Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
    Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
    Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
    Ebook262 pages4 hours

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

    By Barbara Ehrenreich

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted

    Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour?

    To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

    Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2010
    ISBN9781429926645
    Author

    Barbara Ehrenreich

    Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In the Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

    Read more from Barbara Ehrenreich

    Related to Nickel and Dimed

    Related ebooks

    Economics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Nickel and Dimed

    4/5

    190 ratings128 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a powerful and eye-opening portrayal of the struggles faced by the working poor. It sheds light on the widening wealth gap and the challenges faced by those who work hard but receive little in return. The book is praised for its relevance even after almost 20 years since its publication. However, there are some negative reviews that criticize the author for complaining too much and not understanding the perspective of the workers. Overall, this book offers a valuable window into the realities of poverty in a capitalistic society.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      not a great book. very hypocritical. easy read and interesting insights into being a house cleaner, server, and walmart employee (this part i thought was the most interesting). but she goes off about drug users/addicts and then later on goes off about how she can't find work because she can't pass a drug test. she goes into minute details of food/homeware costs, yet never mentions spending $50 for a bag of weed!

      interesting figure - "In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000."
    • 3/5
      Good book. The author's agenda shows through like a spotlight behind tissue paper.
    • 3/5
      In 1998, writer Barbara Ehrenreich was looking for a new story to write for Harper's and was having lunch with the editor when the conversation turned to the topic of people going off welfare and going into the workforce and having trouble making it. She said someone should go undercover and investigate this and he said why don't you. So soon she is spending about a month in different locations trying to live off of $6 to $7 dollars. From Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a house cleaner, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart salesperson.In Florida, she went to Key West and tried to get a job working as a hotel worker but that backfired and she instead got a job waiting tables instead of at a hotel chain's restaurant. Her first place was a small rented efficiency that went for $500 which was cheaper and nicer than the trailer she looked at, but it was also a forty-five-minute drive to the eventual job she would get. She learned quickly that the want ads are a bad way to find a job in that employers place them and take applications constantly because there is a high turnover rate. So there may be no opening right then, but there may be one soon. She had waited tables in her youth, but it was hard getting back into the swing of things. She has to learn how to use a computerized screen for ordering food.And she learns a lot about her co-workers, such as Gail who is living in a flop house and paying $250 a month with a male friend who is now hitting on her and driving her crazy but with the rent so cheap how can she go elsewhere? And Claude the Haitian cook who is desperate to get out of the two-room apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other people. Or Tina who is living with her husband at the Days Inn and paying $60 a night and Joan who lives in her van. Some of these people end up having to rent a hotel room to live in because they can't pay first and last month's rent at an apartment or trailer. Barbara was able to because she budgeted for it in each city she goes to stay.She ends up taking a second waitressing job at Jerry's and tries at first to hold both jobs but just can't do it, so she keeps the job at Jerry's which is paying more at an average of $7.50 an hour in tips. She also gives up her nice efficiency because the drive is eating up too much in gas money and takes a cheap cramped trailer. The other women she works with either work a second job or has a boyfriend or husband to help make it work. But she still needs a second job herself and takes a housekeeping job at a hotel, which is when things begin to fall apart.In Portland, Maine, she puts out many applications and at Merry Maids (Like at Winn-Dixie in Florida and another job she applied for in Maine) she is asked to take a test. This one is the Accutrac personality test. All these tests are designed to find out whether or not you will steal from the company or do drugs, or turn in someone else who has stolen something. The Accutrac also tries to determine your mental health as well. These tests are a joke and can be easily faked. While waiting to get into her new place the Blue Haven Motel that has a kitchen, she also applies to be a dietary aide at a nursing home on the weekends. This involves feeding the elderly and often those with Alzheimer's their meals. If they do not like what is being served she can make them something else they might like such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's a nice job, until one day when things go wrong. At Merry Maids she learns the truth behind the lives of these women and how they will work with a twisted ankle or operate a vacuum cleaner on their back even if they have arthritis or back problems because they need the job and the money, even if it isn't all that much.In Minnesota, she has an impossible time finding a place to stay. The economy is supposed to be good there and jobs are supposed to be plentiful there and she does find a job at Wal-Mart, which she ends up finding out was a mistake and that she should have taken the other job selling plumbing at a hardware store. At first, she stays in the apartment of a friend of a friend until she can find a place, but that place just won't open up and soon she finds herself living in a run down motel with no kitchen much less a fridge and no screen on the window or a fan for the room. There is a massive shortage in Minnesota of housing for a reasonable price. Everyone is living in motels and there is a shortage in places to stay in motels. Working at Wal-Mart changes her into a person that she does not recognize. A very mean, bitch of a woman. And she recognizes this and wonders if it does this to everyone. She's only making $6 and change and she really needs to take a second job, which is made difficult with Wal-Mart changing her schedule. It is here that you really see her dark side. I like to think that it isn't who she really is, but just a facet of her personality put under a microscope