Barbara Ehrenreich: Living In Poverty

You will never know how well off you have it until you walk in someone else’s shoes. This is what Barbara Ehrenreich did for a month. Barbara is a middleclass journalist who gives up life as she knows it to go live in poverty. Her tasks include finding somewhere to live and a job that pays about $7 an hour. She will be live in the town of Key West in a trailer park. Barbara will apply to multiple jobs aiming for a housekeeping job, but she will start her life in poverty with a job at Heartside. Then, later she will change jobs to a place called Jerry’s, where she will wait tables along with cleaning the hotel connected to it. As Barbara sets off on her journey she will discover what it is really like living off of a minimum wage job. Living in poverty is harder than it seems. As a woman with children you want to get a job, but it is much more than that. When you get a job you will have to find a daycare, a mode of transportation, along with many other things. “The humanitarian rationale for welfare reform is that work will lift poor woman out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self-esteem and hence their future value in the labor market” (2006: 229). These welfare reform doesn’t think about the other tasks that …show more content…
She learned that what these people had to go through was sad and they need to realize that they are worth much more then they get. She hopes one day they take appropriate action against those who look down on them. She appreciates what people making minimum-wage go through because they work a lot harder than anyone in the upper classes. Ehrenreich states that “I couldn’t hold two job and I couldn’t make enough money to live on my own. And I had advantages unthinkable to many long-term poor- health, stamina, a working car, and no children to care for and support” (2006: 246). This shows the respect for those she has gained as she took on this one-month