Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
It felt like Nickel and Dimed could have been so much more. It didn’t go half far enough and I was disappointed with it, although it’s a light, easy read. Ehrenreich sets out to find out how hard it is to support yourself in the US as an unskilled worker but she doesn’t really want to suffer so she chooses to make life easy for herself in a few ways, such as providing herself with a functional car, and that takes away from the struggle she’s trying to illustrate.
On the other hand, in some places she’s clearly stacked the deck against herself. She never shares living quarters with anyone, for instance, despite the repeated claims of how hard it is to find affordable housing. I think most people who can’t afford to live alone chose to, um, live with someone. Even most non-poor people live with someone and living alone, if that’s what you want to do, is a luxury. I’d been out of college for five years before I could afford to do it.
Then when she waits tables she somehow ends up averaging less than minimum wage. I don’t know where she was waiting tables or what kind of service she was providing, but I was blowing minimum wage out of the water working third shift at IHOP as a teenager.
Also, she never sticks with the same job or place to live for more than a few weeks, so she never builds up any base of support. She never moves into “real” housing or gets a raise or promotion and complains about the standard practice of withholding the first paycheck for one or two weeks, which she keeps experiencing over and over since she hardly seems to keep a job past that first paycheck. If anything, it’s amazing how easy it seems to be to waltz into a new town and have a job within a week.
I’m supposed to be feeling sorry for unskilled workers, and I do, but she’s not helping. As hard as she tried to make things hard (except where she was trying to make things easy), nothing so horrible happened to her. She always had at least one job and a roof over her head and food to eat. Her employers seemed to treat her fairly and according to the law and she liked her co-workers. She didn’t see any violence, sexual harassment, or even drug use. In fact, if that’s as bad as life gets, it doesn’t seem so bad.
I once saw an episode of 30 Days called Minimum Wage that made her point a lot better than she did and they only had an hour to do it in. She had 250 pages.