Rating: 
Summary: The grindstone
Review: NICKEL AND DIMED is a book of unpleasant truths and awkward economic realities. Being a book about work in America it should not, primarily be a story about grimly getting by. The people here are not economic failures - not the "underclass" or welfare recipients, they are not even the unemployed. They are simply the unskilled and the working poor; that large sector of our labor force that work for less than $8.00 an hour. Included here are former welfare mothers and all who earn below the official poverty line of $17,230 in annual family income. The story however is grim, because, as the subtitle says: it's all about not getting by in America. The motivation for this book came when Ms Ehrenreich asked herself: "how does anyone live on wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular, were the [millions of] women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?" Ah ha! some may say, a critique of welfare reform. This proves that NICKEL AND DIMED is just another partisan analysis of inequality and a diatribe about a coming class war. While Ms Ehrenreich does show her liberal sympathies and talks of social protest, the book is far too objective an analysis to be a polemic, and it's much to humorous to be a jeremiad. Ms Ehrenreich worked for months in low wage jobs: waitress and hotel maid in Key West; housecleaner and nursing home attendant in Portland, Maine; and as a salesclerk at Wal-Mart in Minneapolis. Life pretty quickly became a constant fret about affordable housing, health care, and food. "If you can't put up the two months rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best...you eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store." Her jobs in Key West earned Ms Ehrenreich $1,039 for the month, $517 of which she spent on food and she says there was no accomodation near work for less than $600. Work it out - that's not getting by. In Maine she earned $1,200 and managed to reduce rent to less than 50% of her monthly earnings. This was only a pyrrhic victory though as she states that with the tourist season around the corner, her rent would have more than doubled. This constant and futile search for affordable housing is best summarized by her comment that "it came as a shock to realize that 'trailer-trash' has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to." The strength of the book comes from Ms Ehrenreichs ability to tell this tale of grim and grimy economics in a sensitive and yet humorous way. She discusses some policy issues - housing, the method of calculating minimum wage, health insurance. She is most insightful and writes at her best when she concludes: "Just bear in mind, when I stumble, that this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy's lower depths." Ms Ehrenreich, as a writer, might agree with the comment below, but as NICKEL AND DIMED shows, this should not be anyone's experience of working in America. "Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself, leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Rating:
Summary: GREAT BOOK: I'D GIVE IT SIX STARS IF I COULD
Review: I loved Ehrenreich's original Harper's piece that turned into Nickel and Dimed, but the book is even better. In the face of all the glib talk about how easy it is get by on minimal wage jobs whose pay has stagnated for 20 years, Ehrenreich tries to actually do that-to live on the $5.50 or $6.50-an-hour jobs that are the sole livelihoods of millions of Americans. She creates a wonderful portrait of a world that to most professional class Americans is absolutely invisible. Ehrenreich tells wonderful stories about all the ways that low-wage jobs grind people down, and about how the people caught in those jobs respond with human dignity and solidarity. in the middle of all the forces that grind people down. She's talking about real and urgent issues, but the book is also terrifically funny, both in documenting the blithe callousness that affluent Americans express toward those who serve them, and in her handling of her own role. The humor helps make this a terrific read, and it makes her core points all the more powerful. I also thought constantly while I was reading this book about the Republican overturning of the ergonomic standards. The jobs she describes routinely destroy people's bodies, because of their pace and because of the conditions people work under. Yet we've now ditched the very standards that would have begun to prevent this. With union contracts, people have some protection against the most destructive situations, without them, like in the jobs she describes, they're totally thrown to the wolves. We're going to have to regain some sense of human solidarity in this country and a politics that respects union organizing, or more and more of us will see our lives squeezed away like the people Ehrenreich so eloquently describes. In my dreams, every political and corporate leader would read Nickled and Dimed and heed its lessons, but since that's probably not going to happen, the rest of us better read it and start demanding we actually become a nation of "liberty and justice for all." Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time
Rating: 
Summary: Running to try to catch up
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich "leaves behind" her comfortable home, steady income and sets out to see if one can survive on today's working wages. The only allowences, she has startup money(first and last months' rent) and a car to use. Very quickly she discovers that life's basic needs cannot be met on minimum wage. Housing is unavailable and when available, unaffordable. Medical insurance (when available) is expensive, and food takes a huge chunk out of the weekly pay. Just to barely survive, it is almost a necessity to work two jobs. Ehrenreich works in three different areas of the country, three different types of jobs. The common thread, the jobs were hard, physically demanding, mind numbing, and looked down upon. Employers were able to administer "personality profiles"(usually given by other employees), demand drug testing (sometimes paid for by the applicant)and kept those they employed in a constant state of upheaval by second guessing every part of the job. Any working person can identify with this book. Managers spying on staff to prevent "time theft", the sense you are somehow beholden to the employer, being asked to work overtime without compensation, and "do as I say, not as I do" management. What makes this book unique, is it looks at the lowest segment of the working strata...and how impossible it is to survive on what multimillion corporations, politicians, and stockholders deem a "living wage". Even with the backup the author had, she disovered that she was unable to afford housing, "emergency" food and shelter aid is hard to find (once found; the paperwork byzentine and availability spotty), and Ehrenreich finds herself just one step away from living in a shelter. And she is working. Hard! A clear-eyed and honest look at the reality of the working poor. Ehrenreich gives her coworkers a much deserved dignity and exposes the real impossibility of surviving on low wages and how wearing it is on the soul to be on the low end. if there is a weak point, it is she felt "above" hercoworkers, although bosses get the most(and much deserved) scorn. It is easy to talk about dressing "poor" or to dismiss the "hairstyle of the poor"(the ponytail) when you know you have a home and a well paying job to return to.
