1. What is the topic? The topic of Nickel and Dimed, an autobiography written by Barbara Ehrenreich, is economics. Nickel and Dimed go over the economic situation of living in the minimum wage. The test subject in the book, who is Ehrenreich, the author, and a journalist, attempts to make a living out of a minimum wage job. Ehrenreich wanted to know how could a person can live with a minimum wage job, so she decides to move to different states, apply for jobs such as fast restaurants, maid services, waitressing, and try to make a life out of the job or jobs she managed to get. The author meets co-workers who either have a somewhat similar or worse financial status and who also live in motels, trailer parks, and even in their cars because money …show more content…
Also to expose how minimum wage is terrible and how life can be unbearable. The author goes over ways that we could fix this problem as well to raise awareness about minimum wage salaries. Ehrenreich wants to improve the lives who have minimum wage jobs and also to answer her question on can a young adult live on minimum wage. 13. Overall, is the argument sound? The argument is sound because many of the claims were backed up with reliable sources. Many of the sources are from institutions, studies, and big newspaper companies. Not only that, Ehrenreich had some history with this so she had an idea of how it is like. This makes the argument more reliable because a person who had dealt with this type of situation only solidifies it and does not question it. 14. Did the author convince you of his or her point of view on any issues? The author did convince me her point of view on the issues because there has been recent activity on the subject of the minimum wage. Ehrenreich also utilizes many reliable sources when it came to how she viewed the issues. Not only they were reliable, but they are also believable because of the testimonies she managed to
...y (or don't) in low-wage jobs in the United States. To perform this, she exhausted several months finding and operational low salary jobs while living on the budgets those jobs permitted. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063889/102-7245049-5615318?vi=glance) References Kathy Quinn, Barbara Ehrenreich on Nickel and Dimed, http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/Documents/Ehrenreich.html Scott Rappaport, 'Nickel and Dimed' author Barbara Ehrenreich to speak, http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/02-03/01-27/lecture.html Spotlight Reviews, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063889/102-7245049-5615318?vi=glance The Connection, http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2001/06/0625a.shtml The Labor Lawyer, www.bnabooks.com/ababna/laborlawyer/18.2.pdf Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Americam www.growinglifestyle.com/prod/0805063889.html
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print.
Ehrenreich, B. (2011). Nicke and dimed: On (not) getting by in america. New York, NY: Picador.
Ehrenreich’s views throughout the book do not help her with getting the reader to agree with her. Her use of humor is more offensive than funny. She put herself in a position where she didn’t go into this project open-minded. She kept her own views, which got in the way of seeing people for who they are. She sarcastically makes fun of her place if work, when she didn’t out herself in the place of the people there. She also mocks people to the extent where it isn’t just a little side comment, but a rude, biased statement. Ehrenreich use of humor in Nickel and Dimed contains too much of an opinionated twist.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickle and Dimed” she explored a life as having a low wage earning by working several jobs in numerous of different places as she tempted to live off the wage she earned. Even though she had a doctorate in science she is known as a journalist and as well as muckraker. In the novel she states her journey on how she pondered how someone unskilled, uneducated, and untrained workers can survive with the minimum wage incomes. Barbara gave us real life experiences of her personal life as she had witnessed firsthand as her loved ones struggled living minimum wage jobs to provide enough utilities for her family.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, worked at minimum wage paying jobs and reported the hardships that people had to go through on a day-to-day basis. A critic responded by saying, “This is simply the case of an academic who is forced to get a real job.” Ehrenriech’s reasoning for joining the working-class is to report why people who must be on welfare, continue to stay on welfare. Her reports show there are many hardships that go along with minimum wage jobs, in the areas of drug abuse, fatigue, the idea of invisibility, education and the American Dream. A big disadvantage that the lower class has compared to the wealthy is a lack of quality education.
Poverty and low wages have been a problem ever since money became the only thing that people began to care about. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, she presents the question, “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” This question is what started her experiment of living like a low wage worker in America. Ehrenreich ends up going to Key West, Portland, and Minneapolis to see how low wage work was dealt with in different states. With this experiment she developed her main argument which was that people working at low wages can’t live life in comfort because of how little they make monthly and that the economic system is to blame.
Millions of Americans work full-time, day in and day out, making near and sometimes just minimum wage. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in part by the welfare claim, which promises that any job equals a better life. Barbara wondered how anyone can survive, let alone prosper, on $6-$7 an hour. Barbara moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, working in the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon realizes that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts and in most cases more than one job was needed to make ends meet. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all of its glory, consisting of
In the novel Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehnreich, there are many hurtles she must overcome to experience the life of a low income worker. She sets some ground rules for herself, such as always having a car, and starting out with a certain amount of money for her down payment on an apartment. Although the rules are doable, she admits that she broke all of the rules at least once. Even though Barbara didn't hold to her original plan, she was still able to reveal her appeals clearly.
Nickel and Dimed is a book about the author’s trip into the working poor world. Her profession was as a professor in biology. She noticed similar traits of her studies throughout the years, their struggle with being working poor. This struggled she saw preempted her to create a social experiment that is about how to live as a unskilled, working poor person in America. Instead of experimenting on others she took upon herself to be the one who drives into this unknown world to her. This assignment she given herself wasn’t an easy task and Ehrenreich experiences many conflicting emotions about what she will take on. Before she drives into her social experiment, she create some basic rules she must live by: She has to take the highest pay job offered and do her best to keep it, no relaying on past skills, she has to find the most affordable living conditions in the area she was in. These rules were not easily kept during the experiment and eventual she broke them all at one point or another. She also set some reasonable limits that protect her from going hungry or homeless. There was a couple times throughout the experiment that she broke her
In this book, Ehrenreich tries to work in three different places to see what it is like to work as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich worked as a server in Florida, housekeeper in Miami, and sales person in Minnesota, and still she didn’t make enough money to live comfortable. As she says, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rent too high”(Ehrereich’s 199). She notices how hard it is for poor people to try to survive when they have to work with a minimum
The author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, began her experiment in Key West because she lived near there. Then she moved to Portland, ME since it was mostly white. She finished her investigation in Minnesota, where she thought there would be a pleasant stability between rent and wages. From the beginning, she ruled out high profile cities as a result of the high-rent and the lacking amount of jobs. As a secretive journalist, she related the near poverty experience to a life long ago when she was a child or raising her own children, as a result she endured the crushing feeling of anxiety. She knew she had a home to return to and her savings to fall back on therefore, the feeling of anxiety would not be experienced
In her expose, Nickel and Dime, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women to be forced to be put into the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998. Ehrenreich wanted to capture her experience by retelling her method of “uncover journalism” in a chronological order type of presentation of events that took place during her endeavor. Her methodologies and actions were some what not orthodox in practice. This was not to be a social experiment that was to recreate a poverty social scenario, but it was to in fact see if she could maintain a lifestyle working low wage paying jobs the way 4 million women were about to experience it. Although Ehrenreich makes good use of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos), she is very effective at portraying pathos, trying to get us to understand why we should care about a social situation such as this through, credibility, emotion, and logic.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, published in 2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a book about an author who goes undercover and examines lives of the working lower class by living and working in similar conditions. Ehrenreich sets out to learn how people survive off of minimum wage. For her experiment, she applies rules including that she cannot use skills acquired from her education or work during her job search. She also must take the highest-paying job offered to her and try her best to keep it. For her search of a home, she has to take the cheapest she can find. For the experiment, Ehrenreich took on low-wage jobs in three cities: in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2001.