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The invisible workforce consists of the low-wage workers that face harsh working conditions, a few or no benefits, and long hours of labor that exceed the regular business week. Barbara Ehrenreich, narrates her experience of entering the service workforce, in the book Nickel and Dimed. She proves that getting by in America working a minimum wage job is impossible. Although, the book was written in the 1990’s, the conditions in which minimum wage workers lived still prevail today. Minimum wage no longer serves its original purpose of providing a living wage for the invisible workforce. The Fair Labor Standards Act was established in 1938 during the Great Depression; because Roosevelt felt that an action need to be taken about the long hours and starvation wages.Before the FLSA , “it was common for workers to experience cruel work environments.” (Dugger 1) President Roosevelt was handed a message by a girl stating “We have been working in a sewing factory... and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week.... Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.” (Dugger 2). Consequently, Roosevelt worked to pass a legislation that would protect Americas laborers. …show more content…
According to the established FLSA, non-exempt employees working on an hourly basis should make a living wage working the forty hour work week. Currently,minimum wage is not equal to the living wage. An action needs to be taken now, before the middle class completely disappears. One percent of the populations owns more of the wealth than the other ninety-nine percent.If the working class is not able to improve its current situation only two social classes will exist. America will be divided by a high well paid class and a low class with a minimum wage
...y (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/02-03/01-27/lecture.html Spotlight Reviews, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805063889/102-7245049-5615318?vi=glance The Connection, http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2001/06/0625a.shtml The Labor Lawyer, www.bnabooks.com/ababna/laborlawyer/18.2.pdf Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Americam www.growinglifestyle.com/prod/0805063889.html
The working poor are those whose incomes fall under a given poverty line. Depending on how one defines "working" and "poverty," someone may or may not be counted as part of the working poor, but even though anyone who may not be counted, each one of them are from the working poor who ultimately don’t earn enough money that is required to survive. Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist and an author of Nickel and Dimed, is not literally a low-wage worker, she acted as an undercover low wage worker. She establishes and realizes there is not much difference between someone who is professing to exist as a waitress and someone who is waitressing. As well as a documentary 30 Days episode one “Minimum Wage” done by Morgan Spurlock and his fiancee Alex,
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
Barbara Ehrenreich's, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", is a book that strives to change the way America perceives its working poor. Incorporated is a journal of the time spent by the author, with her identity and Ph.D concealed, working in order to discover whether she could support a basic life style from earning minimum wage. This book brings to light general problems such as stress in the work place, lack of proper benefits, and how what was merely an experiment for Ehrenreich, is a real detriment for many others. Documented from 1998-2000, Ehrenreich finds cheap residencies and works various employment positions paying between $6-$7 an hour all while assessing her findings. In working as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and a sales clerk in Minnesota, Ehrenreich soon discovers that even the "lowliest" of occupations require exhausting and strenuous efforts rewarded by a wage that barely covers living expenses and everyday expenditures.
McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and cleaning services: all of these have one thing in common-they are all minimum wage jobs. Their pay is low and work load high, and because of this living as a low wageworker is never easy. One must handle many hardships in order to make a few meager dollars, with which most cannot sufficiently live. 'The 'living wage' in the United States is between $9-10.18; sounds great to a college student, but in the real world this kind of money just isn't going to cut it,' (Ramisch). Minimum wage standards for American workers rest at $5.15 per hour, and in such slighted fields, very few make much more than that, perhaps $6-7, but even that is a rarity. The material life of a low-income employee includes bare necessities and next to zero luxuries. These workers often live paycheck to paycheck and never have a moment to fully enjoy life because they are constantly working, supporting themselves, and/or their families. Barbara Ehrenreich tries capturing this unacknowledged side of low wageworkers in her book, Nickel and Dimed, when she goes undercover as a fellow employee. Her real life accounts are noted as accurate and shocking as she brings the severity of poverty to the forefront for many Americans (Ehrenreich 3). She portrays the lives of millions in one simple novel, and it is through this piece of literature that so many relate and feel less estranged in the overall scheme of things. This relation is especially true for three young women, Brandyll Powers, Whitney James, and Charity Pouge all of whom are forced to live on their scanty incomes in today's society. These interviewees discuss their daily struggles of living on minimum wage and how they are active representations of Ehrenreich?s novel.
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.