and blown up a million times.One thing that bothers me about her is that she is against drug testing, which the ACLU has always been against them. And back when this book was published they were just starting to require it at various jobs. She tries to make it an invasion of privacy and a "the man" is trying to put you in your place and degrade you. I have found that most people who have problems with drug test use drugs. And that is certainly the case here. To work at either Wal-Mart or the hardware store she has to do a drug test and she isn't sure she can pass it because she had smoked a joint in the recent past and marijuana stays in the system a long while. Of course, there are ways to cleanse it out of your system, which she does and passes the test. She also says that she is worried that her Claritin-D would show up as Chrystal Meth. When you go to get a drug test you tell the technician what drugs you are taking and they will know what is in your system. Besides, I took a drug test in 1997 to get my job as a librarian and I was taking Claritin and the woman told me none of my allergy medicines would have any effect on the test. So she really had nothing to worry about on that front.What else bothered me was some of her racist remarks. She refers to those who live in the Southwest as Chicanos. And she bitches about not being able to go to certain California towns because the Hispanics have hogged all the low wage jobs and all the cheap places to live. It's not a pretty side to her.That being said, she made some very valid points about how we measure poverty. Poverty has always been measured according to how much food costs, but these days half of your pay can go toward your home, apartment, or another dwelling place. They are constantly in danger of being homeless or ending up in a motel if they are lucky. And some of these places know that they can get someone else to replace you easily and they let you know it, so you feel compelled to do whatever they ask and put up with bad working conditions in order to keep the job you so desperately need. While this book was written over fifteen years ago, nothing has really changed. Lots of Wal-Mart workers are on Medicaid and food stamps. People are working more than one job just to barely get by and are not always succeeding. Something needs to change. Maybe that would involve starting with raising the minimum wage. And trying to do something about affordable housing. While Ehrenreich felt as though she did this experiment as a lark and was never in any danger of going hungry (She kept her ATM card for emergencies such as that and anything else.) and she didn't have to worry about feeding anyone else like so many other women do, she does shine a light on an important problem in America today.
    • 4/5
      Ehrenreich posed as a waitress in order to discover how the working poor in America cope financially. I expected to find an examination of the cost of living, but instead found the flip-side: the difficulty of making a living, earning an income.As with any such journalism of this type, it’s hard to truly capture the desperation of not having the luxury of back-up, knowing that, at any time, you can return to another life, job, and bank account. Ehrenreich does acknowledge these limitations.A fine effort.3½ stars
    • 3/5
      I had mixed feelings about this book.I enjoyed reading the experiences.She annoyed me when she talked about the advantages for the Client of dealing with an agency for maids, but not getting the advantages for the maid of working through an agency. Let me explain it when you work through an agency the agency takes care of taxes, insurance, getting the clients, billing the clients, and collecting from the clients. On your own you have to find the clients, get them to pay you and if you break something the client can come after you to replace it. I remember someone being self employed and having a terrible time getting people to pay on time or at all. He found it very hard to be the tough, mean bill collector he sometimes needed to be.I ended up skimming through the Evaluation. She did go into the difficulties of trying to find another job. But I was annoyed when she was talking about why workers don't stand up and fight for better pay. For her it was a lark to try to bring up the Union idea at Wal-Mart. She didn't have to worry, she was leaving anyway. But when you are barely getting by the fear of making waves and getting fired is very real. If she got fired she could just go back to her old live, but the others could end up homeless or unable to feed their children. She had a safety net, the working poor do not.
    • 4/5
      Excellent essay on some of the problems facing our country. As relevant now (if not more so) than a decade ago when it was written.
    • 3/5
      On the heels of the welfare reform of the 1990s, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to live the life of a minimum wage earner. Her book details the experiences and challenges she faces as she tries to survive on minimum wage in three different areas of the country. While I wasn't surprised by her experiences, I enjoyed reading her a-ha moments. Some of the other reviewers felt she was condescending regarding the lower socio-economic class, but I felt that her writing was genuine and that she really did not have any prior knowledge regarding the struggles of the working poor. I wish this book was more up-to-date as it would have been a great pick for an American social studies classroom.
    • 4/5
      I have been meaning to read this book since I heard about it on NPR when it first came out but there are so many books to read, and so little time. It is a wonderful, fast read and very informative if you have never dropped in to one of these neighborhood gulags or known anyone who has been stuck there. As I read, I kept thinking that of course she can face it every day, she has the extra comfort of knowing she can always leave when it is too much or she has enough information, whichever happens first. She has never had to deal with the panic that comes with a sick child and knowing that your job is on the line if you consider for a moment not choosing your employment over your child's well-being. She has never known the gut-wrenching fear that a new noise in your old car quickly delivers to the core of your being. I would compare it to watching a movie of a roller coaster and thinking you have the whole experience. That said though, it takes a gutsy lady to take on a subject that almost no one wants to talk about, and I see that she has updated editions. I will have to read those and see if she revisited any job sites or employees and certainly the latest government figures should be interesting to look at no matter how positively they might be skewed. Thanks and gratitude to Barbara Ehrenreich for taking the time out to suffer a little and write about it.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this, even though journalistic undercover stories like this are inherently a bit fluffy. It was an engaging and honestly pretty (darkly) humorous read about low wage life.

