Hannah Hecht's Blog

Against a backdrop of national and local political battles to raise the minimum wage, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed takes on a new level of relevance to American society. The book, even though researched and written during the booming economy of the late 90’s, makes a statement that even a minimal standard of living is not available to our country’s growing population of minimum wage workers.

The book follows Ehrenreich as she travels to three cities with nothing but the clothes on her back and a small amount of start-up cash and finds three “unskilled jobs” and three places to live. She then attempts to get by only on her earnings, starting with waitressing in Key West, Florida; moving on to a housework job in Maine; and concluding with working the sales floor at a WalMart in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I found the book to be very moving. Ehrenreich’s experiments show that you can’t even meet basic human needs on low wage, hourly jobs, but it was her co-workers experiences that really shook me. A woman in Maine snaps her ankle, but continues to scrub floors, another in Florida lives out of her car, and many go hungry so that their children have something to eat.

The book concludes with a statement explaining and criticizing the current state of the economy which has put an increasingly-large class of people into such an awful state of living. Her experiment shows that having a job (or even multiple jobs) is not the ticket out of poverty that many people say it is. Low income housing in the U.S. is overly-expensive, dilapidated, ill-located, and disappearing. In addition, low income jobs prevent their employees from organizing in any way to fight for their rights in the workplace.

My favorite part of the book was the section where Ehrenreich works a sales floor job at a Minnesota WalMart, mainly because I spent the past summer doing a similar job at Target. I thought that she captured the experience really well, even though out of the three, the WalMart job was probably the least physically and mentally taxing.

According to the book’s Wikipedia page, it has come under some criticism for the author’s methods in her journalistic experiment. Some people say that she doesn’t accurately reproduce a poor person’s experience, since she starts off the experiment with a car and some money in her pocket.

I think that the critics’ point proves Ehrenreich’s conclusion even more so. If a physically fit, single woman with a Ph.D., a means of transportation and some start-up money can’t get by on a low-wage job, then how can we expect anyone to do so?

Overall, after growing up in an upper-middle class family, I’m really happy that I read this book. I honestly wish that more voters and legislators in our society would read it, because it points out problems that our society works very hard to hide. I’d give it four out of four stars.