Nickel and Dimed

 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Eherenreich, 2001, 228 pages

I remember seeing this book on the shelf when it first hit bookstores in 2001. This book has been on my reading list that long! Never give up on your dreams. Unfortunately Ehrenreich doesn't hold much hope for other people's dreams-- especially the working poor. In a social experiment for the deft writer, Ehrenreich abandoned her cushy middle class lifestyle to understand one thing--exactly how do the poor get by in America? She set herself some ground rules, and started working some of the lowest wage jobs she could find. A waitress in Florida. A maid in Maine. And finally at a Wal-mart in Minnesota. What she discovered was what is probably obvious to any rational person reading this right now: no amount of low-wage, full-time labor can get a person above the poverty line. She crimped and saved on the wages she earned, bouncing from trailer park to cheaper motels, tracking every penny she earned and finding that even those times--twenty years ago!--rent prices took up nearly half of a person's pay. And this was just her--no kids, no other responsibilities. She also tracked her life and how she felt, how hard and physically draining and personally defeating this work could be. She rightly concluded that there is no such thing as unskilled labor. "What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're actually selling is your life." You wouldn't think a book that's nearly a quarter century old could still be so timely. But the success of this book paved the way for books like Maid, by Stephanie Land and The Working Poor by David Shipler. They don't call it a classic in social justice literature for nothing. Recommended for adults.