      Two things baffle my mind - that anything in this book was news to anyone, and that once upon a time you could move to a new place and get a job in less than a week. Okay, this has technically happened to me once in the past few years, but right now in many places people would kill to get the jobs Ehrenreich describes. I hope that the recession has made "the working poor" much less invisible to people, but I'm just not sure.
    • 4/5
      The author went undercover as a waitress, maid, and retail clerk and attempted to support herself on her wages, which she could not. A very interesting read which may result in your empathy towards such minimum wage employees or help you decide that college is good idea after all.
    • 5/5
      In a simple experiment, the author takes on a number of minimum wage / no benefits jobs to show that one cannot get ahead on hard work alone. Her experiment adds to the evidence that the working poor are kept in a disadvantaged state with no hope for advancement. Something good to read if you're one of those people who think the poor are poor because they're lazy.
    • 3/5
      Barbara Ehrenreich, a social critic, stepped away from her life to find out the truth about living at the bottom and what that means for American prosperity. She moved to a couple different states where she was an “undercover” maid, waitress, nursing-home aide, cleaning lady, and a sales clerk at Walmart. She soon found out that even these jobs, claimed as unskilled, were exhausting mentally, and physically. She also learned that two jobs was needed if living under a roof was an essential. Diving into this book, although written in 1998, as a reader, you realize that even 15 years later this is still an issue.
    • 4/5
      Nickel and Dimed is a work of investigative journalism in which author Ehrenreich travels to a few different American locales under contrived circumstances to discover what it's like to live on the almost poverty-level wages many American workers earn at their occupations. During stints as a waitress in Key West, a maid in Maine, and a Wal-Mart "associate" in Minnesota, Ehrenreich discovers that even given an edge of a lump sum of cash to start with and a car, living on the poverty-level wages millions of Americans are expected to subsist on is no easy feat. Lodged in pay-by-the-week motels, suffering from the prodigious aches and pains that accompany low-wage labor, sometimes with hardly enough food to get by, and often even in fear for her safety, Ehrenreich offers a very enlightening look into the lives of the working poor.The book itself is compelling. Ehrenreich's writing style is extremely engaging and has such a great flow to it that it's actually hard to put down, a quality I'm always looking for in non-fiction and rarely finding. The book is also peppered with footnotes elaborating on Ehrenreich's experience in the low-wage world with hard data related to low wage workers both in the locales in which she works and across the United States.As for the content, some of it is truly eye-opening while some of it is borderline offensive to anybody who is working or ever has worked a low-wage job. Ehrenreich exposes the pitfalls that come with having to take a job that is nearby even if it pays peanuts because you don't have a car (and likely never will at the wage you're making). She reveals that many low-wage workers, because they don't have a month's rent and security deposit can't ever get a real apartment and are forced to rely on flea-bag pay-by-the-week motels, sometimes cramming whole families into a motel room or even a car if funds for the motel run out. She shows how hourly employees are subject to the whims of mostly useless middle managers who demand a level of work that is practically slavish. She delves into the demeaning world where drug tests are required, there is constant (often unwarranted) suspicion of worker drug use and theft, and worker belongings are subject to search when they are on the premises all for a paltry $7.00/hour, if that. Ehrenreich discovers that low-wage workers are virtually invisible to the people they're serving as waitresses or maids and almost hopelessly trapped in a hamster-wheel of never having enough to get by, much less any savings to rely on in times of crisis.On the other hand, PhD-holding Ehrenreich seems to need her book as much as any of the rest of us privileged folks. If you've ever had to take a job as a waitress or a maid or a big-box store employee in your life, you might find yourself more than a little offended by Ehrenreich's surprise at the fact that "even" low-wage workers are smart, capable, and take pride in their work. While it's easy to relate to Ehrenreich's bewilderment that a co-worker is continuing to work despite injury, she's obviously looking at it from the perspective of someone who has a cushion to fall back on rather than a worker who faces the very real possibility of being out on the street if she can't recover enough to keep her job. Especially irritating to me, however, is Ehrenreich's account of her time working at Wal-Mart, where she flounces in, attempts to stir up some pro-union sentiment, suggests that low-income women all have the same sad haircut, engages in some vaguely patronizing speculation about the lives of the customers who frequent her department, and then seems to more or less glibly return to her life of privilege. Despite its flaws, though, Nickel and Dimed is a very compelling book and one that everybody in a America whose income allows them some measure of comfort and safety needs to read. If nothing else, it will make you think twice about leaving that bigger tip, not taking the maid that cleans your hotel room for granted, and maybe not wreaking thoughtless havoc on the shelves of the store where you're shopping. More than that, Ehrenreich's book helps us to become re-acquainted with the people our incomes allow and encourage us to ignore and is the kind of book that can and should drive change in a "prosperous" country that is leaving a huge segment of its population behind.
    • 3/5
