Nickel and Dimed

itself to the point where economic struggles in the 1900s continue to reflect in the 20th century. The quote, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change,” by Leon C. Megginson relates to Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. In other words, it only takes one person to achieve change and you don’t have to have a PhD to create progression. In her introduction, she describes the reasoning behind her development of her book that consisted…

In the book Nickel and Dimed the author Barbra Ehrenreich puts herself through an experiment working low paying jobs to meet her ends meet. Ehrenreich chooses to do this at time in the United States were the economy is booming. The book is a firsthand account of the different experiences working low income jobs. Barbra Ehrenreich’s first job is as a waitress was she then transitioned to a hotel maid in Florida. She then moved to Main were she became a housecleaning maid; and lastly as a…

Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, is about a middle-classed woman who does an experiment with the poverty in America. Barbara Ehrenreich workers as an author, but also has a Ph.D. With roughly 45 million Americans living below the poverty level, Ehrenreich attempts to work in three different states, at different jobs working for only minimum wage. She sets a few rules for herself that she is not allowed to break to keep her living situation as minimalist as possible and save…

Ehrenreich moved from Florida, to Maine, and then to Minnesota to prove if a person could really live on a low wage salary. Maintaining the expenses below her income was more challenging than she predicted. She documented her journey through the book Nickel and Dimed, where she discovered various themes of low wage workers. One theme, is the difficulty of exiting poverty on a low wage salary. The cost of everyday life creates an impossible scenario for low wage workers to escape poverty.…

Nickel and Dimed on (NOT) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a journey into the low working class in the United States. Ehrenreich leaves her “normal” life in the upper-middle class, to investigate poverty by entering the low-wage class. Throughout the book, she moves city to city, with just enough money to get her started, and a desire to work. She discovers that many of these low paying jobs are “physically demanding, some of them even damaging if performed month after month,”…

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…

Barbara Ehrenreich argues that those in the workforce of minimum wage face struggles that affect their life styles, however they fight back tooth and nail too overcome these situations. In chapter two of Nickel and Dimed Barbara declares that those who fall under the ethnicity of “white” have a much higher chance of obtaining a job compared to someone of color. While reading this chapter some struggles that minimum waged workers faced are: housing standards, being able to afford food and having…

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass are both books that experience more than one “face” from the “Five Faces of Oppression” by Iris Young. The “ Five Faces of Oppression” include Exploitation( the act of using people's labors to produce profit while not contemplating them fairly). Marginalization ( the act of relegating or confining a group to a lower social standing or edge of society) . Powerlessness( the upper or…

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…

are no longer valid. Thoreau’s Walden, penned in 1854 as a recount of his departure from ‘civilisation’, shows us the fallacy of working hard to improve your quality of life, only to have to work harder to emulate it. Ehrenreich’s struggles in Nickel and Dimed, published at the turn of the millennium, highlights the severe lack of opportunities that millions of Americans have access…