How the Low-Wages Employees Live

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

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. 221 pp. $23. ISBN-10: 0312626681

Barbara Ehrenreich was born in 1941, in Montana. She attended Reed College, where she studied chemistry, and graduated in 1963. She also received a Ph. D in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University. She has written fourteen books during her prodigious career as an essayist and activist. She labels herself as a Democrat Liberal, while being part, for a long time, of the Democratic Socialists of America. She has written both fiction and non-fiction, but, as the New York Times called her, she remains a "veteran muckraker"

. As the paragraphs below will discuss, the book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" fits well into this category.

Nickel and Dimed is a book focusing on the life of low-waged Americans. Barbara Ehrenreich travels to Florida, to Maine and to Minnesota, where she takes on low-paying jobs for a month and tries to make ends meet. The thesis of the book is that these jobs often do not offer the necessary financial security, are difficult and often demeaning in many aspects and the employees find themselves caught up in a cycle from which they have no chance to advance or move beyond.

Barbara Ehrenreich uses mostly primary sources, resulting from her experience. These primary sources are either co-workers, employers or other individuals she comes into contact with during her experience (supervisors etc.). There is little secondary research and this can probably be identified as one of the weak points of the book: because the writer makes no prior research, she misses important aspects of the experience of living off a low wage, such as the fact that poor employees usually find alternative solutions to the ones she thinks off. As a short example, it is less likely that a poor individual would go to a dry cleaner, but would probably use a thrift shop to purchase his or her clothes as an alternative. Another important detail that secondary research would have revealed is that there are many alternatives to procuring food that poor people often use.

Taking all these into consideration, Nickel and Dimed is written by an individual who is well off and who only resorts to living of a low wage as an experiment, knowing that the experiment will eventually end and that she can move back to her own life (in fact, she actually leaves one of the jobs before the one month is up). This likely limits the degree to which the experiment can be conclusive, including because of the points previously made.

The period for the experiment is also too limited: it can often happen that an employee will start in a low paying position, but will eventually move upward in the company's structure. At Wal-Mart, for example, one can expect to have regular training programs for the employees, enabling them to improve their chances of getting a promotion.

Nevertheless, the author makes valuable points. One of these is the fact that employees in low-paying jobs often need to choose the less financially effective solution because they cannot afford the more efficient one. A case in point is the fact that many poor employees need to pay for a room at the hotel or motel, when, in fact, renting an apartment would be much cheaper in the long run. The problem is that renting an apartment often implies a first rent and a deposit, something they cannot afford. Ehrenreich finds that it is usually the housing that poses the most important problem, as the largest monthly cost that the employee needs to cover. She finds many compromise by sharing apartments with many other or simply living in a trailer, as she does in Key West at one point.

Another important point is that, despite what was discussed in a previous paragraph regarding promotion possibilities, this is often difficult for someone who is focused on covering day-to-day expenses, which often implies taking a second job, to also concentrate on personal development that would allow them to be promoted within the organization. The reality is that, in many of these situations, the only improvement comes from working more, usually in a similar, low-paid position, which, overall, brings too little to justify the huge effort.