Nickel And Dimed Reflection

Minimum wage has always been a difficult topic to talk about in political situations with questions about increasing or decreasing it forever on the ballot. In today’s economic state there has been an increase of the minimum wage in several states such as California; which has caused a debate on the national level of how much the lower class can live on. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book she tries out low wage living and documents it in Nickel and Dimed, in her opinion it's barely possible to survive on low wages for even one person. To show this she employs conversational and concrete diction to show the difficulties of living two lives that are at different poles of the economic scale and the ignorance of both classes to those besides themselves with a confusion of audiences.

In The working poor by David K shipler writes about the real poverty in America that many forget about.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's award winning book based on the lives of people during the, Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, has experienced a lot of criticism since its release in 1939. From the time it was published all the way up until present times, some people have found much at fault in this realist book, while other people recognize that their are many true parts of Steinbeck's book. Many people consider this book to be Steinbeck's greatest piece of work, while the overall response to it was good, there was some negative outlooks on a few aspects of the books. The Grapes of Wrath began in Oklahoma, starring the Joad family who were attempting to get to California where they had hope to begin their new life after leaving

Imagine losing everything you had, your house, your dad, and all your possessions all of that at the age of 12. Ghastly isn’t it? Well in the story, Esperanza Rising by: Pam Munoz Ryan, Esperanza had to go through all that and shift to America during the Great Depression, and even if you don’t know what that is, you probably know by the looks of it that it is not the most marvelous thing. And you would be right, it’s not. When Esperanza goes to work in America to earn money, there are strikes going on about how people don’t get paid enough for working. Esperanza takes the job because she needs the money to help her mom who is sick and in the hospital and to earn money, so that her grandma can come to America. Esperanza is a brave 12 year-old

The Working Poor: Invisible in America David K. Shipler is a book that could be most accurately described as eye-opening. Shipler opens up the book on his claim that “nobody who works hard should be poor in America.” America is built upon the idea that the harder one works, the better off one will be. Shipler then goes on to explain how the poor, often times, work the hardest jobs and are put into the worse conditions, but still do not grow to become the most successful.

Poverty shares traits with the Shawshank State Penitentiary: a rare few find a way out but more often than not, those who begin the escape get caught and sent back to the same place they started. The path out exists, but it may require help from outside influences or having to digging away at a hole with a rock hammer for years. Unfortunately, not every impoverished American shares the triumphant tale of Andy Dufresne. The Other Wes Moore tells the story of two men of the same name and beginnings who have disparate futures. The author, Wes Moore, ended up on a path to success while the other Wes Moore remains in a jail cell for the rest of his life. The author’s rock hammer was access to a quality education and removal from a rough neighborhood.

Stereotypes are seen as overgeneralized ideas, images, or beliefs of a person based on a group of people. Stereotypes can either be taken or said in a negative or positive way but mostly seen in a negative way. Stereotypes are formed on a life experience, idea or a belief a person may have towards one person based on the person’s gender, race, religion or social class. The most common stereotypes are of the social classes which are the: upper, middle and lower class.

A theory in the work is that political and economic structures failed to provide enough decent opportunities and support to the whole economy.

As a reader reads Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed on (Not) Getting by in America, they get an insight on what it is like to live a low income life. Ehrenreich proposes the argument in the introduction that poverty is a serious matter and just because one has a job does not mean they are not considered poor. She wants to persuade us to realize that American is not the land of opportunity as promised and portrayed and there are regular people who are struggling to live a comfortable life. Throughout her book she mentions her experiences with living on minimum wage, the hiring process, and how she felt being put in that position. After reading Ehrenreich’s book I am thoroughly persuaded.

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. This phrase is sung with pride and passion by American citizens. However, some of America’s hardest working citizens are shackled down by a factor that they have no control over. Poverty, is what’s keeping citizens imprisoned while they should be living free. An appalling 44 percent of homeless Americans are employed (http://nationalhomeless.org/). Why should people who go to work and hold a job be subjected to homelessness in the greatest country in the world? Many other middle-class Americans are too shielded by their almost perfect lives to even see this. Many of them even have the audacity to say that homeless individuals or the lower-class is just lazy. Barbara Ehrenreich directly

¨Inequality is the root of social evil¨ (Pope Francis). In the book To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee shows that social inequality affects everyone. As the book goes on, Lee proves that racial inequality was one of the greater stresses in the 1930’s. Social inequality does not just exist only with race; it interferes with wealth, family backgrounds, age, and even your beliefs. Racism, family background, and wealth are the three main forms of social inequality that appear multiple times in To Kill a Mockingbird.

1.) The author of the text portrays the life of urban America as horrible. The Poverty-stricken area is filled with death and sickness. He describes it as a horrible place to have to live and work with starving orphans and many sick and dying people living in morbid conditions. The waste filled streets and fire prone buildings were just a regular thing for the people living under the poverty line.

Few have college degrees” (Johnston, K. 2014). Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickle and Dimed, left her life as a journalist and became one of the so called working poor (Ehrenreich, B. 2001). In this paper I will discuss the main issues in the first half of her book, I will explain what theoretical perspective her work fits into, how she did her research, the strengths and limitations to her approach, and describe how the American economy may look to a low wage worker.

Surviving off of a minimum wage job in America is a very difficult task to accomplish. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, created an experiment in which she decided to leave her normal life to discover just how hard it is to live off of minimum wage. Ehrenreich made many discoveries during her experiment, most of which contributed to the assertion “On (Not) Getting By in America.”

Middle and upper class Americans were shocked by the novel How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Riis depicted the true grit of immigrant life when he depicted, mixing in depth written imagery and raw photography, the horrendous conditions of New York City\'s tenement housing. Many questions were raised in America by How the Other Half Lives, including: how and why the poor are condemned to these bad living conditions and how this atmosphere affects them.