The minimum wage was, as it should be, a living wage, for working men and women ... who are attempting to provide for their families, feed and clothe their children, heat their homes, [and] pay their mortgages. The cost-of-living inflation adjustment since 1981 would put the minimum wage at $4.79 today, instead of the $4.25 it will reach on April 1, 1991. That is a measure of how far we have failed the test of fairness to the working poor.” (Burkhauser 1)
Poverty continues to grow in America. The average minimum wage in the United States is $7.35 an hour- far too low in today’s society. Key expenses, for example, gas and housing prices, have gone up significantly since the minimum wage was last changed in 2007 (Wagner 52). The laws creating the minimum wage were intended to improve the standard of living and decrease poverty. Raising minimum wage is a vital step in decreasing poverty and giving every family the opportunity to survive and succeed. Millions of hard-working Americans are below the poverty line and need an increase in pay. Minimum wage must be raised because it will diminish poverty and assist the working class to support their families.
The minimum wage today has a lot of issues; some people say it is not enough to live comfortably. Many agree that there needs to be an increase in minimum wages and by doing that it can help with our issues of poverty. Statistics show that a worker who is full time and earning minimum wage makes only $15,080 a year, which is under the federal poverty line for a family of two. (Gitis, 2013) The problem with that is $15,080 is not a sufficient amount that a person can live and grow on. “A family of two can consist of a mother and son or daughter, father and son or ...
Unlike any president before him, President Roosevelt faced the Great Depression and created the New Deal to try and ensure the economic and political wealth of the United States. In 1935, the federal government guaranteed unions the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established minimum wage and maximum outs. Beginning in 1933, the government also helped rural and agricultural American with development programs and assume responsibility for the economy of the United States. Essentially, the New Deal sought to ensure that the benefits of American capitalism were spread equally amongst the many diverse peoples of the United States. Even though Roosevelt's New Deal failed to cure completely the economy of the Great Depression, his governmental policies during it established a new norm for succeeding governments to
On Saturday, June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 121 bills. Among these bills was a landmark law in the United States’ social and economic development—Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) or otherwise known as the Wages and Hours Bill. This new law created a maximum forty-four hour workweek, guaranteed “time-and-a-half” for overtime hours in certain jobs, banned oppressive child labor, and established the nation’s first minimum wage. By definition, a minimum wage is the lowest wage permitted by law or by a special agreement (such as one with a labor union). Throughout the years, the minimum wage has been a central debate topic for the socioeconomic world and now in 2014, the debate has broken through the surface once more. In order to make a choice of whether the wage should be increased or decreased, the history of the wage is needed to make an informed decision.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist who wrote the book Nickel and Dimed. She goes undercover to see how it feels to work for $6 to $7 an hour. She leaves her regular life to explore the experiences of a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich travels to Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, looking for jobs and places to live on a minimum wage salary. At one point in time, she had to work two jobs to makes ends meet. As she worked all these jobs, she discovered many problems in the social world. The things she went through were not the types of situations that she usually experienced. She wasn’t used to living and working environments of the poor. She had to deal with the different personalities and customs of her co-workers, their living arrangement, and the management hierarchy in each job. She worked as a waitress at two different restaurants, as a maid service cleaning houses, and as a dietary aide at a nursing home.
In today’s society, the question of minimum wage is a large political topic. Many people argue that it is impossible to live on a minimum wage lifestyle. In her novel Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich looks into this issue. In an experiment in which she mimics the life of a single woman, she moves into the low-wage workforce in three different cities in America. Within these cities, she attempts to make a living off of low-wage work and records her experiences, as well as the experiences of the true low-wage workers around her. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich utilizes both vivid imagery and data in order to persuade the audience to agree that the low-wage lifestyle is truly un-livable.
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.
Nowadays to live in Napa, CA where I live, one single person should make at least $12 an hour to receive a living wage. Then for one adult and a child the adult has to make $25.82 an hour at least for two adults and one adult working he/she should make at least about $24.13. The minimum wage in Napa is $9, and it is very hard for people to survive on a minimum payment. People often work two jobs to pay rent, bills, but the sad part is that the family loses a lot of time together because parents are working most of the time. For example, I know a man from my neighborhood who works two jobs during the day from 8a.m to 4 p.m. He works at a hotel as a dishwasher, and during the night, he works in a restaurant as a dishwasher. I rarely see him, and I see he is not with his family all day. He works almost every day to sustain his family, but doesn’t have time to hangout with his family. I just think that this is wrong because it is inhuman that a person works all day, seven days a week. My neighbor is so skinny, and I think he is like this because he works too much. We should have a minimum wage increase to benefit all people who work hard like him.