Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed: Analysis

Wenhui Qi Different places, same hard life “To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else”.(221) Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Nickel and Dimed explored life as a low wage earner by working several “unskilled” jobs in different areas of the country and attempted to live off the wages she earned. She undertakes many noble trades, working in low wage and underappreciated jobs while trying to figure out how the people of this country do it every day. She also looks to examine the functional and conflict theories of stratification as they relate to the low wage jobs she pursues. The goal of Barbara was to find if she would be able to live off the money

The ways in which people are placed within “time space compression” as highly complicated and extremely varied. For instance, in the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara said, “ 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 do not need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high”(127). Barbara has a car so that she can drive to her workplace and save the time from waiting public transportation, and she also can go to different cities whenever she is free. Therefore, she has more control of her mobility. The social relations would change when she went to another city. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others, like Barbara; some initiate flows and movement, others do not; some are more more on the receiving-end of it than others. Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imaged as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are structed ona far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. We can see that from her different work experiences in different places. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates ina apositive way the global and the