Social Experiment In Nickel And Dimed

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

She picked Maine because of the demographics, largely white. Her first home in Maine was at a Motel 6, which became her base to find a job. Her search for jobs started with warehouse jobs, nursing, manufacturing and Good Will. She starts a job as a maid at $6. 65 an hour and a weekend job at a nursing home at $7 an hour. She found her nursing home duties were well entwined with her past at Jerry’s. However she found the maid work to be grueling and experiences the true nature of a low wage job. People are treated like objects and not humans. During her stint as a maid she found out what the lives of working wage people are really about, they have serious health problems however they continue to work. Her experiment in Maine allowed her to understand the struggles that many Americans go