Rating:
Summary: In the Vein of WORKING and GIG
Review: I'm glad this book was written because I'm a middle-class woman with a college education and a lot of choices in life. I know it's tough out there and I'm glad that I was able to take a peek and see how others live. Wal-Mart sounds horrible; I used to work at a grocery store as a teenager bagging groceries and that was hades. I knew I had a way out, but most people are not as fortunate. Thank you Ms. Ehrenreich for writing such an eye-opening, powerful book. I've reccommended it to a lot of my friends.
Rating:
Summary: This will be studied in my Social Studies Class
Review: I've already spoken about this book with all my colleagues. It might even be incorporated into our career segment of the health classes. I've always enjoyed Ms. Ehrenreich's essays. I love the one she wrote a few years ago about housewives as leaches. I don't think that this book will change anything, except it might raise awareness. I teach high school, but in the summers I work at those 7.00 jobs. Does she ever have it right--I worked one job in home care--it was exhausting, and then another was a death watch for an old man, and I had a great job to return to in the fall. When my colleagues start to hollar about salary increases, I'm always muttering in the back, "try wiping old people's bums for $7.00 an hour"--you can imagine I am hated! I was a slum lord's daughter, so I know all about the inability to pay rent. Dad used to come home with wedding rings every month around rent time--and Dad was a "soft touch." He had a reputation for helping people out--well, I guess the big welfare reform wasn't so great, especially for women.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: A good book about life at the lower end of the worker-bee food chain. Barbara Ehrenreich is to be commended for actually getting out there and living the life of the menial worker rather than opining from the ivory tower of the academy. She really gets to the meat of the problem for people who have to work several jobs to make ends meet, a real life hand-to-mouth drama. All of us should read this book as it lets you feel the toil, sweat and tears of those on the lower end of the spectrum of employment. It would be even better if her next book would be about running a small business. Since 65% of GDP is produced by businesses of 50 employees or less she should endeavor to come up with a marketable idea, determine a location, write a business plan, pay the attorneys from her savings, incorporate, pay all the license and registration fees, file with IRS, raise the capital from friends and family, start paying her employees including their health care benefits, FICA, disability and life insurance premiums, and begin to deal with the Byzantine world of State, Federal and local regulations. And on top of this she could feel the betrayal a boss feels when the people he has employed steal from him and worse. Barbara could enlighten her audience and do a great service for the country if she were to undertake this arduous venture, the kind that budding entrepreneurs, both men and women of all colors and creeds, do on a daily basis. It's part of what distinguishes America from the "old country", they can actually start a business and improve the quality of their life and that of their family. Many fail, but enough succeed to make our economy the greatest in world history. She should sit down with George McGovern who did this. His was a profound revelation when the country inn he purchased went bankrupt. He was particularly upset with the regulations and the taxes. He didn't realize any of these things when he was in Congress. He allowed laws to pass that hampered these small business people without having a feel for what he was actually imposing on them. Like Ehrenreich he should be commended for "walking a mile in their moccasins". Ehrenreich is such a witty and entertaining writer that she owes it to her audience to produce this sequel. There are many more areas that need to see the light of day such as she has exposed in this classic work. An excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Bold and engaging
Review: I heartily recommend this book as a sobering and engaging look at the trials and travails of low-income workers in America. Ehrenreich captures the desperation, fear, and all-too-frequent fatalism of minimum-wage employees, their demanding and often hypocritical managers, and the indifferent, affluent society that surrounds them. Eminently readable (I finished in just under a day), Ehrenreich handles with humor, insight, and not a few footnotes the problems our economic system has handed the workers at the bottom of the pyramid. On the downside, Ehrenreich lets her personal politics show through unfiltered, and I wonder if the image of the poverty-level worker she has fashioned is sometimes little more than a strawman. By their own admission, many of the workers she portrays have made poor life-choices; would increasing wages, providing decent benefits, and constructing a more "compassionate" work environment result in workers dumping their abusive partners, perpetually poor money management skills, work habits, or addictions that account for much of their misery? It's a chicken-and-egg question Ehrenreich dances around (or ignores, I couldn't tell which). And, while Ehrenreich holds corporate America largely responsible for the inequitable and