      I read this about 10 years ago, and then saw the play based on her work. At the time, I thought her work was brilliant. Of course, I was fresh out of college, full to the brim with ideas about life, none of which had any touch with reality. Now, with ten years of real world experience in my brain, I realize Ehrenreich's work is highly flawed and lopsided. The main thing that bothered me, was while congratulating herself on "living like the poor" she refused to live like them! She had to have a car and bought herself wine and $30 khaki pants. She refused jobs because she was "tired" or didn't want to do them. She constantly complained about not having TV or AC or books. She also seemed to think all supervisors were evil, as if they sat around calculating ways to dehumanize their workers. It never occurred to her the supervisors were in a similar position or to offer any kindness to them. She also complained ALL the time about drug tests. This shows a complete naivety when it comes to human nature. In the end, I think Ehrenreich's idea was a good one, but she executed it all wrong and spent to much time complaining about her lack of comforts and how hard things were, instead of trying to actually understand what poverty is.
    • 4/5
      Easy to read, easy to discuss. Ehrenreich sets herself up to see if a person really can survive on the minimum wage. From "Merry Maids" to WalMart (and more), her experiences should shock us all out of our complacencey.
    • 4/5
      Anyone who has ever worked a low-paying job where the tasks performed are constant and never finished (no 'cool' projects to boost your ego), where--almost always--those tasks are physically demanding, will relate to the final chapter "Selling in Minnesota" about the job at Wal-Mart. Anyone who has never worked a job like this needs to read that final chapter - better still, everyone should read this book. You will think twice about 'looking through' the employee on the other side of the counter in those low-paying jobs. In fact, this book will make you think about a lot of things. Ehrenreich asks in the second chapter, after working seven days (two jobs): If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in? Absolutely YES! And there are millions of workers out there like this.
    • 2/5
      I have conflicted responses to this book. First, I do believe that the US's minimum wage is not a liveable wage. I would like the author to have given a little more backstory, regarding the history of the minimum wage, and what was its original purpose? How long did it take for the original legislation, from its initial concept to law (in 1938, I think). So I need to find that out on my own, I guess. I do believe that our country needs to have a liveable wage. That if these rich companies like Wal-Mart would really pay employees what they're worth, our economy, our quality of life, would improve enormously. At the very least, it was an enjoyable "listen" and provides much food for thought.
    • 4/5
      Eye-opening! Everyone in America should read this book. The only complaint I have is that I wish it had contained more detail.
    • 4/5
      It is hard to say anything new or insightful about this book after reading the many excellent reviews. I found it vastly amusing and laughed at many of her experiences but that does not in any way diminish the very serious message contained in this book. I could laugh because I knew that the author would not remain in these circumstances. For the millions who have to stay in that world there is nothing but heartbreak . I was struck by the lack of human dignity afforded to these people though I know that even that is an upper class notion. They need more money and it ends there. They would find their own human dignity if paid a living wage. I have read numerous books by Ms Ehrenreich and I am a big fan. If you are interested in reading about the Canadian experience try Linda McQuaig of Toronto. She is a prominent Canadian political science writer who is very focussed on poverty issues. Try "Shooting the Hippo" or "The Wealthy Bankers Wife" or look in my library. If you would like any of her books that I have I would be happy to send them to you. Some of these books are a little dated in that unemployment rates in Canada now are very low particularly in the west. Here in Alberta, the job market is so hot that there are literally no minimum wage jobs. Even fast food restaurants pay at least twice the minimum wage and workers earn as much as $19 per hour at Tim Hortons. Employers also have to treat their employees well or they will simply find another job. In Canada we have virtually no access to cheap illegal labour ( I am not suggesting that many Canadian employers wouldn't take advantage if they could but it is a matter of geography). The point is that workers can benefit from a booming economy even without unions because they have something that is valuable (so long as they don't have unfair competition) and working with your hands and the sweat on your brow doesn't have to be demeaning.
    • 4/5
      Nickel and Dimed is a memoir of a woman who challenges herself to support herself in menial labor, to see how the underprivileged lower class lives. She lives in three different cities and works six different jobs, and they all culminate in a unanimous verdict: "minimum wage" is by no means a living wage, and too often employees are being financially and spiritually sucked dry for their employers' benefit. It's a powerful and eye-opening look at the lower class, and makes the reader consider that poverty (or near-poverty) is much more prevalent than we usually think of it as. It's very well-researched in terms of statistics and back-up articles - although dated now since they all reflect the economy of 2000 - and overall just a very powerful and engaging piece of investigative reporting
    • 3/5
      This was a really interesting read. I did learn a lot, although much of the time I found the author's overall attitude highly annoying. Regardless, I will never look at the people in these low wage jobs the same way as I did before. And I will NEVER, EVER hire a cleaning service to clean my home! (yuck!)
    • 4/5
      What is it like to live on wages earned at Wal-Mart? How would it feel to work two full time jobs with no breaks and live in a single room with no air conditioning and no way to prepare food? Ehrenreich learns these hard lessons by choosing to work at the lowest paying jobs. This is an excellent book to give readers sympathy for the very poor and homeless. Twenty percent of homeless people have full time jobs but can’t afford a place to live.
    • 5/5
