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Analysis Essay Going and living the life of a poor/middle class person is what Barbara Ehrenreich did in the story “Serving in Florida”. She illustrates her working conditions at the Hearthside ad Jerry’s. Where she faces many barriers. Ehrenreich suffers from low wages, poor working environments and, long stressful hours. She came from a higher paying job, living in a nice house, to a low wage job, living in a trailer park working two jobs. As a person living the life style Barbara Ehrenriech is experimenting in, I can relate to most of the stuff she goes through. Like the long hours, poor working environment and, low wages. This is all very common to everyone that lives this life style. Some people even suffer from physical and mental issues,
Ehrenreich opens the book by seeking out a “career coach”, in other words, someone who will help her navigate the sea of job opportunities. From Ehrenreich’s description, the biggest thing the coaches bring to the table is enthusiasm and support. Many results have been positive from someone having a coach to guide them. Barbara was off to a good start in her journey.
She knows she will never truly experience poverty because this is nothing more than a project but she leaves behind her old life and becomes known as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years. Her main goal is to get enough income to be able to pay for all her expenses and have enough money to pay next months rent.
The research excerpt, “Nickel-and-Dimed” conducted by Barbara Ehrenreich, explained the day-to-day of the low-wage workforce in America. Ehrenreich conducted the experiment by immersing herself in the” world that welfare mothers are entering”, as she recalls. To commence her journey, she finds a place to live for $500 in Key West, Florida. After she is acclimated in her “sweet little place” she runs through the ads to find work. Ehrenreich finally, lands a job at Hearthside Hotel for $2.43 an hour plus tips. On the first day, she follows Gail, a waitress, to learn the tricks of the trade. She quickly feels overwhelmed by the work and learns that she is incompetent. The first problem she encounters at Hearthside Hotel are the managers she has
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.
She details the life that they live, focusing on their jobs and living situation. Ehrenreich looks at two aspects of their low-income lives. The first is management, how they act and treat her and her fellow workers. This is one of the first things she mentions in her short story. “I could drift along like this, in some dreamy proletarian idyll, except for two things. One is management” (Ehrenreich 129). By doing so she immediately establishes that she resents management for whatever
Many Americans are still struggling to make ends meet. According to the Census Bureau, 104 million people. A third of all Americans have incomes below twice the poverty line. While many of these people are unemployed, many others are the working poor, people trying to support themselves with low and minimum wage jobs. The task of such workers was taken up by Barbara Ehrenreich in her 2001 book Nickled and Dimed. The book, which recounts her experiences, is important because it offers a gripping, first person account of the real difficulties faced by many Americans today. One way the book illuminates these difficulties is by showing how a full-time low wage salary isn’t enough to pay one’s living expenses. Ehrenreich begins each experiment with significant advantages over many minimum wage workers.
Carver's "Women in Florida" is regarding women’s rights issues. She notes that in the United States, Florida is one of the most populated; women are roughly equal the population to men. Yet, women are still seen as a minority group. Women are considered minorities, because they do not share the same power, privileges, rights, or opportunities as men. Most of the women in history had fewer rights and career opportunities than men. Carver believes that the south limited women to "traditional roles". Being a wife and mother were seen as women's professions. In the 20th century, women won the right to vote. However, southern states, like Florida resisted, due to their traditional values concerning women's roles.
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
She puts herself in the mindset of many women in her position by getting a job as a waitress, getting a small apartment, and working minimum wage to get by day to day. Ehrenreich’s states, her main goal is “to lift poor women out of poverty as well as raise their self-esteem.” (p. 224.) This is a powerful statement Ehrenreich makes because she is not doing this for the sake of experimenting she honestly wants to make a difference in American women lives. The story shows Ehrenreich’s experience as working as minimum waitress in Hearthside as well as describing her coworkers and their
Ehrenreich’s use of statistical information also proves to her audience that she in fact has done her research on this topic. She admits that poverty is a social topic that she frequently talks about. She researched that in 1998 the National Coalition for the Homeless reported that nationwide on average it would take about a wage of $8.89 to afford a one bedroom apartment and that the odds of common welfare recipients landing a job that pays such a “living wage” were about 97 to 1. Ehrenreich experiences this statistic in first person when she set out job hunting in Key West, Florida when she applied to 20 different jobs, ranging from wait tables to housekeeping, and of those applications, zero were responded to.
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
In the book, Ehrenreich documented her experiences working a series of minimum wage jobs as a waitress, a maid and a nursing home dietary assistant. Ehrenreich found that in order to make ends meet and afford a place to live and food to eat, she needed to work two jobs, which left her in a constant state of exhaustion and pain. She also observed of her fellow servers that, “everyone who lacks a working husband or boyfriend seems to have a second job” (2001, p. 48). Many of her co-workers shared the same challenge with affordable living arrangements, some living in a van, with their mother, sharing rooms with strangers or even living in a dry-docked boat (Ehrenreich, 2001). Not only did Ehrenreich find that the wages offered unskilled workers were not enough to meet the basic needs of food and shelter, but that there are a “host of special costs” (2001, p. 27) incurred by the working poor. For example, workers are required to invest their own funds in partial uniform and pay ...
What would life be like if most of America was unemployed, broke, and not making enough money? George and Lennie left Weed to go find work in a different place and ended up working on a ranch in Soledad for fifty dollars a month. At the ranch, there were many problems that happened. “Of Mice & Men” by John Steinbeck takes place during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, a tough time filled with loneliness and lack of education, which contributed to the conflicts in this story.
In the excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich’s, “Nickel and Dimed”, Ehrenreich uses her own knowledge and scientific experience from a PhD in biology to further research the life of a low wage worker. She goes through her own low wage job experience with the corporate cleaning agency, “The Maids.” Ehrenreich offers a profound perception of the day-to-day challenges and sacrifices that low wage workers face to keep their jobs, support their families, and survive in a corporate driven society.
During the middle of the book, Ehrenreich writes, "Maybe, it occurs to me, that I 'm getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black (p. 100)." I found this interesting because African Americans continuously face inequality due to race, which correlates with the inequalities that lower classes in society face. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich emphasizes that there are "hidden costs" to being poor, which includes those in poverty who cannot find a way out. The working poor, who Ehrenreich gets to know through work, live in hotels paying daily. These people in the book describe to Ehrenreich that that would rent an apartment, but they cannot afford the security deposit and starting costs. The working poor in the book also must buy unhealthy meals at fast-food restaurants because they cannot afford kitchen appliances or food to cook with. People suffering in poverty often believe they are stuck there and cannot get out, so they