Thesis For Nickel And Dimed

Selling your life by the hour “What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life,”as Barbara Ehrenreich once said. In Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to work on a project, as well as investigate on the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States. Ehrenreich appeals to the readers with the true reality and struggles with money that society has taken a part of. Summing up, and showing them what life was really. As the low waged pay that people were a part of wasn’t livable, no matter how hard you work.
Once Ehrenreich begins her low wage job in Key West, she starts to developed
emotion, whether it be passionate about how it “Seems it’s marble walls have been “bleeding” onto brass fixtures” or just the fact that she remembered she still had tear ducts (90). In Florida she begins to learn the one job paying minimum wage isn’t enough as she goes beyond for another job meeting new people with stories. Barbara grows connections with the other employes, and hears their stories such as Gail. As Gail is a middle-aged, wiry, but yet a kind waitress at Hearthside that works with Ehrenreich, and shares that her boyfriend has died in prison to Ehrenreich, and letting the readers know that this is real. A relation that the readers might relate is to walk out or leave a situation or job without another word as I find it so strongly for someone to do that, because as that point Ehrenreich left no matter the consequences.
After Key West she headed to Maine because of its “whiteness”, and became a maid making $6.65 as well a working in a nursing home, and making $7 an hour working more, and harder for a pay that’s not enough to support yourself or even your family (51). As no matter how hard you worked the pay would never be enough you would live by check, and in the beginning of her project you see that she has a plan on what her money goes to showing a sense of what it was like. Going on into Ehrenreich journey she finds herself beginning to strike up a friendship with the cook, and connecting more with him from sharing a cigarette with him and thinking more about it. I believe that both the readers, and Ehrenreich has build a comfortability to share emotion, and for us as readers to understand and relate. We all had expectations of this book, and it ended up becoming more than we had thought, as I can say the same for Barbara Ehrenreich with beginning her project and in part of the outcome with more that she thought, but as for the way she lived she was still at the bottom. By documenting this emotional experience she is connecting with the readers, as the author, Ehrenreich, exposes how being in the lower class forces you to work ten times harder while still getting low
wages.