      Short of working at Wal Mart, I've done every job that Ehrenreich did for this book, and my experiences were pretty much the same. She manages to convey the tragedy of life in the riches country in the world while being part of the working poor. Everyone would benefit from reading this book, specially those in power in the work place!
    • 3/5
      Giving up a comfortable life to research on the job, her only income her wages, sampling motel living with kitchen facilities comprising the local 7-11 microwave. Barbara Ehrenreich turns her hand to Fast Food, Maid Service and WalMart. Revealing the true horror that is the existence of the low wage worker: No health insurance /No union/No dignity. Another great expose of those wicked multinational corporations and their exploitation of the masses in general, both workers and customers.
    • 4/5
      Eye-opening. Makes you have a new respect for those in the service industry, and really grants some insight into how trapping that life can be.
    • 3/5
      Ehrenreich writes a disturbing tale of the vest majority of Americans trying to make a living on minimum wage jobs. I found it interesting and distressing that she left some of her “jobs” prematurely even with her education and resources in that she was unable to find housing and keep up with the tasks assigned to her. I found it insulting that she mocks the man with the bumper sticker, “Don’t steal-the government hates competition” insinuating that it is more than taxes that “keeps him out of the Embassy Suites” and later mocks the physical size of Mexican and Anglo families eating out at the buffet. I liked her self examination later suggesting “take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you’re left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn’t managed to climb out of the mines.” I have often thought along the lines of her concern about the total separation between lower and middle classes and the widening gap. “The rich and the poor, who are generally thought to live in a state of harmonious independence-the one providing cheap labor, the other providing low-wage jobs-can no longer co-exist.” Later, “there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by the distant home offices.” Currently there are four Walgreen’s and Rite Aids being constructed within two miles of my residence. Is only East Aurora is immune from this big box store invasion? Ehrenreich is reduced one day at Wal-Mart to “dodging behind a clothing rack to avoid a twenty-six year old management twerp” intent on catching her with “time theft.” Stolen from these low wage workers most harmful is there lack of personal self. “But as much as any other social animal we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs.” Most problematic for me is that sixty percent of all American workers have incomes below the living wage Ehrenreich writes about. The lack of support for affordable child care and housing as in other civilized nations is dehumanizing. With wages remaining static and higher education costs skyrocketing, no longer are they able to afford education or training to lift them up from the bottom in America. How long can this majority be expected to subsist on wages that keep them in poverty, unable to afford health care or any meaningful life experiences?
    • 4/5
      This was an easy read with a fascinating premise: the author goes "undercover" and tries to survive as a low-wage worker for a month in each of three cities.It held my interest, but I was slightly underwhelmed. What she discovered was nothing surprising or new: rents are high and it's not easy to get by on minimum wage. I was expecting a bit more depth; in particular, I would have liked to hear more about the stories of her co-workers and not just her own experience.Plus, I found that the author herself seemed irritating at times. When working at Wal-mart, she tries to point out to the other workers that they're being treated badly and brings up the idea of forming a union, but then goes on to tell the reader, "All right, I'm not a union organizer.... The truth... is that I'm just amusing myself, and in what seems like a pretty harmless way. Someone has to puncture the prevailing fiction that we're a 'family' here...." Um, why? I don't see the point in stirring up discontent if you're not going to help them do something about it. The last statement she makes about her Wal-mart experience is that she thinks she could have done something, if only she "could have afforded to work at Wal-mart a little longer" (the experiment ended when she could no longer support herself through her job there). Maybe that was intended as an inspiration to others, but it just left me wondering why she didn't use some of her own money from her "real" life to stay on for a while longer if she really felt that she could make a difference.Overall, though, this was a worthwhile read. Those who are unfamiliar with the problems facing low-wage earners might get a lot out of this book, but if you already know that plenty of working people are living in poverty through no fault of their own, there's not a lot of new information here.
    • 3/5
      ood sample of jobs. I felt like the best parts of the book were the selection of the jobs, the real life details of the unexpected negatives, and also the economic layout of trying to live on minimum wage. Until I read this, I believed that someone could have a viable if not new cheap car, a decent apartment all on a minimum wage job. After reading it, I felt differently, and started to understand more the trend of immigrants taking more of these jobs and living 2 familiies to an apartment. As another reviewer said, there was an aspect of a rich person having to live like a poor person--her being amazed about things poor people have to go through. Overall, a must read for someone trying to get a perspective on our culture and nation.
    • 5/5
      This is a must read for the establishment! Barbara Ehrenhreich takes on the task of going undercover as one of the "working poor" in the richest country in the world" and does a great job! Couldn't put it down!
    • 3/5
      Good piece of investigative journalism. It is sad to learn the state of today's working class poor, and the author gives a nice insight into their daily lives by becoming one of them herself. Would have liked a little more examples of working for mimumum wage to gain a better propsective of how broad this lifestyle extends to as the book seems to really focus on 3 different typyes of jobs in 2 areas of the country.

