Review: Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America

Nickel & Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich provides a firsthand account at our nation's low-wage earners. The book began as an assignment for Harper's magazine to explore how millions of Americans were able to survive on minimum wages. "How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?" Ehrenreich asks. "How... 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?" To find out, Ehrenreich spent several months traveling from Maine to Minnesota to Florida, working a variety of low-paying gigs. She worked as a waitress, a motel housekeeper, a cleaning service worker, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart retail clerk. Although her weekly take-home pay was only slightly more than $300 (the result of often working two jobs a week), she scrupulously avoided tapping into her credit cards and bank account. Along the way, Ehrenreich was always mindful of her advantages: she was, after all, a privileged (with a Ph.D., a substantial career, and money in the bank) Alice who was just passing through this Much-Less-Than-Wonderland. As an honest writer, Ehrenreich also confronts her middle-class, feminist, and liberal biases and acknowledges that those principles may be luxuries in a world where regular meals, a secure place to live, and the money for a doctor's visit or a medical prescription are never guaranteed. Ehrenreich is a terrific storyteller who writes with a muckraker's heat. But she never allows her passion to turn these real-life experiences or the people whom she encounters into wooden object lessons.

--This review came from School Library Journal Dec2001, Vol. 47 Issue 12, p57, 1/3p


This book would be of interest to those studying Public Affairs and Human/Social Services as well as anyone interested in human or social concerns.


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