...Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America is a novel that Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about her social experiment. She went undercover as a low-wage worker trying to live with the money she earns from work. There were rules that she have set for herself, however, she broke them throughout the experiment. If she had stuck to her rules throughout the experiment, then it could have gone a lot better and it would be more interesting. She would be able to fully experience how living in poverty would be like. As Ehrenreich starts her experiment, the first rule she had set was that “[she] could not, in [her] search for jobs, fall back on any skills derived from [her] education or usual work” (Ehrenreich, 9). Ehrenreich broke this rule when she...
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...Written in 1984 by Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not Getting) Getting by in America is an exposé portraying how it is to live with a minimum wage job in America. This piece is a form of a report on an experiment, which she acted upon. Though it may seem like a mocking action to the financially impaired, it was a genuine effort to bring attention to the issue. In brief, she set out to live first-hand what it was like to live with minimum paying jobs in order to bring awareness to the issue of having a poor class in the economical culture. She writes about the almost deplorable conditions in three different cities, Key West, Maine, and Twin Cities. Throughout the series of events, she ends up working at hotels, restaurants, and Wal-Mart....
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...History 1700 Nickel and Dimed Paper 13 November 2007 Nickel and Dimed Experience Have you ever been so poor that you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from? I have been this poor before and this book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America”, really shows the heart ache it takes sometimes to just get by. I was amazed that the author, Barbara Ehrenreich, was willing to put herself through this pain to write this book and show people how hard it can be for lower waged workers. This book shows how getting by in America for some is difficult and how important an education really is. Having experienced some of the same pains that the author went through in my early adulthood, I could feel what the author was going through in writing this book. I like the way that she used pathos to persuade her audience in “feeling” what she was going through. The way the book flowed from one location to another and low paying jobs to a bit higher paying low waged jobs was very well organized. The references and research she uses to convey her points are well placed and factual. She is seen as a credible source of information due to the fact that she uses personal experience and statistics from credible sources. When I first moved away from home, I too had a job that barely made ends meet. It was a hard learning experience. The main problem with having a low income job was the stress. I was always worried about how I was going to pay my rent, eat...
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...Nowadays, there is an idea of poverty of ambition, people want to drive fancy cars and live a luxurious lifestyle but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize his or her full potential. Throughout Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America, she sets herself up for failure. Most people, no matter what the job of the moment, see it as a way to get ahead later. By starting the experiment with the intention to fail, hence the name “on not getting by in America”, Ehrenreich sets herself up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. This self-fulfilling prophecy/bias is present throughout her whole experience causing her experiment to become tainted with flaws. Ehrenreich did not try...
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...Minimum wage in America remains a common topic of discussion throughout the country, mainly because its gradual increase over the years sparks the argument: should pay for blue-collar jobs reach an amount resembling that of a normal career’s? Nickel and Dimed actively investigates that question by seeing if minimum wage in today’s modern world can suitably satisfy all of an individual’s living needs. Ehrenreich targets the working-class and owning-class citizens alike as her book’s audience, but it is certainly the owning-class people who claim that a minimum wage is an acceptable living wage that she aims to persuade otherwise. She occasionally cheats in order to maintain a basic semblance of security throughout her experiences; and had she be willing to explore those kinds of usual difficulties that the working-class unwillingly have to face, it would have supported her case by exposing the absolute worst of the worst of a life hanging onto existence by meager pay. Despite the particular...
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...Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Carmen Arvelo Northwestern State University SOWK 3350 Barbara Pierce PHD, LMSW, ACSW March 04, 2013 Abstract The author Barbara Ehrenreich sets out on her quest to decide for herself if the working women in America are able to survive on low paying jobs. Accomplishing this will mean living on only what she makes to pay the rent, groceries and gas. The author makes up her mind to seek employment in three different cities around America, Key West, Florida, Maine and Minnesota. Her reasons for choosing each these cities varies and she realizes very quickly that making ends meet in any of these cities will not be easy to do if not impossible on a low salary. The author meets numerous people, including Holly a maid in Maine that she befriends. Ehrenreich’s view of low wage workers helps her understand their situation around the country as she comes to the realization that one cannot afford nutritious food, a protected living enviroment and provide for health insurance all on low earnings. My paper will discuss the repercussions of low wages on the working poor as well as how they are viewed by society. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America The book Nickel and Dimed begins with the author, Barbara Ehrenreich (2011), contemplating how she will take on the task of living with limited money and assets as she has a Ph.D. in Biology, but her focus became social change. Ehrenreich must ground rules for her research...
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...The first reading we were given for this week was Nickel-And-Dimed on (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. This reading narrates the writer’s undercover experiment to find out how non-skilled, low waged workers make ends meet. The goal of the experiment was to see whether or not the author had enough money solely from the low paying job to provide for herself and also pay for the next month’s rent. Her first task was to find a place to live while she was staying in Key West Florida. She assumed that she would be paid roughly $7 an hour and could afford to spend $500 on rent. She eventually finds a trailer to live in for the two weeks that she would be staying in the city. After finding somewhere to live, she then found a job as...