    Book preview

    Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

    Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

    Begin Reading

    Table of Contents

    About the Author

    Copyright Page

    Thank you for buying this

    Picador ebook.

    To receive special offers, bonus content,

    and info on new releases and other great reads,

    sign up for our newsletters.

    Or visit us online at

    us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

    For email updates on the author, click here.

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    foreword to the 20th anniversary edition

    Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich published a book that did not describe the lived realities of working poverty so much as imprint them somewhere deep in your conscience. The daughter of a copper miner turned journalist, Ehrenreich temporarily left her normal, middle-class life to work in the low-wage labor market. The Clinton administration had recently reformed cash welfare, pushing millions of families off public aid and into the workforce. Members of both political parties were preaching work as the solution to poverty. Ehrenreich set out to see if they were right. In his journals, Nietzsche implored us to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul. Well, here was a great problem—unacceptable levels of scarcity and hunger in one of the richest democracies in the history of the world—and Ehrenreich tossed herself into it.

    She worked as a waitress in Florida ($2.43 an hour plus tips), then as a maid in Maine ($6.65 an hour), and finally as a Wal-Mart retail associate in Minnesota ($7 an hour). One of the first things Ehrenreich realized was that one job wasn’t enough to live on. She had to take on another job in each place just to afford fast food and the small mobile home or dingy motel room she rented. In Florida, she served in two restaurants, on her feet from 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. In Maine, she clocked in seven days a week, cleaning rich people’s houses on weekdays and serving food to Alzheimer’s patients on weekends. Almost all of Ehrenreich’s waking hours were spent working, but she was never able to pay all her bills, let alone save money or have the time to take night classes at a local community college. By itself, hard work was no ticket out of poverty, just as the unemployment rate by itself was not a reliable signal of how well the economy was working for scores of Americans.

    I first read Nickel and Dimed as an undergraduate student working my way through college. By that time, I had had some tough jobs: dropping curly fries at Arby’s, making drinks at Starbucks (morning shift), selling junk as a telemarketer, fighting wildland fires. But I was young, and I knew these jobs were temporary. Ehrenreich wrote about people for whom the jobs were permanent because there were no better options.

    I found the book powerful and inspiring, galling and enraging. Most important for me, it brought to the foreground people who are so often told to make themselves small and unseen. Nickel and Dimed models, and so trains, a shift in vision. We enter a restaurant and usually notice what’s on the menu or the conversation at other tables. Ehrenreich keeps her eye on the immigrant dishwasher and the pregnant waitress. We go shopping and are drawn to the sale items and new offerings under bright lights. Ehrenreich sees the stockers reorganizing the shelves and cleaning up the messes we leave behind.

    It is Ehrenreich’s fierce witnessing that still gets to me. She looks at poverty in the same way people look at the Grand Canyon or someone they love: nakedly, without retreating to explanation. Susan Sontag was right when she said that we only deplete the world when we try to interpret it. Our rationalizations of poverty allow us to domesticate it, to calm it in the confines of our theories and tropes. It’s safer that way. It allows us to continue ignoring poverty not because it is hidden from view but because when we see it, we blunt our curiosity and empathy with ready-made explanations. Ehrenreich takes the harder path, stepping out of her comfort zone and allowing herself to feel the heat and anguish and complexity of American life at the margins.

    I’ve since read and reread, and have taught and retaught, Nickel and Dimed several times over the years. My students regularly list it as one of their favorite books; it stays with them. What continues to haunt me most are all the slights and indignities the workers faced each day. In Maine, for example, Ehrenreich’s company charged clients $25 per person-hour but paid the women who actually did the cleaning only about a quarter of that, women who scrubbed floors on their hands and knees and cleaned so many toilets that they developed a typology of the stains people left behind. Ehrenreich broke out in a rash as a housecleaner, perhaps on account of the chemicals. Her coworkers suffered much more debilitating injuries on the job, like when Holly fell and badly hurt, perhaps even broke, her ankle. Something snapped, she cried. We never learn the extent of the injury because Holly worked through it, as her boss had encouraged his workers to do during a recent staff meeting.

    There is an old, self-congratulating idea, still taught in our universities and modeled daily on our television screens and Twitter feeds, that the best way to understand poverty is by looking down on it from above; that objectivity is found at a vantage point sufficiently lofty and remote from people struggling to make ends meet.¹ The professional talking class is plenty lofty and plenty remote from the lives of the poor. What we need is not more distance but the opposite: more intimacy, more proximity to the problem, as Bryan Stevenson has put it.² While think tank consultants gather in air-conditioned rooms to discuss how raising the minimum wage will affect overall employment levels, Ehrenreich describes a coworker who brought a bag of hot dog buns for lunch and a poster hanging in the maid’s office announcing that vacuuming burns seven calories a minute.

    When describing herself, Ehrenreich is funny and self-deprecating. But her most moving passages focus our attention on the people she worked alongside, women like Gail, a waitress who dipped into her thin earnings to buy a meal for an out-of-work mechanic, or Joan, a hostess at the same restaurant. Joan, who had fooled me with her numerous and tasteful outfits, Ehrenreich writes, lives in a van parked behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina’s motel room. When Ehrenreich introduces Joan a few pages earlier, she describes her appearance—Joan was slender and fashionable—and tells us how she stood up for the waitstaff, even telling off the cook when he got in one of his moods.

