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Nickel and dime barbara ehrenreich essay
Essay about nickel and dime by ehrenreich
Essay about nickel and dime by ehrenreich
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Walking a Mile in Another Persons Shoes Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover as a struggling and minumum wage payed American Waitress. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of “Nickel-And-Dimed” an essay about an average minimum wage worker and how they live their lives on a low wage job. She disguises herself and tries to prove that it is impossible or possible to be financially stable. Barbara meets other minimum wage workers, uses mathematical statics and personal experience to prove that it is very difficult or even impossible to live off a minimum wage paid job and using all of these facts make this article effective and strong. Barbara takes a break from her cushion life as a well paid journalist and decides to see what it is like to live …show more content…
At the beginning of the article Barbara shows statics, mathematically calculated, that it is indeed impossible to make a living through 1 minimum wage income alone. Barbara starts by saying “Mathematically, the answer is no, as can be shown by taking $6 to $7 an hour, perhaps subtracting a $1 or two an hour for child care, multiplying by 160 hours a month, and comparing the results to the prevailing rents.” She then goes on to show statics by stating, “According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, for example, in 1998 it took, on average nation wide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Preamble Center for Public Policy estimates that the odd against a typical welfare recipients landing a job at such a “living wage” are 97 to 1” (Hirschberg 539). These facts and statics proves that it would be difficult to live off of a one person, minimum wage, income. It shows that mathematically it would not be possible to support everything in …show more content…
Barbara, disguises herself and experiments to see if she could live off minimum wage for a month. Firstly Barbara states “So unless I want to start my car as a residence, I have to find a second, or alternative, job.” (Hirschberg 549). This is personally saying that she is having trouble keeping up on rent and living off her pay and proving that it is impossible to live off of one income. Barbara later mentions more expenses and changes she has to make to keep on surviving on the pay shes receiving, “I make the decision to move closer to Key West. First, because of the drive. Second and third, also because of the drive: gas is eating up to $4 to $5 a day, and although Jerry’s is as high-volume as you can get, the tips average only 10 percent, and not just for a newbie like me. Between the base pay of $2.50 an hour and the obligation to share tips with the bus boys and dish washers, were averaging only about $7.50 an hour. Then there 's the $30 I had to spend on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry’s servers-a set back it could take weeks to absorb.” (Hirschberg 552). Even though Barbara knew that mathematically it was impossible to live off the minimum wage that she is paid, she started the experiment wanting to see the hidden struggles in living with a low paycheck and she succeeded in seeing that simple things like gas
Barbara starts her undercover mission with her first job as a waitress in Hearthside restaurant. From her experience, I can understand how exhausting her job was with the hourly shifts the staff worked under, especially with the manager Stu always keeping the workers busy. When she was reading USA Today, she had to vacuum with a broken vacuum cleaner. She found the attitude of her manager towards his staff insulting. For example, one
middle of paper ... ... She asked how people get by (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/
The current minimum wage right now in California is $9.00 per hour. The question is, will this be enough for people to pay off their rent and still able to not keep their fridge empty. In the book, "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich talks about working as a low wage worker. Barbara describes the environment of the jobs that she had done in a detailed manner. She also explained how most of her coworkers lived with more than one person in order to pay rent. One of her job was working in a nursing home which she got a really low pay to take care of elderly people. In addition to that job, she had another job in order to pay off her rent. Therefore, according to the book an individual may need more than one job or live in a house with more
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.
In her unforgettable memoir, Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to explore the lives of the working poor under the proposed welfare reforms in her hometown, Key West, Florida. Temporarily discarding her middle class status, she resides in a small cheap cabin located in a swampy background that is forty-five minutes from work, dines at fast food restaurants, and searches all over the city for a job. This heart-wrenching yet infuriating account of hers reveals the struggles that the low-income workers have to face just to survive. In the except from Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich uses many rhetorical strategies to illustrate the conditions of the low wage workers including personal anecdotes of humiliation at interviews, lists of restrictions due to limited
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.
Although the wage is being increased frequently, the cost of other necessities also increase at a faster rate that is not being accounted for. The author explains that this society is shaped around hiding poverty from the public, also referred to as “money taboo”. An example, Ehrenreich explains, is the lack of low-wage search help from the media. Many employees often don’t share wages from their jobs in fear of a sense of outcast. Thus, many well-paying jobs go under the radar. Minimum wage employers, such as Walmart, eat up the ignorance of the working class. Such companies resist increasing the wage by promoting flashy “benefits” for workers instead. Ehrenreich explains that in a world where the rich overshadow the poor, low-cost housing can easily be overbid by the rich. As seen in her time in Minnesota, Ehrenreich could not find low-cost housing affordable on her Walmart wage. Even the borderline affordable motels lacked safety and cleanliness. In the Evaluation, Ehrenreich sums up the social and economic problems that seem to be apparent throughout the book. She also effectively highlights the issues of the legitimate lower-class workers she encounters. Ehrenreich incorporates prior knowledge of her specialty into
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.
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2001). Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America. Published- New York, New York.
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
Barbara Ehrenreich is a brave and amazing author. Nickel-and-Dimed is informative, entertaining, and influential. I enjoyed reading about a white woman trying to endow a life that is all I know. Barbara's experiment exposed sexism, classism, and racism in the American workplace amongst other reasons why working for someone else is dreadful.
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich frequently uses pathos in her novel Nickel and Dimed to make the readers feel sympathy for the hardships of the low working class, who do not get recognized. Throughout the novel Ehrenreich discovers the difficulty of searching for a place to live that is reasonably affordable and accomadable to her life. Ehrenreich describes the lunches her former co-workers eat. Ehrenreich calculates that her co-workers do not take in enough calories for the work they are doing. Once Ehrenreich acquires a job, she talks to her co-workers and the hard labor they put in everyday. Along with the jobs, workers have to worry about healthcare. Most workers cannot afford health care, therefore they have to be careful not to get injured. Many
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.