Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America- Barbara Ehrenreich

How I found this book: Patric got it for cheap, and was curious as our friend Randy pretty much holds one of these low-paying jobs. We wanted to see what the author had to say about it.

Setting: Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, all circa 1999-2000.

Main Characters: It’s a non-fiction book, and follows Barbara Ehrenreich.

Plot: PhD author Barbara Ehrenreich explores through first hand experience how those living on minimum wage make it in different regions and in different areas of work. She spends a month in each region, with specific rules she sets for her experiment, to see if she can make enough to live for a month in each place on the wages she gets. Meanwhile, she also gets to know many of her co-workers, the very people in these situations, and tries to learn how it is they make it on the wages that they earn.

Themes:

Damn the man, he’s screwing you anyway: Ehrenreich’s observations highlight what in her opinion are the abuses of the corporate machine and in particular the thirty-something managers who she sees as ‘the man’ pushing down on the mass of minimum wage labor. She points out many of the gross abuses of people’s time and health, (in particularly one place where a woman was injured on the job), and the unethical practices by many employers, some even breaking the law, (as in the case of a restaurant hiring illegal workers in Key West.)

Just trying to make ends meet: When you are barely holding it together financially, every little thing is a huge obstacle to overcome, and everything from rent to groceries must be calculated to be handled just so, or you sink. Unaccountable things, such as broken down cares, illness, or an accident because major situations that can put someone out of work or on the streets, and there is very little recourse or help for people when life just happens. It’s a very precarious existence on the edge of destitution, and people make do as best as they can to just try to make things happen.

Aren’t we lucky to be edumacated: Ehrenreich has a constant and steady soliloquy on just how lucky she is for her father getting out of the coal mines and putting her through college, so she can be a happy, white, middle-class yuppie unlike all of these poor folk. It’s a mixed message of, ‘gee, aren’t we glad we are smart and better off’, and ‘but we suck so bad for being soft and middle class, and why can’t we do more to effect change for these people?” It’s a schizophrenic tone through much of the book.

Every book sucks somewhere: I had a lot of beefs with this book. First of, Ehrenreich above mentioned ‘schizophrenic’ tone became very grating after a while. While I don’t mind the bleeding-heart liberalism, especially in relation to the working, minimum wage class, it got a bit distracting when I couldn’t decide if she really empathized with the people she was working with for those months, or was she just counting down the days till she could go back to her low-fat, caramel macchiatos. It gave her a very condescending voice, on the one hand almost frowning in disgust at the lives these people have to lead because they can’t afford better, and at the same time upbraiding the rest of us educated folks for not caring about these people. It was very disjointed.

I also resented a bit the fact that Ehrenreich never really ‘lived’ the lives of the people she was attempting to emulate. She had all the buffer and comfort that someone going into any social experiment, such as a reporter, would have, an extra wad of cash to cover things in case her wages didn’t, a car, (which often many on minimum wage don’t have or have to share), and with the knowledge that this was all a temporary sentence, like being condemned to be the char girl for a month by her evil-step mother. This pill is particularly bitter for myself, who grew up in a household with parents who made the kind of money that they make at these jobs, neither of my parents has ever had a well-paying job in my memory. Thanks to their hard work and perseverance, and the talents and intelligence they fostered in my siblings and I, some of us have been able to claw our way up to middle-class respectability, with two of us having attained our college degrees, and two already owning their own homes before age 30. But I don’t forget those rough days, and neither do they, when we worried if our parents could pull together the rent, or how they would pay the electric bill, or get the money together for gas and groceries all in the same week. It’s difficult, and it’s hard, and you make do with it as you can, not because it’s a fun experiment, but because it is the way life is, and either you swim, or you sink. Perhaps someday, as in the case of my parents, you get to see your children succeed, and there, you get to feel that at least something has gone right. Ehrenreich portrays these struggles as ‘injustices’ rather than ‘it’s just how life is’, and you learn to survive and overcome as you can. For some, yes, perhaps it is in changing the system, for others it’s just learning to get by in the hope that something better comes of all of it eventually.

Enrenreich tries hard to add some humor and levity to the work, while keeping her sword of righteous justice still firmly outstretched so we won’t forget it. It doesn’t work, really. Instead, it seems to come off as her making light of a way of life that millions in this country are forced to live everyday, rather than bringing levity to a very serious subject.

What did I like: Ehrenreich tries to be honest in what she sees in terms of the jobs and the problems that go on behind the scenes. This expose of the practices of some employers brings to light a lot of shady things that I hear about from my work in HR, and in doing so perhaps gets a conversation going on how to effect change so those things do not happen again.

How would I rate this wormy book: I would rate it a LITTLE WORM. It has a noble premise, I won’t deny that, but its execution is sloppy, it’s not very entertaining, and in spots it’s a bit insulting. I think that in the hands of another author, it perhaps could have been done better.