    Notice that Ehrenreich does not bluntly introduce Joan as a homeless woman—as Joan would have been described by many other writers—because, simply enough, that’s not how Ehrenreich first saw her. When Ehrenreich discovered that Joan was homeless, she was somewhat shocked; by admitting this, she invites us to be shocked along with her. Encasing poor people in sterile categories—the homeless, welfare recipients—allows us to hold them at a cool distance. Ehrenreich pulls us closer, and soon we find ourselves wondering how many times we’ve been fooled by the Joans in our lives.

    Nickel and Dimed has become a modern classic. For countless readers and students, it served as an introduction to an America they didn’t know existed. For many others, it elevated the experiences of their parents, friends, and loved ones. Low-wage workers read the book too, seeing some of their struggles reflected in its pages and writing to Ehrenreich to share their thoughts. In the years that followed the book’s publication, Ehrenreich founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports journalism, filmmaking, and art focused on poverty and inequality, prioritizing reporters and creators who have personal connections to the issues. Alumni of the EHRP fellows program include Lori Yearwood, whose thoughtful journalism on social marginality is informed by her personal experiences with homelessness, and Stephanie Land, whose powerful memoir, Maid, chronicled her life as a young single mother who worked as a housecleaner while living in a homeless shelter.

    Have the lives of the working poor gotten better or worse since Nickel and Dimed was published twenty years ago? Judging by the value of wages and the cost of housing, the two issues that consistently dog Ehrenreich and her coworkers throughout the book, the answer is worse. The federal hourly minimum wage was $5.15 in 2001. Today it’s $7.25. If we adjust for inflation, since a dollar in 2021 doesn’t have the same purchasing power as it did two decades ago, we realize that the nominal value of the federal minimum wage is lower today than it was when Ehrenreich was in the field. Nearly a third of the American workforce—41.7 million laborers—earn less than $12 an hour, according to a 2016 study.³

    As millions of workers have watched their wages stagnate or even fall, their housing costs have soared. Median rent more than doubled over the past two decades, rising from $483 in 2000 to $1,002 in 2019. This is not just a problem affecting large coastal cities like New York and Seattle. All regions of the country have experienced a surge in rents.⁴ And yet only one in six eligible families receive housing assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the form of public housing, rent-reducing vouchers, or subsidized multifamily units. Today, families spend an average of twenty-six months on waiting lists for rental assistance.⁵ In America’s biggest cities, that time can stretch out for years, even decades. In October 2018, Los Angeles opened its waiting list for housing choice vouchers for the first time in thirteen years.

    Black and Hispanic families are disproportionately harmed by these trends. Studies have shown that Black job seekers today face similar levels of employer discrimination as they did thirty years ago and that Black workers are much more likely than white workers to be paid at or below minimum wage. A 2018 study found that nearly one in five Hispanic workers were paid poverty wages—full-time earned income insufficient to lift a family above the federal poverty level—which was more than twice the rate of white workers laboring under such conditions. Owing to the country’s legacy of housing and lending discrimination, most white families own their homes, but most Black and Hispanic families rent them, leaving those families exposed to rent hikes and housing loss. Black renters today are nearly twice as likely to receive an eviction filing as white renters.⁶

    In recent decades, the federal government has expanded other forms of aid, like the earned income tax credit, a once-a-year cash boost that many low-wage workers receive. With an annual budget of $73 billion, the credit has become one of the nation’s biggest anti-poverty initiatives, yet the poverty rate today is basically the same as it was two decades ago. When companies keep wages low as the cost of living keeps rising, the government has to spend more just so the poor can remain stuck in place. As for the country’s experiment with welfare reform, the number of Americans living on no more than $2 per person per day has doubled since the late 1990s. Roughly three million children now suffer under these conditions. Most of those children live with an adult who held a job sometime during the year.⁷

    Here is a book that made a difference, and yet America refused to change. Until it does, Nickel and Dimed stands as an urgent and searing indictment of the American dream. Against the claim, issued from some lofty and remote perch, that in this country anyone can work their way out of poverty if they simply put in enough effort, Ehrenreich offers a clear and convincing rebuke: Try it sometime.

    Matthew Desmond

    Introduction: Getting Ready

    The idea that led to this book arose in comparatively sumptuous circumstances. Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, had taken me out for a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place to discuss future articles I might write for his magazine. I had the salmon and field greens, I think, and was pitching him some ideas having to do with pop culture when the conversation drifted to one of my more familiar themes—poverty. How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, 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? Then I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret: Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism—you know, go out there and try it for themselves. I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands. But Lapham got this crazy-looking half smile on his face and ended life as I knew it, for long stretches at least, with the single word You.

    The last time anyone had urged me to forsake my normal life for a run-of-the-mill low-paid job had been in the seventies, when dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sixties radicals started going into the factories to proletarianize themselves and organize the working class in the process. Not this girl. I felt sorry for the parents who had paid college tuition for these blue-collar wannabes and sorry, too, for the people they intended to uplift. In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away; it was close enough, in any case, to make me treasure the gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life. My sister has been through one low-paid job after another—phone company business rep, factory worker, receptionist—constantly struggling against what she calls the hopelessness of being a wage slave. My husband and companion of seventeen years was a $4.50-an-hour warehouse worker when I fell in with him, escaping eventually and with huge relief to become an organizer for the Teamsters. My father had been a copper miner; uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines or for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.

