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Effects of raising the minimum wage on society
Effects of low wages
Effects of raising the minimum wage on society
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Wage: The Realities
When it comes to the working class, minimum wage is such a debatable topic. From about two dollars an hour waiting tables, to about seven working in retail, people are wondering why they don’t get paid more by the hour for all the work they put into their jobs day by day. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed investigates the realities of minimum wage jobs, and with using her work and other resources, the effects physically, mentally, and financially can be determined. Also, the perspective of society in general when it comes to the peculiar topic can be evaluated. For instance, Ehrenreich in her novel goes undercover by moving across the country and willingly attempts waitressing, being a hotel maid, house
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A lot of her shifts were very lengthy, such as nine hour shifts, which caused her to develop back pains. She even talks about how she was so relieved when at the church she attended that “one of the ten or so men on the stage orders us to stand and start singing, because the folding chair is torturing my overworked back” (67). AFL-CIO.com explains that low wage workers are hit a lot harder when injuries happen. “First, they lose pay because the vast majorities (more than 80%) of low wage workers don’t have any paid sick leave to take time off to recover. Second, not only does the paycheck shrink, but because of inadequate workers’ compensation laws, they must shoulder a bigger portion of their health care costs with those smaller paychecks” (AFL-CIO). This is very evident in Ehrenreich’s book. While waitressing at Jerry’s, Ehrenreich talks about Lucy, who is an older waitress, is suffering from a leg issue that cannot be diagnosed unless she has health insurance. When Ehrenreich is working for The Maids in Maine, a co-worker named …show more content…
On page 213 in her evaluation, Ehrenreich goes on to saying that the result with keeping wages low is that “many people earn far less than they need to live on”. She goes on explaining how research was done that the average “living wage” for a family of one adult and two children is thirty thousand a year, with a wage of fourteen dollars an hour. Ehrenreich continues with saying that “this is not the very minimum such a family could live on; the budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions. But it doesn’t include restaurant meals, video rentals, internet access, wine and liquor, cigarettes, and lottery ticket, or even very much meat” (213). She ends this point with explaining that, “The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour” (213). If low wage workers want to make more, it looks like they have to find their significant other before that would happen. It’s really disheartening that you have to eat a small bag of chips for lunch because the pay is so low. As financial issues take part with minimum wage, so does your mentality. Ehrenreich believes that if we are such a free democratic country, why do we have to “check our civil liberties out the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip
Wallechinsky demonstrates the many hardships that families and individuals go through. “Almost two-thirds say they live from paycheck to paycheck, and 47% say that no matter how hard they work, they cannot get
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.
As a sociologist we look at two different perspectives, there is structural functional perspective and the conflict perspective. Out of the two perspectives I agree with the conflict perspective more than I do the structural functional perspective, and I’m going to use this perspective throughout my paper. I choose this perspective because as much as we want society to be “fair” and it work smoothly, it just doesn’t. We have struggle for power and I believe there are the groups that are powerful and wealthy, and there are some groups that are the working class and struggle to make it. I also picked this perspective because in the book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich gave up the power and wealth to struggle with the working class to show us how truly difficult it sometimes can be.
For her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, a middle-aged female investigative journalist, assumed the undercover position of a newly divorced housewife returning to work after several years of unemployment. The premise for Ehrenreich to go undercover in this way was due to her belief that a single mother returning to work after years of being on welfare would have a difficult time providing for her family on a low or minimum wage. Her cover story was the closest she could get to that of a welfare mother since she had no children and was not on welfare. During the time she developed the idea for the book, “roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform” were going to have to survive on a $6 or $7 an hour wage; the wage of the inexperienced and uneducated. This paper will discuss Ehrenreich's approach to the research, her discoveries, and the economic assumptions we can make based on the information presented in her book.
After reading this novel, I agree with her argument. Barbara tried to stick as close to the real life scenario as possible, but periodically she would fall back into her safety net; the women into whose shoes she pretends to step cannot. This goes to show that even when she “cheated” every once in a while – laptop still in tow, a bank account at her disposal in times of emergency, the tendency to switch cities once one becomes too much to handle– she had a difficult time managing to survive based on her wages alone, and so it must be that much harder for the people who do not have a fall-back plan. We all tend to blame the unemployment rate for poverty, and politicians are always trying to assuage the public by thinking of new proposals to reduce it, but the real culprit seems to be wages.
