Barbara Ehhrenrenich's Nickel And Dimed By Barbara Ehrenreich

Improved Essays
Barbara Ehrenreich’s bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed, is not only an excellently portrayed book for the classroom, but also a studious book to advocate for a social issue. The advocacy related in the book blends well with the societal campaign for a living wage. Ehrenreich’s book has created a lot of momentum for the workforce and how difficult it is to live life with a low-wage. For Ehrenreich, she could not just simply explain the statistics of how gruesome life is this way, but to experience in full. Thus, Ehrenreich throughout the book visits various parts of the country with a disguise of a low-wage worker. Not only is it the most effective way to learn about the ebbs and flows of the working class, it also is the most persuasive way …show more content…
However, what makes Nickel and Dimed better than the rest of her collection is how realistic it is. Not only is the description from a first person point of view, it is incredibly raw with experience that cannot be tinkered with in any way necessary. Going into the workforce as an undercover journalist, she is determined to find ways to bring this issue to light after being understated as an impossible problem to fix. “It is not hard to get my coworkers talking about their living situations, because of housing [...] is the principal source of disruption in their lives”. Towards every problem, there is always a solution. However, it is not always easy finding the source of problems in a country with over 320 million people. Consequently speaking, Barbara Ehrenreich uncovers the truth to numerous problems within the lives of low-wage workers. With that being said, this means that we are steps closer to solving this nationwide epidemic, and Nickel and Dimed helped contribute to the solution. Therefore, the aftermath of this book helped give the working class a strong voice to send their message nationwide. She helps advocate for these people through her exquisite writing and heart throbbing descriptive experiences. Known as a “veteran muckraker” by the New Yorker, she helps unfold this longlasting issue in America through her confidence and bravery as a writer. Not …show more content…
Although this history is not incredibly enormous as other parts of history, but this book does not contribute to the history of advocating for a living wage in America for many people. “For low-wage workers in general the trajectory has tended downwards, as employers have found more diabolical ways to suppress the earnings of their already underpaid workers”(228). Not only is Barbara Ehrenreich an incredibly talented author, she also is a political activist. She puts both of these qualities together to make an excellent piece of literature that will be remembered as a book that changed the American’s perspective on low-wage workers. People always say that everyone should work as a waitress for a year just so they know what it is like. This is said since people truly don’t understand how rough and ruthless the life of a low-wage worker can be, especially if you are living off of week to week paychecks. Although this book shows the brute of life in America, it can portray a beautiful scene of what life would be like if we solved this idea now rather than

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The book Labor’s Love Lost by Cherlin brings to light how the disappearance of the working-class family, along with other cultural shifts, has changed and damaged this American icon. A once thriving and growing social class, with endless possibilities has since hit a brick wall of sorts fracturing their livelihood and the fact that nothing stable has replaced the declining male-breadwinner family has pushed this social class into crisis and has hastened the fall of the working-class family (Cherlin 2014: 5). This book would be a wonderful addition for historians, sociologists, policy-makers, concerned citizens, as well as anyone interested in becoming better advocates for those who have been most effected by the collapse of the working-class…

    • 1009 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Nickel and Dimed Notes Intro/Thesis: Journalist, Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickel and Dimed, describes her personal experiences of working low-paying jobs and the struggles that come with it. Ehrenreich’s purpose was to determine the possibility of living off a minimum wage job. She adopts an objective tone in order to show her readers the harsh reality of the workers of the low-paying jobs, poverty is one of American society’s biggest problems, people are working full time yet still sink into poverty Logos: Author has worked multiple different jobs in different locations but is not able to stay in all of them, takes ibuprofen to help with the pain ( pg. 33), when in Maine (salary being 200/250 for about 40 hrs a week [pg. 60] ) unable to…

    • 384 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    RTC 1- Romero, “Bonds of Sisterhood-Bonds of Oppression” In the “Bonds of Sisterhood,” the women are the only ones doing the housework. They were at first fighting for their feminist rights to do work outside of the home. However, because of their fighting to work, they were pushed to do other people 's housework as a job.…

    • 2337 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nickel And Dimed Argument

    • 909 Words
    • 4 Pages

    When presented the experiment of living off of minimum wage, Barbara Ehrenreich, embarks on a journey that is followed throughout Nickel and Dimed and shows the struggles that she encounters living the life of a person in poverty. Ehrenreich argues that different systems in America are setup to actively keep those people working for minimum wage in poverty and this system prevents them from moving up in economic status. Ehrenreich’s argument is strengthened by the many experiences she presents in the book showing the difficulties of living life gaining minimum wage. Ehrenreich, while low on funds and in need of help, talks about her own personal experiences with trying to get some food.…

    • 909 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Serving in Florida” by Barbara Ehrenreich is a story about Ehrenreich’s experience as a low-wage waitress in a restaurant. Ehrenreich discusses her experiences as a low-wage worker and the everyday difficulties she encounters in her position. Ehrenreich publicizes the plight of low-wage workers by using analogies, which highlight the challenges low-wage workers face, emotionally charged words, to allow the reader to connect with the story, and extreme language to arouse sympathy from the audience. Ehrenreich uses the analogies of food and battlefields in order to emphasize the difficulties of her situation. Ehrenreich describes her workplace as a “a fat person’s hell” (Ehrenreich 179), which creates a picture in the mind of the reader.…

