Life Struggle on Minimum Wage

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Life Struggle on Minimum Wage
Sometimes life isn’t always as easy as getting a job, making money and paying you bills. In her fascinating book on extended essays Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich poses as an unskilled worker to show the struggles encountered everyday by Americans attempting to live on minimum wage, “matching income to expenses as the truly poor attempting to do everyday.” (6)
Ehrenreich gave herself three rules she had to live by and they were: 1. She could not use her education or professional skills to land a job, 2. She had to take the highest paying job offered and do her best to hold it and 3. She had to take the cheapest accommodations available with an acceptable level of safety and privacy.
Ehrenreich decides to try living in three cities across the US: Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine and Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In Florida she works as a waitress, taking two jobs, one of them she describes the conditions as:
“The regulation poster in the single unisex restroom admonishes us to wash our hands thoroughly, and even offers instructions for doing so, but there is always some vital substance missing – soap, paper towels, toilet paper – and I never found all three at once. You learn t...

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