inhuman treatment suffered by the workers, she fails to explain how a corporation that tolerated substance abuse, shoplifting or other forms of theft, and absenteeism -- all of which she personally has no qualms about in her co-workers -- could stay in business, let alone not be shut down by a government agency or sued out of existence in a product liability case. Ehrenreich describes reality at the worker level while short-changing realities at other levels. Nevertheless, it is not Ehrenreich's purpose to debate the complex interactions of the nation's economy. She is, first and foremost, an observer -- and she marvelously succeeds at conveying her first-hand experience as an undercover laborer. Numbers do not lie: she conclusively demonstrates that market conditions do not make "minimum wage" equal to a "living wage". She is not a John Howard Griffin -- when the going gets tough, she unapologetically dips into her previous-life resources while musing how hard this must be for the REAL minimum-wage worker. Her self-imposed one-month stays at each job site left me feeling she hadn't captured the full stories behind many of her reticent co-workers. Yet Ehrenreich must be praised for her willingness to go through this ordeal at any level, and her book is far more illustrative than a stack of journals and articles of reporters who tackle this issue from the outside. The real story of this book is that a well-educated, resourceful, healthy woman was unable to make her ends meet in low-wage jobs across the country; what should we expect from a portion of the population that lacks one or more of those advantages? Welfare "reform", as we know it, has not dispelled the struggling of the low-income wage earner. While I may disagree with Ehrenreich's proposed solutions, this book convinced me of the need for action.
Rating:
Summary: Minimum wage is big challenge for single moms
Review: My experiences were a little different than many of the examples in the book, however as a single parent(that couldn't drive) with five children I can relate to the difficulties in this book. I was lucky, I had a good job, child support and the help of friends and family. I often worked two or three jobs, but we were never on welfare and my kids never went hungry. Emergencies were a challenge, how families make it without insurance, without help from the community and without family support is beyond me. This book is great because the author is quick to disclose that she had many advantages including a thousand dollar start up and a car. I am curious if the author has considered the large off the books population in childcare and other household employment that work off the books at salaries much higher than minimum wage and do not pay taxes. The deck is stacked against women trying to make a living for their families and this book showcases the many problems.
Rating:
Summary: "A Preferential Option For The Poor"
Review: Barbara Ehrenreich wonderfully enough breaks down the simplistic agendas which restrict so many contemporary liberals and conservatives from observing our recent economic boom with due concerns for equity and justice. Except for her insistence that an adequate provision for the poor is a necessary mark of any true civilization - an insistence as true for the cultural conservative Richard M. Weaver as for the more left-leaning George Orwell - she is free of any vision-distorting agenda. No latter-day Marie Antoinette eager to play shepherdess, Ehrenreich is quick to point out that her incognito trip through the economic lower depths is in a sense artificial, if not phony, for she's never more than a phone call away from personal bail-out. Nevertheless, her purpose here is not to wring hands with the suffering poor, but to put herself in a first-person position to report on the plights of so many of them, and this she does with a clear and steady vision. While she laments, for instance, the absence of union representation as a countervailing force to corporate greed, she acknowledges at the same time her awareness of union abuses past and present. While she sees many female members of the working poor as exploited by low wages and high rents, she also reveals her despair at finding so many of them them disturbingly passive, and even worse, oddly eager for male management's praises. Ehrenreich's overall purpose is less to outline precise solutions than to call the attention of our greedy society to economic abuses that in fact exist all around us. In doing so, she has performed a profound civic service.
Rating:
Summary: For anyone who ever wondered if they were crazy
Review: Ever wondered why when the economy was supposed to be so great, things were still awfully tough/impossible for you? thought there was something wrong with you? this book will make you feel better in some ways and worse in others. The good news: it's not you! You CAN'T live on a minimum wage job in modern america. The bad news: this is a big problem for millions. This book is hilariously funny, heartbreaking, a story about one woman's attempt to learn how to survive while working as a waitress, in walmart, as a maid-- and it;s also a brilliant and sad commentary about ordinary people just trying to get by in america today. read it -- and give it to all your friends, those who make little money-- and especially, to those who make a lot. They need to know this!
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