Nickled and Dimed: A Book Review

With millions of people leaving welfare every year, is it possible for American citizens to provide for themselves on solely the income earned from a low-wage job? In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich comes to the realization that although the jobs low-income workers take over require exhausting physical and mental efforts, their incomes still do not provide them with enough money to survive. She arrives at this assertion after placing herself in the situation millions of Americans live everyday. She works low-wage jobs earning six to eight dollars an hour, while trying to find acceptable shelter and survive in her new setting.
As Ehrenreich begins her field research, her first task is to find affordable housing. Throughout her travels in the United States, however, she finds that housing offered to the low-income is abysmal, if not nonexistent. In Florida, the cheapest housing is forty-five minutes away from any job openings, forcing her to move into a dilapidated trailer park. Elsewhere her findings faired much worse, as she documented her stay in a cockroach-infested motel room in Minnesota with a door that had no lock.

Getting a job is Ehrenreich's next step in her sociological experiment. In Florida, she worked as a waitress at a local restaurant. She experiences the demeaning relationship between the manager and his employees, the mental strain required to memorize orders and the physical burden of constantly being on the move. Furthermore, Ehrenreich realizes that to afford her decrepit housing, she still needs another job. Working two jobs increases the author's stress even more, which was best shown in Maine where she worked as a housekeeper at two separate businesses. In her job with one cleaning service, she is put through difficult physical labor for hours on end without breaks to the point that several of her colleagues have suffered injuries. Ehrenreich becomes gradually more disenfranchised with how employers treat their workers that she does not make it through the month she planned to work at Wal-Mart in Minnesota.

While Ehrenreich's experience as a low-wage worker proved to readers that it is a difficult task to work a demanding job and provide for oneself, the book, however, revolves more around her personal complaints and anecdotes rather than the economy these low-income citizens face. The majority of the book did not portray the experience of the working poor, but showed the experience of her trying to find a cheap apartment on short notice, which is a difficult task for any economic class. It showed the experience of Ehrenreich trying to cleanse her body of marijuana before a Wal-Mart ordered drug test when anyone searching for a job should know better than to smoke weed prior to the application process. There were, in fact, at least ten pages dedicated to showing her experience with housesitting a friend's parrot, while she stayed at their house. These self-centered moments of Ehrenreich made the book more appealing to a mainstream audience, but took away from the sociological credibility of her experiment.

Despite Ehrenreich's qualitative experiment, her book is far from scientific. Her writings often appeared to be more of a political soapbox rather than an insightful evaluation of her sociological research. She spends a majority of the chapter about her experience with Wal-Mart stating the need for unions to represent the millions of employees to combat the bureaucratic organization. She condemns the capitalistic nature of a cleaning company owner. Conversely, however, Ehrenreich uses elitist language throughout her book. She refers to her neighbors as trailer trash and other derogatory terms. She complains that the Latinos hog all the crap jobs in California.

Nickel and Dimed is of the most use during its footnotes. These statistics provided insightful factual data to accompany Ehrenreich's writing. In addition, the author uses the experiences of several of her coworkers to successfully illustrate her point. While she was recently placed into this world of low-wages and long hours, her colleagues have put up with it for years, which made them highly reliable primary sources in her research.

The main sociological concept in the book is economic inequality. Macioni in his famed textbook, Social Problems, states that in the past fifty years despite economical gains for all income brackets, the rich have made substantial progress, while the average income for poor has only rose by seven percent. These facts, accompanied with Ehrenreich's chronicles, show that the income inequality in the United States is becoming only worse. His textbook also states that "19 percent of the heads of poor families worked full time... yet remained below the poverty line." Ehrenreich showed this element throughout her book as she worked over fifty hours a week with two jobs to make enough money to barely afford housing and food.

The book also showed some elements of gender inequality. Statistics show that a greater number of women rather than men are in poverty. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich recounted that very few of the managerial positions were headed by females. She also recalled the derogatory names she was called as a waitress, ranging from "girl" to "sweets." The owner of the cleaning service she worked for stated that he would never raise the wages because he is kind enough to provide "mother hours," which allow the maids to be home with their children after school.

While Nickel and Dimed missed much of its sociological focus, Ehrenreich's insight into the low-income world of workers was essential for the American public to realize. Income inequality is a major problem in the United States and she suggests that we all hold stake in it.