Nickel And Dimed Reflection
Nickel and Dimed, written by Barbara Ehrenreich goes in depth of workers that have minimum wage jobs and are trying to survive in the U.S economy. Ehrenreich’s goes incognito trying to work in low-end jobs. Experiencing the hardships that many Americans face, Ehrenreich learns that money is not equal to the work and grief put in. Everywhere in the novel, Ehrenreich expresses that owners of corporations keep the workers down. As quoted, “…everyone knows they have crossed over to the other side, which is, crudely put, corporate as opposed to human" (Ehrenreich, 22). She defines that once a worker is moved up a position, they become the enemy. They misunderstand the difficulty of moving up the ranks so the system remains untouched. After reading Ehrenreich’s bestseller, the discussion of who is at fault often lingers. Is it a problem that can be …show more content…
I know how hard is it to find a decent job. Many occupations wont take applicants unless they have experience in a demanding and skilled environment. If a ready to work American went out to find a job, they would be out of luck because they don’t have the needed requirements and will never have them because they can’t get hired, in other words it’s a new ending loop of not having the requirements that will never be gained in the first place. After reading this novel, I also understood the true meaning of American poverty and what is it to be “poor”. The novel also revealed to me the difficulty of the less fortunate, and the free flowing lives of the people who didn’t get thrown in the never-ending loop of poverty and despair. Less fortunate individuals have no room to prosper and grow in society. In other words, they are stuck, they have no room to expand and it becomes an unobtainable dream for them to get an occupation that will let them to proceed upward on a corporate
Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed
986 Words | 4 PagesBarbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America is a critically acclaimed investigative biography of a reporter going undercover to see how individuals manage to live on minimum wage across America. More specifically, Barbara was curious about how were “the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour” (1)? Ehrenreich developed a plan and some rules for her undercover research for finding jobs, housing, and living expenses. The research for this book covered a span of three states, Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, between spring of 1998 and summer of 2000.
Analysis Of Nickel And Dimed On (Not) Getting By In America
736 Words | 3 PagesNickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America, is the factual narrative of Barbara Ehrenreich’s venture to completely immerse herself in the life of a minimum wage worker. Through her experiment Ehrenreich set out to prove that the average worker can’t “make it on $6 or $7 an hour (1)” in this country; and with her hands on research, she defends while simultaneously proving that the reason so many people are stuck in the lower end of the economy is not because they are lazy or unskilled, but because the jobs they can acquire rarely pay enough to surpass the annual poverty levels. Ehrenreich's use of statistics, examples and the general tone she phrases her rhetorical questions with enlightens her audience of just how hard it is to get by
Nickel And Dimed: Rhetorical Analysis
540 Words | 3 PagesMinimum 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.
Living Nickel And Dimed Critical Essay
803 Words | 4 PagesMoreover, 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
Nickel And Dimed Reflection
738 Words | 3 PagesBefore 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
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Barbara Ehrenreich Rhetorical Analysis
1009 Words | 5 PagesVerbal irony through a sarcastic tone strengthens the central claim since many people respond well to being addressed in a more satirical, direct manner. Barbara continues discussing the Maids, “no one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub the kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you’re so good!”” (Ehrenreich 117). The fact that the middle-class doesn’t even understand the amount of hard work that is done addresses the subclaim of how hard life is while working minimum wage, or close to it, jobs, while still using a sarcastic tone. The audience of middle-class Americans will most likely put down this memoir feeling a call to action to change the operation of the treatment of these trapped
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Brief Summary Of Nickel And Dimed By Barbara Ehrenreich
925 Words | 4 PagesSummary of Nickel and Dimed And how it relates to Macroeconomics This paper will discuss the book Nickel and Dimed. The book is based on the real life experiences of Barbara Ehrenreich who is the protagonist in the book. The plot of the book is following the story of Barbara as she decides to do a personal experiment. She decided to see if someone can survive on a low income level based job.
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1974 Words | 8 Pages“The Working Poor: Invisible in America”, written by David Shipler (2004), portrayed many families who faced extreme barriers that directly impacted their families and affected the quality of their lives. This book not only gave the reader a sense of America’s social justice issues, but it also allowed the reader an opportunity to take a look inside the lives of real people struggling with social, economic, and cultural barriers to achieving the “American Dream”. Among many of the individuals and families in the book, most were barely making it financially, despite large efforts. With respect to social work, David Shipler did a fantastic job opening the eyes of the reader to the problems one might face with clients, and the spiral effects
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Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed
652 Words | 3 PagesAs 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.
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