading the word as to the tremendous obstancles impeding the progress of the "working poor" in our country.

I don't think that the author is a hero, and I wasn't shocked by what the author's experiences revealed. But I think a lot of people who read this book will be. This is a sympathetic and wryly humorous account of one woman's experience in the $7.00/hour workforce. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Overall, Well-Done
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich, for all of the fundamental flaws in the premise of her grand experiment, does a fairly good job presenting the "working poor." Nickel and Dimed is a first-hand account of Ehrenreich's attempt to assume a low-paying (read: Sub- $8.00/hr) job and attempt to, essentially, make ends meet. She holds numerous positions, among which are waitressing in the Key West and cleaning houses in Maine. While her writing may get wordy and almost general to a fault (she tends to use non-specific, broad language which makes it mildly boring), she does a commendable job of holding reader's interest overall.

Overall being the key word.

Ehrenreich does a formidable job of presenting her own circumstances, and there is much to be said for an actual "experiment" versus plain regurgitation of news articles or statistics. Additionally (fully appreciated by me), she does not weigh her writing down in facts; rather, she presents the issue at hand (with a noticeable leftist-skew, but it is tolerable) as she has experienced them, leaving the reader to make their own judgement.

While this book is a sounding board for Ehrenreich's own political commentary, what she says is validated by the circumstances she had put herself in to write this book. Did she really get a 100% accurate experience? Of course not. But she manages to maintain an air of credibility by having actually experienced about what she writes.

This is an excellent book to read for an introduction to the plight of the "working poor." While I don't agree with a lot of what she says, it is still worthwhile - she raises issues on the most fundamental level of acceptable survival/lifestyle, and validly so. There are, of course, flaws in what she did - and it was exactly that, an "experiment" - she could easily revert back to her old, cushy lifestyle without much effort.

Rating:
Summary: An Eye-Opener For Everyone . . .
Review: The book Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is an excellent demonstration of how difficult it is to survive on a low-wage income. Ms. Ehrenreich is a journalist with a Ph.D. who temporarily gives up life as she knows it to join the millions of people who work full-time earning poverty-level wages.

She sets out with next to nothing to beging this journey in Florida then moves to Maine and eventually Minnesota. She worked as a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a cleaning maid, a dietary aide and even a sales clerk at Wal-Mart. At times she must even juggle two jobs at once to make ends meet. While Barbara struggles through difficult times, as many of us do, she is only conducting a research assignment and is able to return to a comfortable life. Unfortunately, many Americans do not have this luxury and must continue to struggle, day in and day out, to pay the rent and hopefully have enough money left over for food.

This book is an eye-opener in several aspects. First, it puts into perspective just how many people actually do fight to survive in the real world. Next, it makes me realize how lucky I am and that life really isn't that bad; compared to how some people live. I may not be able to afford brand name clothes or go to fancy restaurants but I do have clothes on my back and food to eat every day. Finally, it stresses the importance of respect and appreciation for everyone regardless of what job they hold. Many low-wage employees are frowned upon or simply ignored because of their status but they work just as hard and are just as dedicated to their job as an executive is. They make the least amount of money and often times do the hardest work yet they are rarely recognized for it. Keep this in mind next time you pass a housekeeper in a hotel hallway or contemplate leaving a tip for your waitress. Remember to say hello and thank them for the service they provided for you!

Rating:
Summary: Sloppy, contradictory and demeaning...to the workers.
Review: I was prepared to read this as a fact-finding book. What I discovered was an author who invariably found exactly what she expected to find, and, in the rush to foreordained conclusions, never noticed that her observations contradict one another.

The last sentence of the book exemplifies Ehrenreich's soggy thinking: "I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief." In fact, as she tells it, she met at least two thieves (a worker who stole from a storeroom and a disliked boss who was perhaps also an addict) and two slackers -- the worker who went AWOL from a nursing home job and left her to a grueling day, and Ehrenreich herself, when she "called in sick" at the nursing home because she wanted a day off, leaving someone else to have a grueling day. Secondly, she stayed in no job long enough to truly know her coworkers. Thirdly, and in any case, not meeting slackers, addicts, or thieves would not prove they don't exist.

