Nickel And Dimed Analysis

Analysis of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
In “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”, Barbara Ehrenreich, a well-off white woman with a Ph.D. in Biology questions how low-income workers, especially females, make a living. Due to the welfare reform, 4 million women were about to have to enter into the workforce, usually for less than minimum wage. Ehrenreich decides to make an experiment out of her ideas. She decided she would travel to three different cities: Key West, FL., Portland, ME., and Twin Cities, MN. (all picked based off of the low salary there), and attempt to live as a regular low-income woman. She wants to find out how they make their income work and what they do to get by. Ehrenreich makes a set of
This surprises her because she believes if the supply of labor is low to demand, wages should be higher. Ehrenreich is hired at the company “Merry Maids,” a house-cleaning service, for $6.65 an hour. She also gets a weekend job at a nursing home for $7 an hour. Ehrenreich finds that serving the nursing-home patients their meals is easy compared with waitressing in Key West, but cleaning up after them involved a lot of physically demanding labor. During her first day at the maid service, Ehrenreich is trained by watching videos on how they clean. She overheard another employee and learned the maid service charges its customers $25 an hour, but pays it’s employees below minimum wage. Soon after starting at Merry Maids, Ehrenreich gets a terrible rash all over her body. Her boss’ motto is “working through it” when it comes to illness, so she was unsure of how to bring the issue up. He tells her that she must be allergic to the latex gloves and that she will be fine to work. Ehrenreich has never hired a cleaning service because she finds the idea repugnant. She does not want to have the type of relationship with another human being. She continues to gather more of what it’s like to be poor in America. She notices that people in public (grocery stores, convenience stores) give her mean looks when she is dirty after work. After realzing that her rent was going to
She comes from a nice life with money and materialistic things, many people in poverty do not know what that is even like, and therefore do not have their lifestyle to compare it to. I think she tried her best, but sort of gave up quickly. Of course people are not going to like their job, but it is an income. They cannot quit after two weeks because it was too hard for them. I think her experiment would’ve been better if she had more than one person attempting to live on a low-income salary. We also have to take into account that she had those rules; she always had a car and put her safety before other things. I think that was a smart idea, but not everyone in poverty lives that way. Walking to work could save hundreds of dollars a year and deciding to live in a not-so-safe neighborhood with cheaper rent could be the difference in eating dinner that week or not. Overall I enjoyed her experiment and her findings on