Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Published in 2002. 240 p.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Summary: Freelance writer and author Barbara Ehrenreich conducts a social experiment in which she leaves her comfortable middle-class existence behind to work as a low-wage worker in various fields in different parts of the country to see if minimum wage will keep a roof over her head and food on her table…or somewhere, because she doesn’t always have a table. She works as a server (waitress) in Florida, a cleaning lady in Maine and a Wal-Mart employee in Minnesota. She shares her experiences with trying to make do, and covertly interviewing her coworkers about how they make a go at it (since they don’t have a middle-class existence to go home to at the end of a month or two.)

Review: This is a timely novel for the world we currently live in. Ehrenreich tackles a tough subject and an even tougher lifestyle by adopting the lifestyle of the working poor. Major kudos to her for going undercover for the book, rather than just interviewing people as a journalist. She was able to really integrate herself with the working poor and get information that is not usually made available to a person of her socioeconomic rank. What’s really cool about the book is that I can show it to my mother as an example of how I didn’t fritter all of my wages away when I supported myself during my final two years of college, and that sometimes, yeah, you just need more money than your job provides.

Another great aspect of the book is how Ehrenreich pulls the working poor, the ones who serve the middle class and up, into view for the first time. Ehrenreich admits to never having noticed any of the workers at the places she shopped, dined, etc. She marvels at how no one of her normal socioeconomic status notices that she exists, despite the fact that she, during her three stints as an “unskilled” worker, helped to provide and keep up the lifestyle that the middle and upper classes have become used to. Diana Henriques of the New York Times writes that everyone who reads the book should pass it on to their relatives and friends…and she’s right. Everyone should read the book, and realize that there are these people out there, slaving away to make your life better. And you don’t thank…because you don’t even know that they are there. And if by some chance you do notice them, it’s almost always in a negative way. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been yelled at or ignored by someone who feels that because I’m working in retail and they have a 9 to 5 job that they are better than me. As Ehrenreich proved, half of them probably couldn’t do what the working poor, what the “unskilled” laborer, does.

Having worked retail at only $7 an hour (I later learned that I was the lowest paid employee in the company, but I had come from out of state and didn’t know what a living wage was in Boston and didn’t request a high enough starting wage, or a raise even after I realized it), I empathize with Ehrenreich throughout all of her jobs. I felt for her when she talks about how she had to put away cart after cart of discarded clothing at Wal-Mart. Any person who has ever worked retail understands the frustration of people picking up things that they later decide they don’t want, and leaving them somewhere, whether its at a dressing room, or placed randomly in the store (insert rant: if you don’t want it, give it to a salesperson, or put it back in the correct spot. When you put it in a random spot, we, the retail workers, want to bar you from ever re-entering our store.) I also empathized with Ehrenreich over the back-breaking labor that she endured during her stint as a maid. Thankfully, I’ve never been a maid, but I’ve worked at higher levels of retail long enough to know that things like heavy lifting and being on your feet for 8 hours a day, especially both in the same 8 hour period, absolutely sucks. Ehrenreich definitely gets that point across.

That’s really what Ehrenreich was getting across about the working poor: it sucks to be a member. You can scrape by, by the quality of life is so unbelievably low, that no sane person would want to do it for any length of time, and yet, people do. I worked with a girl who had two jobs: a full-time job with kids during the week, and a part-time job in retail on the weekends. She had no days off. Ever. I couldn’t imagine a life like that until I worked full-time while going to school. I had no days off. Ever. And it sucked, big-time.

My big big big complaint with this experiment is that Ehrenreich went into each of these situations with a larger sum of money than any of her coworkers would have had when setting up (over a thousand dollars), a car (in which insurance was already paid on it, she only had to account for gas), and an unwillingness to do sometimes whatever it takes to get by (such as live with roommates.) Although I fully understand that these jobs and these few months of living poor were unpleasant for Ehrenreich, I think there is a whole other side to poverty that she will never grasp without fully immersing herself in the lifestyle, not to mention, whenever she needed to, she could pull the plug and leave. A safety net is great if you have one, but how many of the type of people she was reporting on would actually have such a safety net? I think Ehrenreich made a good head start here, but may have done better had she written another section where she was not “on location,” but interviewing someone who had no safety net, no car, roommates galore, and really lived the type of life that the impoverished live. Hell Ehrenreich, interview me. I’ll tell you what it means to hear your roommates’ every drunken move at 3 am when you have to be to work at 9, what its like to not have a safety net (my mother had temporarily withdrawn it,) what its like to walk to work every day, and make a measly $7 and hour when living in Boston (one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.), and the fight for time and a half (by law, holidays and Sundays in Massachusetts are paid time and a half, and as such, a day that you “reward” the best workers with.)

Overall, I think the book is an absolutely amazing start, and I give Ehrenreich mondo kudos for having the balls to get out there and get dirty and live the life for a while. And since not everyone has the balls to go do that for a while, anyone who doesn’t live it should read the book so they have a clue about how the other half (not the rich half) lives. And anyone who is a member of the working poor should read it just so that they know that there are people out there trying to make their lives better, and best of all, people who have noticed that they exist.