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Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

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In the book Nickel and Dimed, the author Barbara Ehrenreich who is a reporter, but she describes a cruel fact of the American low wage workers’ life after she experienced poverty. She illustrates a series of stories about the poor life of low wage workers from different aspects, such as food, shelter and health insurance. She had been worked as three kinds of jobs in three diverse places, but the common point of these three jobs is low salary, which means that the money she earns was not enough for living. The author also mentioned some of her coworkers’ life, the life of low wage workers seems like a circle, it is hard for them to escape, it repeats all the time, nobody helps them to get out of the circle. To find out which obstacle keeps the poor poor, we should to know what kind of characteristics that the low wage workers had. Here are some …show more content…

Most low wage jobs were very physical and included lot of labor and they do not provide health care anymore. I had been listened a news that in order to walk into the emergency room, the hospital will charge you $300. That is absolutely ridiculous. Medication and aid has an even price. For example, the people in Nickel and Dimed are having a hard time with paying for these extra things. Gail takes estrogen pills to help her migraines but since she doesn’t have health insurance she is forced to pay $9 per pill. It is a tough decision whether to buy the $9 pill or suffer her terrible migraines.( page 21) Similarly, after getting hurt on the foot, Marianne’s boyfriend lost his job as a roofer because he missed so much time, however he could not afford the prescribed antibiotic. ( page 22). According to this, although low wage workers pay all their efforts to earn money, but they spend much more money which made them tangled in “the poverty circle” and hard to

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