I just finished Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed and it really heartwarming to read. Cleverly Subtitle “ How (Not) To Get By In America,” The book is about Ehrenreich’s “adventures” in survival as a member of the low- wage workforce that serves our meals, cleans our homes, and cares for our elderly. The book divvied into three sections, each of which find’s Ehrenreich in a new location, looking for new work and a place to live., she took the job as a waitress at one restaurant before moving to a busier one attached to hotel. But exhaustion (and accompanying pain) got to her and she ended up with
In a capitalist world, there are many opportunities to succeed, but an individual must be willing to work hard in order to ascend the social ladder. In Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, she undergoes an experiment to see whether or not the average low-wage worker can get by in America. Ehrenreich claims that based on the wages that the low wage worker receives, he/she can not really get by and thus they don’t really have a way to get up out of poverty. However, the working poor do in fact have an opportunities to succeed, such as working up the corporate ladder from the bottom and saving money to build wealth, making Ehrenreich’s argument invalid.
In the book of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich presents to readers an overall perspective on how the unskilled women to be forced to join the labor market after the American welfare reform on 1998. Interestingly, this presentation is actually based on Ehrenreich’s practical experiences. She participates into the lifestyle of the poor in the low-wage labor market in order to experiences and researches that living style as an “undercover journalist”. Moreover, Ehrenreich wants to find an answer for the question if she could survive and maintain her living with low wage just like the way “four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or$7 an hour” (Nickel and Dimed, pg.1). In fact, three
The books, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, are exemplary models of an American family in poverty, and their journey and struggle to survive. They had to live off of what they had and they thought their lifestyles were normal until realizing others have it easier. Each of these families used different strategies in order to survive their insolvent circumstances and hardships. In Salvage the Bones, Esch and her family kept moving and giving each other strength to survive, during a devastating storm in which left them homeless. In The Glass Castle, even though the Walls family was in poverty and didn’t have a permanent home and were always moving.
Melanie Castellanos Daniels ENGL 3 - B5 26 August 2014 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: Merit of Experiences Although much criticism revolves around Barbara Ehrenreich’s experiences as a minimum wage worker, it can be widely recognized by various critics that she deserves credit for at least attempting to understand the lower class, considering her privilege as a white, wealthy, middle-aged woman. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a novel regarding minimum wage workers and a single woman’s experience jumping into the lower class; the overall theme of the book is that even the lowest class deserve more credit for their hard work, long hours, and demeaning lifestyles. Overall, Ehrenreich is praised for her bravery to dive into a minimum wage lifestyle. Although at first it seems demeaning for such a wealthy and
Moreover, there is a copious amount of stories of people struggling to survive. We experience some of those accounts in Nickel and Dimed by journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, a novel about the working class of America, and also in Living
“poverty”(170). Larger Occasion In 2007, 28 percent of Baltimore’s children lived in poverty. Both the author’s mother and the other Wes Moore’s mother struggled to provide for their children. Both took extra jobs in the hopes of providing their children with a better life.
In the book “$2.00 A Day” authors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer look into the lives of families who are living with an income of $2.00 day. The authors use storytelling throughout the book, but also interject into the stories to explain what policies are in place that perpetuate the circumstances that keep these families in such extreme poverty. The book focused on how the welfare policy reforms in 1996 created a shift in who primarily received assistance. Before the reforms in 1996, welfare “entitled families with children to receive cash assistance as long as they had economic need” (Edin and Shaefer, 2015, pg. 7). However, the 1996 reforms largely did away with this type of assistance by setting lifetime limits on programs cash welfare with programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.6 million of Americans live in poverty in the United States. There are many opportunities these days for Americans to get out of poverty including a job. Earning any job can help find a better job placement and learn job skills as oppose to unemployment. Doing well in a job can help allude employers give a better job to an employee. Many employers will look at work ethics within employees and if the credentials—amount of jobs, hours, and dedication put into—is sufficient, then the employer would move the employee to a better working place.
Before reading “Nickel and Dimed: On (NOT) Getting by in America”, my perception of blue collar Americans is much different. I had figured that blue collared workers in lower paying jobs were not very hard working people, and that they still made enough money to have decent living conditions. Before reading Nickel and Dimed I thought that if you had a job and were not making enough to get by that you were probably a lazy person. Reading Nickel and Dimed really opened my eyes to the quality of life workers in these jobs have made me realize that you can be employed at a Walmart or as a hotel maid like Barbara Ehrenreich was and still be living in poverty. I learned pretty early into Nickel and Dimed that only having one job at this level of jobs
Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, explains the hidden truth behind low-income citizens in the United States. However, more rather than writing about this situation she actually goes undercover to determine if it is indeed possible to be living in a low-income lifestyle. By traveling in various locations across the country that is exactly what she does. In each location, she sets parameters explaining her economic changes such as living in the cheapest home or apartment she could find, as well as finding the highest paying job that does not t require any advanced skills.
J.D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a personal psychological, cultural and sociological analysis of poor white working-class Americans. Specifically, Hillbilly Elegy examines the life of the author in Middletown Ohio, a once booming post war steel town that today has a struggling economy, diminishing family values and a rapid increase in drug abuse. At the beginning of the memoir, Vance perfectly situates the reader to the uniqueness from his life in Middletown. Vance repeatedly wrote throughout the memoir that the youth living in this Ohio steel town has a bleak and troubling future. Vance illustrates the statistics that children like him living in these towns were lucky if they just manage to avoid welfare or unlucky by dying from a heroin overdose.
When You Can’t Afford Sleep In “When You Can’t Afford Sleep,” Olga Khazan discusses the issue of low-income workers having more sleep problems compared to the people with high-income. She explores the lives of a few low-income workers, particularly Sam McCalman, to present their everyday struggles. McCalman, an immigrant in the United States from Guyana, works two jobs since he is in need of cash to cover expenses and payments such as money for raising children, and rent. Khazan explains that McCalman has to be ready early in order to catch the bus to work due to the absence of his own transportation, and he often falls asleep at work.
For example, Caroline Bird says, “In Harlan County where whole towns whose people had not a cent of income. They lived on dandelions and blackberries. Children were reported so famished they were chewing up their own hands. Miners tried to plant vegetables, but they were often so hungry that they ate them before they were ripe”( Document 2). This shows the reality of how much these families struggled to stay alive, no matter how arduous it was to get through the day the families managed to keep their ambitions high in hope for better times.
In the discussions of food insecurity, one controversial issue has been the prevalent misconception of why people are suffering from obtaining nutritious food on a consistent basis. On one hand, Frank Eltman, a writer for the Business facet of the Huffington post, argues that university students are facing food insecurity due to college expenses exponentially rising within the past decade. On the other hand, Adam Appelhanz, a police officer featured in the documentary “A Place at the Table,” contends that due to budget constraints he has not received a pay raise in the last four years, and is now inevitably utilizing a local food bank in order to ensure that he has something to eat each month. Others even maintain that food insecurity is synonymous
The author, Matthew Desmond visited Milwaukee to live with under privileged families to see how the eviction process takes place in America. Informing society and telling a first had experience that involved, evidence, research, and passion. With this in mind, he then wants to educate the public on how society can change and make poverty less of an issue in America today. Desmond uses living with these poor families, watching the struggle, kids suffer, and then eventually get evicted, as evidence.