Review: Nickel and Dimed

Oct. 21, 2004
By Anna Anderson
Staff Writer

Barbara Ehrenreich didn’t jump at the chance to personally find out what it was like to be suddenly taken off welfare and thrown into the working world.  But she did, and she tells about her experiences in her book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”.

Ehrenreich takes readers on a dismal adventure into the world of minimum wage and all it entails.  Going into this project, Ehrenreich, who has a Ph.D. in biology, took a scientific approach and set rules and parameters for herself.  The rules said that she couldn’t resort to previous work or education experience, she had to accept the highest paying job offered, and she had to live in the cheapest place available.  What she finds is the hopelessness of (barely) living paycheck to paycheck with little or no benefits, difficult bosses, some of whom seem to sincerely think they are helping their employees while ripping them off and oppressing them.  Even as a single woman with no dependents, she sometimes had to work two jobs to cover her rent and she couldn’t do it for very long.

She worked as a waitress and a dietary aid in a nursing home.  She cleaned houses for a franchise cleaning company.  She worked at Wal-Mart.  She lived in Florida, Maine and Minnesota and each time she moved she had to start all over again.  Scouring the help wanted ads, trying to find a decent place to live.  Eating cheaply was always a challenge because of the lack of kitchen utilities such as a refrigerator in one place and limited utensils in another.  In Florida, when the money she earned wasn’t going to cover the rent, Ehrenreich tried to figure out ways to cut down on other expense, but couldn’t see any expenses she could go without.  She admitted that she hadn’t taken to eating lentil stew, but purchasing the pot and ladle needed to make the stew would have been almost impossible.

The cleaning company she calls Maids insisted that floors be scrubbed by hand and that no food or drink be consumed while cleaning. She worked “tirelessly, hour after hour,” but realized that the reason why she was such a “productive fake member of the working class,” was because of a lifetime of good diet and health care and the fact that she hadn’t worked physical labor long enough to have damaged her body.

Throughout the book, Ehrenreich never imagines herself to be a part of the working class, but her real identity gets lost somewhere in the aisles of Wal-Mart and amid the “miles of baseboard” she dusts.  When she reveals who she really is and what she’s doing to coworkers at Maids, they don’t seem to understand, or really care.  Ehrenreich writes that after this project, people have asked her if anyone suspected that she was somehow different from the others she worked with.  She writes that the only way she was viewed as different was when it came to her lack of experience.

Ehrenreich is coming to the St. Ambrose campus on Tuesday, Nov. 16 as the featured speak of the Conference on Social and Economic Justice.

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