Author Background: Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, is a passionate writer. According to her personal website, she went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon and she studied chemistry, but then decided to study physics instead. Ehrenreich made it to grad school at Rockefeller University and she switched from various majors and she ended up in molecular biology. The reason why Ehrenreich ended up in Reed college, was because she came from a blue collar family. Her father was a miner and through hard work he went to get his degree. Ehrenreich and her family traveled to various locations in her childhood and when she was in her mid-teens, she was able to go to Reed College and start her carreer there. Many years later, she quit her job of teaching at the State Univeristy of NY and became a full-time writer. Ehrenreich started off small and made her way up. She categorized her life into three tracks: journalism, book length projects and activism. Her journalism work consisted of …show more content…
At the beginning, Ehrenreich was having a conversation with Lewis Lapham about that she is willing to write a book of the working people in today’s society. In order to have proper research, she decided that she will do some old fashion journalism and she, herself would try to fit in with the working class. In order to have the real life experience, she decided to go to Key West, Florida, and she plans out how much money she has to make and has to spend in order for her to survive. She finds an apartment for $500 a month and then she immediately applies for various jobs, but she soon learns about the low-wage-job application process. She was hired at a small restaurant, in which she calls Jerry’s, and during her encounter she reveals that she seems underqualified, because the job seems difficult and physically
She blames capitalism for the injustices of the world, slightly more than easy bad management techniques. A company should be shown that would benefit from a union and it will be shown to all around that one that will promote even better from decent, gentle management decisions. Most irritating, she’s constantly negative about the whole lot, even the positive experiences she has. When one of her colleagues offers to allow her move in with her and her family, not only does Ehrenreich turn the proposal down, but she still describes it sneeringly as a "touched by an angel moment." Does she have to dribble with irony when writing about an authentic type deed?
Ehrenreich’s “biting humor” gives off the sense of her stereotypical views, bluntly stating her biased opinions. Some of these views are understandable, and sometimes even excusable, considering her background of high education and/or lack of personal experience that is like majority of the people she encounters throughout her journey. However, there are points in which her wisecracks go too far. During her time in Florida, there is a point when four of her tables fill up at once. When a customer from a table of British tourists complains, she states, “Princess Di refuses to eat her chicken strips with her pancake and sausage special since, as she now reveals, the strips were meant to be an appetizer.” (p. 47). She also refers to another table of customers as “yuppies” (p. 47). When making these stereotypical judgments of people, she puts herself on a pedestal, almost as if she disregards the fact that she may fall under the same category of those whom she is making the comments about. When she references the food at the location of second job she takes in Florida, she begins describing it with: “Picture a fat person’s hell, and I don’t mean a place with no food.” (p. 29)....
Through this, the reader understands that the author has an advanced amount of knowledge on the subject she will be covering throughout the novel. Feeling as if there will be no need to question her findings or conclusions (due to her vast educational background and the research she put in), the audience is much more susceptible and therefore predisposed to Ehrenreich’s arguments, making it easier for her to make her case.
Can someone really live and prosper in American receiving minimal income? Can someone create a good lifestyle for themselves on just six to seven dollars an hour? In Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to find out if it is indeed possible. Giving herself only $1,000 she leaves the lifestyle that she has come accustomed too and goes to join all the people living the low class way of life.
The juxtaposed contrasts that she often uses are seen explicitly in anecdotes or implicitly in conscious thoughts. Such contrasts first appear in the first paragraph. Even before Ehrenreich makes any substantial effort to join the poor working class, she is hit with this sudden unease of being recognized. At that time, it is clear that she has not relinquished her middle class status since she feels ashamed of being identified as a poor worker. In the world that the author originally belongs to, name and reputation are considered important to one’s standing in society yet in the working class realm, as Ehrenreich later finds out, one is often “unnoticed” and names are “unuttered.” Not only are names forgotten but one’s ability and education are also ignored when looking for jobs. Oblivious to the “rule” for hiring for unskilled jobs, Ehrenreich initially worries about her over-qualification but only to be shocked when she realizes the employers are not even interested. Whereas jobs for the middle class often demand higher education and past accomplishments, jobs for the low-wage workforce are simply depended simply on luck or as Ehrenreich claims “ being in the right place at the right time.” One can convey this as part of a corporate scheme to ensure the
The biggest appeal that Ehrenreich makes is after she ends up walking out of the housekeeping job/waitress job because she cannot handle it anymore." I have failed I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time in many years, that the tear ducts are still there and still capable of doing their job." (Ehrenreich, 48) This is the biggest appeal because Ehrenreich is quitting on the whole project. She is basically telling the readers that it is impossible for her, a "well-off", woman to live the life of a low wage worker.
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
My views about Ehrenreich’s novel that it was filled with educational details of minimum wage job occurrences. The author captures concrete memories of her experiences of several job positions. Working in several jobs of hard manual labor is exhausting for the mind and body. The job experiments involving all these jobs to see what many struggling people endure on a daily basis. I thought the experiments resulted in average, and intolerable work environments. Working one or two jobs was needed to survive and pay for necessities. From my perspective, it was a useful trial to show readers the hardships people of every culture deal with constantly.
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a
Cause and Effect 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.
The Rhetorical Triangle states that writing should incorporate ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is establishing credibility, pathos is showing emotion in the writing, and logos is stating logical facts. In “Shooting an Elephant” written by George Orwell and “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich powerful messages are conveyed. However, “Shooting an Elephant” is comprised of ethos and pathos. While Orwell’s writing lacks logos “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich includes ethos, pathos, and logos. Therefore, while both conveying powerful messages Ehrenreich’s writing includes all three aspects of The Rhetorical Tringle while, Orwell’s writing lacks logos but includes the emotion and credibility.
Like most people whom conduct experiments, Ehrenreich must first establish credibility of her knowledge of this subject. She does this in her introduction in numerous ways. Ehrenreich comes out saying that she has a Ph.D in biology but has a fancy for writing. She starts off with her exposure to low wage paying jobs by using her sister and her husband a companion for over a decade. Her sister, who use to work for the phone company as a sales representative, a factory work and receptionist who described it her experiences as “the hopelessness of being a wage slave”. Her husband use to work for $4.50 an hour in a warehouse before he was fortunate enough to land a good paying job with the union workers the Teamsters.
For example, She notes that “ One of the women explains to me that teams do not necessary return to the same houses week after week, nor do you have any guarantee of being on the same team from one day to the next.” What this quote means is it explains the way the company tries to prevent the groups from making social contact. I can relate to Ehrenreich’s argument because while I was working at Jewel as a bagger. I had similar routines and experienced some of the ways that the system tried to work my body more than my mind. For example, while working there I was ordered to do many tasks to keep me busy and from interacting and making friendships with fellow employees. If this was allowed then we would be able to talk about how unfair our job is and how we are treated. The author tries to argue that her job keeps her mind busy and she won't be able to have time to think or react., in other words, this blue collar job is
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.