    • 1101 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Barbara Ehrenreich enacts the rhetorical appeal pathos, an emotional and experiential appeal, to develop her argument in her essay Serving in Florida. In her essay, Ehrenreich uses pathos to show that the living and working conditions of those in the service industry are far from ideal. Ehrenreich draws on her personal experience to display to readers the bleak and depressing lives of workers in the service industry. By using pathos, Ehrenreich is using both experience and emotional stories to draw the reader’s attention to the inhumane working and living conditions that most waitresses/waiters face. To strengthen her argument, Barbara Ehrenreich uses four main rhetorical devices: exemplum, enumeratio, metaphor, and procatalepsis.…

    • 1268 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Most people in the middle and upper classes of American society believe that low wage workers are where they are due to multiple reasons, such as drug use, laziness, or other mistakes. This thought has been part of society for many years, and as a result there is often little pity, and little help for the poor. In the book, Nickel and Dimed, the author, Barbara Ehrenreich, an established writer, leaves her comfortable life, and lives and works the life of low wage worker, in order to shed light on the true nature of the lower class. As Barbara struggles throughout the time of her social experiment, she discovers how the difficulty of finding housing, as well as the time consumption, and wear and tear of low wage work, make it difficult for…

    • 950 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The book isn’t completely accurate. The reason that Nickel and Dimed isn’t one hundred percent true is because the book is old fashioned. Times have changed the fascinating work environment and the availability of jobs. Availability meaning the American population has grown tremendously. You must also keep in mind that what she wrote was from her memory.…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the book Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dr. Ehrenreich a writer decides over an expensive meal with one of her editors to try to survive with a series of lower wage jobs. Ehrenreich wrote the book in the late 1990’s as Congress was passing legislation to push people off the welfare rolls and getting them back to work. Along the journey, Ehrenreich encounters other women who are in the similar situations as the one she has placed herself into. Dr. Ehrenreich succeeds in her goal of being able to survive on her lower wages but learns that she must put in long hours to be able to achieve these goals. The first job that Ehrenreich obtains is as a waitress in Key West, FL, which is not far from her home.…

    • 1321 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This week’s lecture by Professor Dan Gilbert and the excerpts of Tera Hunter’s works titled “Domination and resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta” and “Dancing and Carousing the Night Away” portrayed the role labor relations played in relation to inequality. It is quite interesting how the relations in the workplace mirror those in the community and across the nation. Tera Hunter discuss how workers challenged daily inequality in the workplace and Professor Gilbert made the social and political implication of their actions more obvious. In the workplace power is an important thing and those in power often abuse it.…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    When America first started out as a growing nation—with seemingly endless opportunities and chances for success —a concept grew along with it. A concept that in it of itself is protected by the Declaration of Independence but was not coined until the late 1930s: the American Dream. The American Dream is the ideology, which many people follow, that states that there is an equal opportunity for Americans to attain success if they show determination and work persistently. However, this ideal today is far from what it started as. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the idea of not only thriving in the lower classes of the nation, but also surviving.…

    • 1123 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich, an essayist with a Ph.D. in biology, was encouraged to go out and try hands on and investigating journalism. This then developed into the idea of Barbara going out and living the life of an unskilled worker, with the conversation having drifted to how those who make minimum wage live. Skeptical at first, Barbara accepted and decided upon three rules for herself to follow through the process. First, she would not use any previously acquired skills to secure a job. Second, she must take the highest paying job offers and give her best attempt at holding it.…

    • 567 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Consumers today don 't directly see the behind the scenes actions and grievances of workers and employees within franchises and companies. Though on the surface raising wages does not seem problematic, if one were to put on the hat of an economist they would see the significant repercussions that could result. James Surowiecki and Michael Saltsman both present ideas regarding the complex topic of how to properly improve the lives of those in the workforce in an economy that is suffering in their articles “The Pay Is Too Damn Low” and “To Help the Poor, Move Beyond ‘Minimum’ Gestures.” Surowiecki believes that though there are other ways to fight poverty, simply raising the minimum wage will help drastically. In contrast, Saltsman believes that…

    • 817 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days: Minimum Wage both show the struggles families on minimum wage go through. Both of them highlight some of the difficulties they face daily, however, they have differences in the dynamics of the experiment. Some of these similarities include the emotional, physical, and economic strain they had on the characters. While the differences of their experience are one-person experience versus a two-person experience and the duration of the experiment.…

    • 1573 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Barbara Ehrenreich spend a month in each of three places—Key West, Portland-Maine, and Minneapolis The novel Nickel and Dimed is written by researcher Barbara Ehrenreich, a middle aged upper-class woman. This novel details Ehrenreich’s study of the average, lower class, working woman. The author knows though, that she truly couldn't perfectly conduct this experiment to replicate her life as the “average woman”.…

    • 507 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays