Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

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All through school you are taught to listen, study hard, so when you graduate high school and go out in the real world to get a job that you will be prepared. You will get a good job, work hard, and start living the “American Dream” of owning your own home and taking care of your family. In her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich disguises herself as a divorced unemployed woman and talks about all the problems she had trying to survive on a minimum wage salary as a low paid average joe. The major theme she talks about in her book is the problems experienced by the poor people trying to get by on a minimum wage salary that doesn’t allow them to pay for their basic cost of living expenses. These problems are made worse by problems of gender, race, and dead-end jobs that play a big part in their continuing to be poor. …show more content…
degree and tries to see if she “could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day” (p. 20). She moves for a month each to three different cities in Florida, Minnesota and Maine. She tries to get a job, a place to live and food on only what she can earn doing your basic low paying job. After spending days putting in applications at a lot of places, she discovers that it isn’t easy trying to get a job as “unskilled” worker. In time she manages to get jobs such as a waitress, a maid, a housekeeper, nursing aide, and a Walmart employee. Her experiences reveal to her how nearly impossible it is to get by on what little she

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting by in America. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2001. Ehrenreich’s tale of a low wage life offers insight into the world of poverty; One of which often goes unnoticed. She addresses the brutal reality of a full time job accompanied with no health care, no benefits, and enough pay to barely make it through the night. To find out for herself if it was actually possible to have a substantial life on minimum wage, Ehrenreich leaves her well-off world…

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Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

the United States. This high percentage of inflation makes it nearly impossible for low income workers to survive. Barbara Ehrenreich unequivocally argues that people who work low income jobs suffer from a lack of respect from customers, luxuries, and social lives; therefore, she effectively supports her argument with a condescending, disgruntled tone in Nickel and Dimed. [Ehrenreich’s diction helps to convey her condescending and disgruntled attitude towards the problems, such as lack of respect…

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The Struggle In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

In the narrative Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich attempts to join the workforce and to live off of the wage she is given through her numerous jobs she takes while in Key West, Florida. Through the chapter, Ehrenreich’s main struggle seemed to be orientated around trying to make ends meet with the dismal wage she has been given. As a story for one of the three narratives in Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich tries to discuss how it is almost impossible to live comfortably with the wage she…

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Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

After reading about Barbara Ehrenreich’s personal experience in Nickel and Dimed, the image of the constant drug tests employees had to take stayed with me and made me ponder. When applying for jobs such as waitressing or sorting clothes at Walmart, Ehrenreich talks about how drug testing was either threatened or mandatory; however, she strongly believes that they are not necessary and invade the privacy of citizens. For example, she rebukes drug tests when she writes, “What surprised and offended…

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Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed: Analysis

inflating prices of affordable housing has made it very difficult for United States citizens to live complacently. In her book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the issue of poverty in America to the conclusion that in order to end these challenges with the lower class, people must limit doing things that would lead individuals to poverty (238). As a source, Barbara Ehrenreich is credible because of her extensive background in writing and her own personal experiences she provides in the…

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Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich decides to take journalism back to its roots in her memoir Nickel and Dimed. In order to showcase the difficulties of living off of low wages in America, she decides to leave her job as a journalist and become a low wage worker herself. She spends a month each in three different locations with a single goal in mind: being able to pay to live for the current month, and to be able to live in the same location for another month if she were to stay. Her experiences give a glimpse of…

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Analysis Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

The author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, relocated to Minnesota to try the experiment one more time. She found housing to be a struggle as there seems to be a shortage of houses; as a result she transitions herself into a hotel. Her stay at the hotel proved to surpass her estimated expenses despite the fact this was her only safe haven. She speculated there would be a refreshing strength between rent and wages. Ehrenreich thought working in a low-wage setting would be uncomplicated;…

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Minimum Wage Workers In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

In the expose Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich portrays a minimum wage worker to show the people that are working minimum wage jobs need more help then they are getting. Ehrenreich uses many ways of persuasion to get the reader to want to do something about minimum wage. In the introduction of the book she states …My husband and companion of seventeen years was $4.50-an-hour warehouse worker when I fell in with him, escaping eventually and with huge relief to become an organizer for Teamsters…

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Nickel And Dimed Language Analysis

During the captivating memoir, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich efficiently uses language to depict a sense of the life, culture, and time of the novel. The author begins her journey of investigating poverty in the age of welfare reform and addresses the time of the novel by writing, “According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, in 1998- the year I started this project…” (Ehrenreich 3). This statement allows readers to know the time frame of the journalist’s endeavor. In addition, Ehrenreich…

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Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel And Dimed Analysis

Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America” is an exposé on working as an unskilled laborer in America. In the excerpt we read Ehrenreich leaves her home to go undercover in Key West, Florida with $1,300, no job, and no place to live. She puts down her deposit at an “$500-a-month efficiency” 30 miles from town and gets a full-time job as a waitress. Unable to live on just one minimum wage job, Ehrenreich gets a job at another restaurant. When this proves to be too much,…

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