Nickel and Dimed

In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich tells a powerful and gritty story of daily survival. Her tale transcends the gap that exists between rich and poor and relays a powerful accounting of the dark corners that lie somewhere beyond the popular portrayal of American prosperity. Throughout this book the reader will be intimately introduced to the world of the “working poor”, a place unfamiliar to the vast majority of affluent and middle-class Americans. What makes this world particularly real is the fact that we have all come across the hard-working hotel maid, store associate, or restaurant waitress but we hardly ever think of what their actual lives are like? We regularly dismiss these people as nearly invisible and they drop into the background of our normal routines. But they are real people with quite real and serious problems and, even by conservative estimates, there are millions of them struggling to persist each and every day.

What makes this book so riveting is that Ehrenreich doesn’t document the daily life of the working poor by analyzing government statistics or observing people from some distant location. Rather, Ehrenreich becomes a member of the working poor and her goal is quite simple, she wants to find out whether she could match her income to her expenses. Nickel and Dimed is a story that details the results of Ehrenreich’s “hands–on experiment” but it raises concerns that go far beyond her original goal.

The book opens with Ehrenreich at a lunch meeting with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine. A topic being discussed at lunch was poverty in America. Both Ehrenreich and Lapham wondered how the “roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor mar...

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...ost jaded, conservative reader should be able to conduct some beneficial self-reflection regarding the state of the working poor. America’s politicians and policy makers, many of whom seem to be drastically out of touch with the day-to-day reality faced by a percentage of Americans, should also read the book.

Perhaps the lasting contribution of Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is the realization that poverty is not a consequence of unemployment and simply having a job is not a ticket out of destitution. As Ehrenreich herself noted, the majority of the people she lived with and around were not drug dealers and prostitutes, they were just working people who didn’t have the capital needed to rent a normal apartment. Ehrenreich’s book has the potential to open the eyes of many Americans and perhaps, if more people are aware, some positive change may be the outcome.