Ehrenreich Nickeled and Dimed
In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, the workers trapped in dead-end service sector jobs have virtually no chance at all of escaping poverty or obtaining any meaningful quality of life. That is one of the main themes of the book, a constant struggle for mere subsistence with a high cost of living and a very poor quality of life. These jobs are all the same in that the employees are expendable, the pay is too low for them to survive, and the benefits are often nonexistent. They are often filled by women, young people and immigrants, and they offer no real future of any kind, much less a path to middle-class status. When Ehrenreich wrote this book, the Great Recession had not yet begun, so this top of work was plentiful, and as she discovered employers ran want ads almost continuously due to the high turnover. Today, with real unemployment rates running at 10-15% or higher in many parts of the country, even these subsistence-level jobs are often hard to find. She has certainly identified one primary reason why the rates of poverty and income inequality have skyrocketed in the United States over the last thirty years, and are getting worse all the time in the current recession.
In Chapter Two, Ehrenreich described how she began her experiment of how well workers could survive at or near the minimum wage in her hometown of Key West, Florida. At first she was concerned that friends might discover her but "during a month of poverty and toils, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes for the most part unnoticed and for the most part unuttered" (Ehrenreich 11). This theme of the sheer anonymity and facelessness of low-wage workers is a constant one throughout the chapter, since they are basically treated as disposable and expendable commodities that can easily be replaced. Her first problem was finding a place to live within her budget, since Key West was a very expensive town for those earning $6-7 per hour. So were most other cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco where "tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with those who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns" (Ehrenreich 12). She finally had to settle on renting a cabin thirty miles out of town for $500 a month, which meant a 30-45 minute commute every day. After saving enough money, she paid $1,100 to rent a trailer closer to Key West in a neighborhood that was a "nest of crime and crack," lacking basic services like a supermarket, bank or Laundromat (Ehrenreich 39).
Finding one of these low-level service jobs was simply a question of filling out applications at supermarkets, hotels and convenience stores at the right time and then waiting for someone to quit or be fired. By the 1990s, 81% of all large employers also required a drug screening as a precondition to being hired, which tended to detect marijuana users most of all (Ehrenreich 14). She finally got a waitressing job that paid about $2.00 an hour plus tips, although once these were added in the pay was usually around $7 an hour. Even managers were never very highly paid in these jobs, averaging only about $400 a week, although they were at least free to sit down while when the servers were not working they were "sweeping, scrubbing, refilling, and restocking" (Ehrenreich 18). No matter that managers were mainly promoted from the working class, once they had moved over to the corporate side there was always a gulf between them and the lower-level employees.
In this workplace of menial jobs where unions were almost never allowed, Ehrenreich did not notice a great deal of working class solidarity. She sympathized with George, a 19-year-old Czech immigrant who worked as a dishwasher, and noted that he had to share an apartment with other immigrant workers and only slept when one of the beds became available. Later, he was accused of stealing...
Nickel and Dream People who are born or raised in the United States share unique character traits because of the American culture. Because this is considered a land of freedom and opportunity there are rights and gifts that are promised to each citizen. The American Dream is the unique idea that anyone who is willing to work hard can come from nothing and achieve their life's goals and ambitions so long
However, I did not feel in any way degraded by the position in the way that Ehrenreich did, and I believe that to be the case because many of Ehrenreich's positions were by their very nature problematic. For example, she worked as a waitress and a house cleaner. Both of those positions place the individual in a position of subservience. Working at Blockbuster is different because we are around
" (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.44) At least as a waitress, Ehrenreich is visible. Maids, which are usually, except in all-white areas like Maine, utterly invisible and socially isolated in the socially stratified community. Worse yet, while Ehrenreich might have had some anxiety about passing, even educated Black women occasionally have trouble 'passing' for the class they are a part of. 'Oh Look Mommy a baby maid," Ehrenreich quotes the poet "Audre Lorde"
Ehrenreich notes how girls who must work for hours cleaning houses often select a bag of Doritos over a sandwich for lunch, presumably because the Doritos are cheaper and taste good. Of course, for the workers at the lowest end of the pay scale, Doritos or the free burger Ehrenreich gets as a waitress for lunch is an undreamed-of luxury. Lunch might instead be some store-brand hot dog or hamburger
If the author had been a woman of color, she might have faced additional discrimination in hiring, and found she was kept away from certain jobs, even though such hiring practices are illegal. She does note often throughout the book that many (in fact most) of her co-workers are white, so it is clear immigrants and women of color work at even lower paying jobs behind the scenes. She also
Nickeled and Dimed In an attempt to prevent families from living below the poverty line in the United States, the government ensures that people are paid a minimum-wage. Through this minimum-wage, the government believes that people can afford to pay their rents and bills, and cover the costs of their groceries, etc. However, this is not true, as the minimum-wage is indeed too little for the average family to survive on.
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