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...Nickel and Dimed is a novel written about the life of Barbara Ehrenreich, as an upper class writer, who went undercover to discover the pain and frustration of how so many Americans are not getting by in America. She leaves all her money and clothes and goes city to city trying to find a job and make a living with her laptop in tow. As she finds new jobs, she also finds new companions and learns that their struggle to escape the ominous thought of falling into poverty is large and never ending. Nickel and Dimed proved that It is impossible for minimum wage to provide an ordinary life for those working under a blue collar forcing them to grasp and fight for their survival. In the first part of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich decided to go to...
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...LBS 3001: Introduction to Labor Studies (Section RXLA-55242) Summer A 2013 Instructor: Professor Alí R. Bustamante Schedule: Mondays and Wednesdays / 11:00am – 1:40pm Credits: 3 Location: PC 439 Office Hours: LC 315, one hour before class or by appointment. E-mail: albustam@fiu.edu Department Phone: (305) 348-1519 Course Description: This course will introduce you to the challenges and struggles of working people in the United States. In our readings and classroom discussions, we will pay close attention to the conditions faced by low-wage workers in industrial, agricultural, and service jobs, as well as the impact of globalization on labor markets in the U.S. and abroad. We will also look at some of the hidden dimensions of working-class life through the lens of slavery, immigration, and global economic competition. By the end of the course, you will understand and be able to analyze: 1. What class is and how it operates in American society; 2. What it is like to work at a various low-wage jobs while trying to sustain yourself; 3. The impact of race, ethnicity, and gender on conditions in the American workplace; 4. How management exerts control over industrial, agricultural, and service workers; 5. The impact of large retailers and other consumer-oriented industries in determining conditions in the modern American workplace; 6. The role of immigration and the immigrant experience in the American workplace; 7. The evolution of and relationship...
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...Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, is a passionate writer. According to her personal website, she was born in Butte, Montana in 1941 to a family that were blue-collar workers. Her father was a miner and through tough work he went to get his degree from Butte School of Mines. From then on, Ehrenreich and her family traveled to various locations in her childhood. When she was in her mid-teens her family reached a middle class status and she was able to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon. That’s where she studied chemistry, but then decided to study physics instead. Ehrenreich made it to grad school at Rockefeller University. There were a couple of times when she switched from various majors, but in the end, she ended up in molecular biology and she received her Ph. D. In 1970, with the birth of her first child, she suffered a political as well as a personal transformation. In the sense when she questioned the prenatal care that she received from the hospital clinic that she was in. Ehrenreich, then became herself involved with the “Women’s health movement”, where woman can have...
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...In “Introduction: Getting Ready” from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, she describes the experiment she performed in order to expose the conditions of living on minimum wage as well as accredit herself with the prerequisites for reporting on the subject. The introduction of Ehrenreich’s novel, Nickel and Dimed, was written with the intent to inform the audience of some background information that supports the rest of the book. One of the important ways she does this is by providing statistics and facts about the lives of those living on minimum wage. She does this mostly in the beginning of the intro: “were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?”(1). In this sentence not only does she mention the sheer amount of people who are forced to live on minimum wage, but she also states the low amount that these women are being paid. By telling the audience this information she can convince the reader that the low class workers of America are not being paid enough. By using data to argue this point she is using the rhetorical device logos in her introduction....
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...lowest wage that employers may legally pay their employees for time and effort spent in producing goods and services. It is also the lowest value at which a person can sell their labor power. In the United States, the minimum wage is regulated by the government of each state; therefore, it cannot be less than the value stipulated by the federal government. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the current minimum wage provided by the federal government is $7.25. Although some states have established their own minimum wages, often higher than the stated by the federal government. Over the years, people seek to improve their skills in order to have a better understanding; therefore, it will increase their chances of getting a job with a better salary. Those who stop in time and settle with the knowledge they have rarely develop professionally. For the world to run perfectly, it is necessary for people to perform work and services that have low wage. If all employees receive the same salary, from the company director until the person in charge of cleaning, no one would try to develop intellectually, because it would not be valued....
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...After reading about Barbara Ehrenreigh’s plight in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, living as a low-wage worker is almost impossible, especially if issues are present that will impact work. For the amount of money earned, a bare bones lifestyle was extremely difficult to meet. Her standard of living, or “the level of wealth available to acquire material goods and comforts to maintain a particular socioeconomic style” (Griffiths et al., 2015, p. 202), decreased notably from her former occupation, especially when she was working with the maids, suffering rashes and pains. In addition, her income, defined as “the money a person earns from work or investments” (Griffiths et al., 2015, p. 201) left her with a strict budget that left her at the brink of disaster. Throughout all of her jobs, she encountered troubles with management, as they often mistreated their employees, especially in Jerry’s through a manager called B.J. and also in The Maids by a manager named Ted. When she completed her investigation, she realized that living costs were becoming too high relative to wages. Also, she found that the economic boom of the 1990s had little effect on the wages of low-wage...
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...In the reading Nickel and Dimed : (not) Getting by in America, researcher Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of working and living as a part of the poor in American society. She began her research in 1998, in Key West and aimed to work and survive on the wages most unskilled workers receive in America, in order to adapt to and understand their situations. In the second reading Who Rules America, by G. William Domhoff, the author talks about power and class in the United States and how these social structures affect American society. Further on, he moves on to describe the role of democracy and the government and its influence on social stratification. He concludes that power plays a huge role in dominating society in terms of advantages,...
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