After reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, the arising response of outrage is germane. It all started when she wondered how the roughly four million women who were about to be booted into the labor force would make ends meet with their six or seven dollar an hour salary. This ended up sparking her project, spanning multiple months, where she put her life on hold and left everything behind to enter the field of service work. Travelling to various states working different minimum wage jobs, and seeing how she fares on the amount of money she is paid, Ehrenreich documents her endeavours in her book. Along with her journalistic skills, she helps illuminate the underside of capitalism. Using various outside sources along with her own personal
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With this in mind, reading through the book only confirmed how fitting this title truly is. What Ehrenreich 's work depicts is that Americans have created a system in which the chances of any low-income worker making ends meet are grim. Even a single person working eight hours each day struggles to feed themselves and live in suitable conditions. In a footnote on page 26, Ehrenreich, citing from a 1997 report of the National Coalition for the Homeless, “Myths About the Homeless” states that nearly one-fifth of all homeless people across twenty-nine cities are employed in full or part time jobs. Something is glaringly wrong when the system, a system created for one person to be able to support themselves and a family while working one job, fails so miserably that nowadays, without working multiple jobs or without having any outside monetary support, people end up without a roof over their heads, and yet still struggle to feed themselves. Of course, the concept of minimum wage worked well in the past, but with the cost of inflation and prices going up, the idea of raising the minimum wage to match these changes were met with a cowardly retreat of responsibility by others. Ehrenreich has worked with people who have had to have meals consisting of a bag of Doritos that lead to dizziness and faintness by the end of their shift. She has worked with people who have injured themselves on the job and chose to just “work through it”, because going home due to illness or injury means no money, and when there is no money made one day, it means no food the next. No one should be so reliant on a paycheck that they have to chose between their own personal health, and being able to afford to eat. Ehrenreich describes these situations as emergencies, and states “that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans--as a state of emergency”
With this in mind, reading through the book only confirmed how fitting this title truly is. What Ehrenreich 's work depicts is that Americans have created a system in which the chances of any low-income worker making ends meet are grim. Even a single person working eight hours each day struggles to feed themselves and live in suitable conditions. In a footnote on page 26, Ehrenreich, citing from a 1997 report of the National Coalition for the Homeless, “Myths About the Homeless” states that nearly one-fifth of all homeless people across twenty-nine cities are employed in full or part time jobs. Something is glaringly wrong when the system, a system created for one person to be able to support themselves and a family while working one job, fails so miserably that nowadays, without working multiple jobs or without having any outside monetary support, people end up without a roof over their heads, and yet still struggle to feed themselves. Of course, the concept of minimum wage worked well in the past, but with the cost of inflation and prices going up, the idea of raising the minimum wage to match these changes were met with a cowardly retreat of responsibility by others. Ehrenreich has worked with people who have had to have meals consisting of a bag of Doritos that lead to dizziness and faintness by the end of their shift. She has worked with people who have injured themselves on the job and chose to just “work through it”, because going home due to illness or injury means no money, and when there is no money made one day, it means no food the next. No one should be so reliant on a paycheck that they have to chose between their own personal health, and being able to afford to eat. Ehrenreich describes these situations as emergencies, and states “that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans--as a state of emergency”