In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s experiment to prove that fair wages, overtime pay, retirement funds, and health insurance are crucial for a person in this economy. She forced her to adapt to the lifestyle of the working-poor: how they live, eat, and performed in their daily lives. To exemplify the struggles endured in order to keep up with a society, where the rich get richer and poor get poorer as they travel with no way out form the bottomless pit that is the lower class. Many problems recurred throughout the novel for instance long hours, no job benefits such as health insurance, and the fact that Ehrenreich does not fully commit to the experiment. A major problem in the book is that employees are working long exhausting hours
…show more content…
While she’s working as a waitress her manager Stu, is constantly on them about not relaxing or taking breaks. He forces them to work even when there is no one in the restaurant. Many people are working multiple jobs just to receive a lousy pay of less than $2 an hour. Barbara describes an experience of where she was working as a waitress trying to take an extremely difficult and specific order from a group of men while on the other hand she had various tables demanding orders be taken right that very moment. This chaos of events resulted in her mixing up the orders and sending them back to the kitchen. This raised numerous conflicts with management as they were upset that she had wasted valuable product. Tired, fed up, and flustered she storms out of the dinner realizing that she still needed to muster up enough energy to report to Jerry’s for her next shift just a few hours later. She expressed that all this stress is no way for a person to live, that only a young person unlike herself would be able to handle such a situation. A quick solution to long work hours is to allow the employees to take a couple a breaks while working, and giving them rotating shifts ease the stress. Additionally whenever a person was ill, they were still expected to work at full strength. Barbara demonstrates this when she a full body rash and goes to her boss for a day off as he cannot expect her to work under these conditions as it is unsanitary and repel customers. He responds by saying “you must be allergic to the latex gloves or something, but you’ll be fine.” The managers seem to care more about making money than their employees’ well-being which is
While she’s working as a waitress her manager Stu, is constantly on them about not relaxing or taking breaks. He forces them to work even when there is no one in the restaurant. Many people are working multiple jobs just to receive a lousy pay of less than $2 an hour. Barbara describes an experience of where she was working as a waitress trying to take an extremely difficult and specific order from a group of men while on the other hand she had various tables demanding orders be taken right that very moment. This chaos of events resulted in her mixing up the orders and sending them back to the kitchen. This raised numerous conflicts with management as they were upset that she had wasted valuable product. Tired, fed up, and flustered she storms out of the dinner realizing that she still needed to muster up enough energy to report to Jerry’s for her next shift just a few hours later. She expressed that all this stress is no way for a person to live, that only a young person unlike herself would be able to handle such a situation. A quick solution to long work hours is to allow the employees to take a couple a breaks while working, and giving them rotating shifts ease the stress. Additionally whenever a person was ill, they were still expected to work at full strength. Barbara demonstrates this when she a full body rash and goes to her boss for a day off as he cannot expect her to work under these conditions as it is unsanitary and repel customers. He responds by saying “you must be allergic to the latex gloves or something, but you’ll be fine.” The managers seem to care more about making money than their employees’ well-being which is