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, worked at minimum wage paying jobs and reported the hardships that people had to go through on a day-to-day basis. A critic responded by saying, “This is simply the case of an academic who is forced to get a real job.” Ehrenriech’s reasoning for joining the working-class is to report why people who must be on welfare, continue to stay on welfare. Her reports show there are many hardships that go along with minimum wage jobs, in the areas of drug abuse, fatigue, the idea of invisibility, education and the American Dream. A big disadvantage that the lower class has compared to the wealthy is a lack of quality education.
1. In the book Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich tell the reader about her experiences of the low-wage employee that insist an observation through many jobs that she had gone through. Ehrenreich purposes of this book are to convince the reader about low-wage worker condition might not satisfy with the living and unfair lifestyle of the minimum salaries and analyzed her observation of the job experiences she has made throughout the book. Ehrenreich started her experience in Key West, Florida as a low-wage waitress employee at a restaurant called Hearthside. However, as she informs the low salaries at the restaurant along with an exhaustion, the aches, the pains that come being her on the feet all day long she decided to Maine to invent more experiences. Maine was the large population of white that speak English with low-wage works, she applied to many jobs like the warehouse, Goodwill but got a job as a maid and a nursing home employee. Ehrenreich’s experience helps the reader to realize that not a lot of American can
In this book, Ehrenreich tries to work in three different places to see what it is like to work as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich worked as a server in Florida, housekeeper in Miami, and sales person in Minnesota, and still she didn’t make enough money to live comfortable. As she says, “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 don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rent too high”(Ehrereich’s 199). She notices how hard it is for poor people to try to survive when they have to work with a minimum
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.
Linda Gorman. "Minimum Wages." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. 2008. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved April 24, 2014 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MinimumWages.html
There are frequent footnotes in the novel, many of them containing statistics about low-wage lifestyles. One claims that “In 1997, a living wage for a single parent supporting a single child in the Twin Cities metro area was $11.77 an hour” (Ehrenreich 127). Throughout the novel, Ehrenreich never gets paid this much in any of her jobs. In fact, she is amazed when a potential wage for a job is “not $8.50 but an incredible $10 an hour” (Ehrenreich 142). Even living on her own Ehrenreich could hardly pay for the basic necessities to live, it would have been impossible to do so with a child to care for as well. Another statistic stats that “Nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full- or part- time jobs” (Ehrenreich 26). This fact shows the flaws in the low-wage workforce. After all, minimum wage is meant to be designed to be able to support people with necessities such as shelter and food, yet 20% of those without homes cannot afford shelter with these wages. Through these statistic, ehrenreich is able to establish that it is nearly impossible to live a decent lifestyle with just low-wage job
Ehrenreich wants to find a ways to improve the quality of life of the working class. While working for Wal-mart, Ehrenreich discussed unionizing with her co-workers. The purpose of the union is so the workers can get a higher hourly wage. Her downfall in Minneapolis is when she can’t find affordable lodging. Ehrenreich stayed in hotels which become very expensive. The accommodations in these hotels proved to be almost inhabitable. The rooms were small, most had no air conditioning. The windows had no screens so they could not be left open to...
The gap in wealth between the rich and the poor continues to grow larger, as productivity increases but wages remain the same. There were changes in the tax structure that gave the wealthy tax breaks, such as only taxing for social security within the first $113,700 of income in a year. For CEOs this tax was paid off almost immediately. Free trade treaties broke barriers to trade and resulted in outsourcing and lower wages for workers. In “Job on the Line” by William Adler, a worker named Mollie James lost her job when the factory moved to Mexico. “The job in which Mollie James once took great pride, the job that both fostered and repaid her loyalty by enabling her to rise above humble beginnings and provide for her family – that job does not now pay Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on” (489). When Balbina started working she was only making 65 cents an hour. Another huge issue lies in the minimum wage. In 2007, the minimum wage was only 51% of the living wage in America. How can a person live 51% of a life? Especially when cuts were being made in anti-poverty and welfare programs that were intended to get people on their feet. Now, it seems that the system keeps people down, as they try to earn more but their benefits are taken away faster than they can earn. Even when workers tried to get together to help themselves they were thrown
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.