Other examples: Ehrenreich exults when the aforementioned boss is fired for stealing money for drugs but concludes that urine tests for drugs are meant only to intimidate workers. Employed as a waitress, she is advised not to let her customers run her ragged and views this as the Corporation preventing her from caring for them; later she quits because a table of customers has run her ragged -- so why was the advice Corporate malice and not Corporate protectiveness?

Ehrenreich sympathizes with and condescends to her coworkers simultaneously. Because she finds certain jobs degrading, she believes the jobholder to be degraded, and never mind what the jobholder thinks. Because some people -- at both ends of the economic spectrum -- treat her differently when she is in a maid uniform, she thinks she is demeaned. Thus, when her fellow maids value their work and want praise for doing it well, she pities them and believes them to be brainwashed. The fault, of course, is with those who treat maids differently -- that is, with people who don't confer dignity on all honest work. Unfortunately, Ehrenreich appears to be among them.

In some cases, such as that of the storeroom thief, she comes dangerously close to arguing that business causes both poverty and misbehavior. Has Ehrenreich thought this through? Are human beings so weak and malleable that certain pay levels and job conditions provoke involuntary thievery, laziness, etc.? Or are "the oppressed" a special category, of whom society shouldn't expect good character and good sense? In short, does Ehrenreich think ill of humanity in general or merely those for whom she claims to speak?

Buy this book if you want propaganda to confirm what you think you already know. Don't buy it if you want logical thinking on an important topic.

Rating:
Summary: No shocker here...but worth the read
Review: It's tough to get by on minimum wage...but you must already know that. If that comes as a shocker then with all due respect, please read this book. If you are aware of this fact, still read this book. It might make you angry and at times you feel like strangling Barbara Ehrenreich because of her constant references to her success in her "real life" with her PhD and her daughter at Harvard, and because as soon as the money started to get low and things really got tough, she was quick to depart from her rough environment. How many of her co-workers were able to do that? This book raises issues that both conservatives and liberals are aware of, but conservatives choose not to pay attention to, such issues as unaffordable housing for people who work low wage jobs and are at the bottom of the economic scale forcing them to become renters rather than owners and limiting their ability to gain financial stability.

Ehrenreich pats herself on the back for a job well done. Yes, she has been accustom to the spoils of life that many of us could not possibly go without for more than a day, but this only works to slight the fact that she failed; after all, the subtitle reads, "On NOT getting by in America". The gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. Ehrenreich works two jobs a week to stay afloat but is gone after basically a week. She also never is able to fully embody the minimum wage worker. Her life of spoils causes her to sometimes misuse her money by ordering fast food rather than buying food at the grocery market for the same price to last her six more days than a fast food meal does.

Despite Ehrenreich's flaws, the interviews and detailed economic interactions she has are insightful and give rise to reflections. In a world where a majority wants to see the wrong righted, this book offers issues where wrongs can be righted in regard to finding affordable housing for low income Americans or forming unions in jobs like Wal-Mart where so many rights are taken from their workers as well as issues with health care. Conservatives will hate it, liberals will love it, but within both groups individuals will come out of it with individual opinions on the working poor in America.

Rating:
Summary: I Write from Experience
Review: The Republicans will either ignore or hate this book, but I worked at the majority of the places she mentions, and yes, she is very accurate in her discriptions.
She doesn't mention that there are also many college graduates with liberal arts degrees (Journalism, English, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, etc ) who are working at these jobs as well.
For those of you who are non-business majors, business only cares about business and nothing else. All managers -- yes, even the nice ones -- believe they have divine authority and impeccable judgement.
I landed a job driving the city bus, which pays well, but with the danger of a police officer without a gun or backup. I have a degree in English/Philosophy, but there's not much call for that in my job. I wish the author would have went more into the plight of the college educated who also work at these jobs.

Rating:
Summary: Self Indulgence, or Barbara Goes Slumming
Review: "Dahling, let's go see how the other half lives!" begins Ehrenreich's latest tome. Well, it should, anyway. One long, gorgeous paean to ...well, herself, Ehrenreich's book exposes the insufferable condescension with which well-to-do liberals treat the objects of their compassion.

Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to determine whether the working poor can actually live on their meager wages. It's an interesting enough premise, which is why I bought the book. We discover that work is harder than Barbara thought; housing is harder to find than Barbara thought; and that the poor refuse to recognize just how downtrodden they are. After adventures and misadventures, Barbara determines that the low-wage poor just can't get by; they are in crisis.

Perhaps they are; but you wouldn't know it by this book. Our heroine pops from city to city, offering no skills whatsoever to a prospective employer, and never fails to land a job almost immediately. Her househunting skills are abysmal, she fails to capitalize on the housing she does discover (for example, in the housing market in Minneapolis, which she describes as the tightest in the nation, she turns her nose up at a room without a kitchen, opting instead for a 50-dollar-a-night motel room -- without a kitchen). She smokes a doobie or two (she doesn't mention where she got the weed, or how it factored into her expenses) and then spends several pages excoriating the humiliating urinalysis process - which was, after all, designed to weed out dilettantes like Barbara. She tries to interest her fellow workers in the Revolution, sort of, when she's feeling revolutionary, but can't sustain the urge. She kindly explains to some of her new Poor Friends why they should feel outraged and angry; one can't help feeling that at least one reason her friends don't respond is that they have already become responsible adults. I can't help leaving the book with the impression that Barbara, despite her years, was spared that transition. (Have another doobie, comrade!)

The best review I can offer of the book is the same review Barbara's coworkers gave her when she dropped her anticlimactic bombshell as she left each location. "I'm not really one of you poor slobs!" she confides to her Special Friend at each location. "I'm a Writer!" The response, without exception, can be summarized as "Oh, really? That's nice."

That's about as worked up as I can get about Barbara's Year of Living Dangerously. "Oh, really? That's nice."

Rating:
Summary: What a wasted opportunity.
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich should be both ashamed and proud. She should be proud of herself because she's a good writer (which is an admirable and difficult to acquire skill), she should be ashamed because she's a poor journalist...

...and she's more a journalist. This "expiriment" was tainted from the start. Barbara Ehrenreich wasn't looking to write a expose about the "soiled but still intact" American Dream (and the (X) ways to avoid getting crushed under it); no, she knew how the story would go. This was a campaign not to emphasize the legitimite plight of our countries poor, but instead, to further her career and fatten her wallet.

I read this book about two years ago not to find fault with it, but rather (as a large employer) to better understand the plight of some of my lowest paid employees. I believe understanding is the first step towards finding an equitable solution. Well, time after time I found myself shaking my head as she acted out her "impression" of an uneducated poor person. According to Barbara Ehrenreich poor people aren't smart enough to rent rooms to cut their biggest expense (rent) in half while they get on their feet, or to cook at home (vs. go out and spend $11 on a burger and wine), or to exceed the expectations of their employer (hint: that's how you get raises).

I barely got through High School, I know what it's like to stand in line with WIC coupons while the cashier decides what food that you picked out will or won't qualify, my paychecks at 13 (when I started working at an Ice Cream Parlor for $3.50hr) went towards buying food, my mom worked as a security co. receptionist by day and waitress by night; I know the agony, and debilitating emotional toll that being poor takes on people...

...that was 10 years ago. After a long hard slog I now own a Consumer Service company (over 1,000 employees), a Software Company (100 employees), a Restaurant, and a Nightclub. This, according to Barbara Ehrenreich would be a literal impossibility. How did I do it? Well, I could go into boring detail...I won't; but at the core of my long answer would be this: OPTIMISM. I fundamentally believed it could be done. I took a sales job for minimum wage + commission (Barbara Ehrenreich never did that...another handicap...?), I got a roommate, and I worked 70 hours a week. Nothing happened at first (but exhaustion), nothing perceptible anyway, but unbeknownst to me, I was learning and developing respect as a hard worker from those that I worked for.

That's how you do it. When you "NEED" to. Barbara Ehrenreich never needed to. She got her story, she made her money. But at what cost? It's my belief that this book sapped "just that much more" desperately needed optimism from our wonderful, ever changing, painfully flawed, but best available ideal we call The American Dream.