    Adding to my misgivings, certain family members kept reminding me unhelpfully that I could do this project, after a fashion, without ever leaving my study. I could just pay myself a typical entry-level wage for eight hours a day, charge myself for room and board plus some plausible expenses like gas, and total up the numbers after a month. With the prevailing wages running at $6–$7 an hour in my town and rents at $400 a month or more, the numbers might, it seemed to me, just barely work out all right. But if the question was whether a single mother leaving welfare could survive without government assistance in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing and child care subsidies, the answer was well known before I ever left the comforts of home. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, in 1998—the year I started this project—it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Preamble Center for Public Policy was estimating that the odds against a typical welfare recipient’s landing a job at such a living wage were about 97 to 1. Why should I bother to confirm these unpleasant facts? As the time when I could no longer avoid the assignment approached, I began to feel a little like the elderly man I once knew who used a calculator to balance his checkbook and then went back and checked the results by redoing each sum by hand.

    In the end, the only way to overcome my hesitation was by thinking of myself as a scientist, which is, in fact, what I was educated to be. I have a Ph.D. in biology, and I didn’t get it by sitting at a desk and fiddling with numbers. In that line of business, you can think all you want, but sooner or later you have to get to the bench and plunge into the everyday chaos of nature, where surprises lurk in the most mundane measurements. Maybe when I got into the project, I would discover some hidden economies in the world of the low-wage worker. After all, if almost 30 percent of the workforce toils for $8 an hour or less, as the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute reported in 1998, they may have found some tricks as yet unknown to me. Maybe I would even be able to detect in myself the bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform. Or, on the other hand, maybe there would be unexpected costs—physical, financial, emotional—to throw off all my calculations. The only way to find out was to get out there and get my hands dirty.

    In the spirit of science, I first decided on certain rules and parameters. Rule one, obviously enough, was that I could not, in my search for jobs, fall back on any skills derived from my education or usual work—not that there were a lot of want ads for essayists anyway. Two, I had to take the highest-paying job that was offered me and do my best to hold it; no Marxist rants or sneaking off to read novels in the ladies’ room. Three, I had to take the cheapest accommodations I could find, at least the cheapest that offered an acceptable level of safety and privacy, though my standards in this regard were hazy and, as it turned out, prone to deterioration over time.

    I tried to stick to these rules, but in the course of the project, all of them were bent or broken at some time. In Key West, for example, where I began this project in the late spring of 1998, I once promoted myself to an interviewer for a waitressing job by telling her I could greet European tourists with the appropriate Bonjour or Guten Tag, but this was the only case in which I drew on any remnant of my actual education. In Minneapolis, my final destination, where I lived in the early summer of 2000, I broke another rule by failing to take the best-paying job that was offered, and you will have to judge my reasons for doing so yourself. And finally, toward the very end, I did break down and rant—stealthily, though, and never within hearing of management.

    There was also the problem of how to present myself to potential employers and, in particular, how to explain my dismal lack of relevant job experience. The truth, or at least a drastically stripped-down version thereof, seemed easiest: I described myself to interviewers as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years, which is true as far as it goes. Sometimes, though not always, I would throw in a few housecleaning jobs, citing as references former housemates and a friend in Key West whom I have at least helped with after-dinner cleanups now and then. Job application forms also want to know about education, and here I figured the Ph.D. would be no help at all, might even lead employers to suspect that I was an alcoholic washout or worse. So I confined myself to three years of college, listing my real-life alma mater. No one ever questioned my background, as it turned out, and only one employer out of several dozen bothered to check my references. When, on one occasion, an exceptionally chatty interviewer asked about hobbies, I said writing and she seemed to find nothing strange about this, although the job she was offering could have been performed perfectly well by an illiterate.

    Finally, I set some reassuring limits to whatever tribulations I might have to endure. First, I would always have a car. In Key West I drove my own; in other cities I used Rent-A-Wrecks, which I paid for with a credit card rather than my earnings. Yes, I could have walked more or limited myself to jobs accessible by public transportation. I just figured that a story about waiting for buses would not be very interesting to read. Second, I ruled out homelessness as an option. The idea was to spend a month in each setting and see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month’s rent. If I was paying rent by the week and ran out of money I would simply declare the project at an end; no shelters or sleeping in cars for me. Furthermore, I had no intention of going hungry. If things ever got to the point where the next meal was in question, I promised myself as the time to begin the experiment approached, I would dig out my ATM card and cheat.

    So this is not a story of some death-defying undercover adventure. Almost anyone could do what I did—look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering.

    I am, of course, very different from the people who normally fill America’s least attractive jobs, and in ways that both helped and limited me. Most obviously, I was only visiting a world that others inhabit full-time, often for most of their lives. With all the real-life assets I’ve built up in middle age—bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home—waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to experience poverty or find out how it really feels to be a long-term low-wage worker. My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1