Book Critique
Barbara Ehrenreich starts her book by discussing how the lower class of America can survive on the minimum wage. She thinks that living as the lower class is unfair and impractical and hopes that one day they will do something one day and strike for higher wages. She finds it difficult when she discovers that the when housing goes up and minimum wage stays the same it is nearly impossible to compete with this income. Especially women who will be “booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?” This is where she uses taking the role of the other. All to see if she can match her income to her expenses.
This leads her to ponder to commence her journey to investigate. …show more content…
I believe she did use the appropriate method by field research but she was also in their shoes. She said she would never realize how being poor would be but she got a pretty good idea. This is kind of like that story of that guy in our textbook who decided to be homeless to see how they live, eat their food and sleep like they did and wondered how he did it. I think she supported her experiment very well. Moving place to place realizing how hard it is to survive in the lower class, borderline homeless. She took field research to a whole new level. I think to have better results, she should have analyzed some documents to see where she should move, find affordable apartments before she moves and goes in blind. Use some secondary analysis of people who have already have done this and find out where it is better to live or to work. Where employment is high. It seems like she just picked random places off the map. I think she should have shown the process of how and why she picked the cities. The strengths of her evidence would be that she was so detailed about the process of getting both of her jobs and how she went about things. Like how she went through the process of interviewing then going to get the drug test. Every single test for Walmart that took almost six hours long. The weaknesses would have to be how much money she had where she was. Not like bank statements but just to know a rough estimate. She showed many statistics on different scenarios such as when people got caught for drugs she showed true paragraphs at the bottom
Barbara Ehrenreich starts her book by discussing how the lower class of America can survive on the minimum wage. She thinks that living as the lower class is unfair and impractical and hopes that one day they will do something one day and strike for higher wages. She finds it difficult when she discovers that the when housing goes up and minimum wage stays the same it is nearly impossible to compete with this income. Especially women who will be “booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?” This is where she uses taking the role of the other. All to see if she can match her income to her expenses.
This leads her to ponder to commence her journey to investigate. …show more content…
I believe she did use the appropriate method by field research but she was also in their shoes. She said she would never realize how being poor would be but she got a pretty good idea. This is kind of like that story of that guy in our textbook who decided to be homeless to see how they live, eat their food and sleep like they did and wondered how he did it. I think she supported her experiment very well. Moving place to place realizing how hard it is to survive in the lower class, borderline homeless. She took field research to a whole new level. I think to have better results, she should have analyzed some documents to see where she should move, find affordable apartments before she moves and goes in blind. Use some secondary analysis of people who have already have done this and find out where it is better to live or to work. Where employment is high. It seems like she just picked random places off the map. I think she should have shown the process of how and why she picked the cities. The strengths of her evidence would be that she was so detailed about the process of getting both of her jobs and how she went about things. Like how she went through the process of interviewing then going to get the drug test. Every single test for Walmart that took almost six hours long. The weaknesses would have to be how much money she had where she was. Not like bank statements but just to know a rough estimate. She showed many statistics on different scenarios such as when people got caught for drugs she showed true paragraphs at the bottom