Book Review: Nickle and Dimed

Nickle and Dimed

The full title of this book by Barbara Ehrenreich is Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and the premise is similar to another book by her that I recently read, Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich is an educated, White, accomplished writer who goes undercover as a minimum wage earning laborer at various jobs in order to research how the poor in America try to get by as waitresses, housekeepers, and Wal-Mart drones.

As with Bait and Switch (which actually came after this book), the best parts of the book are where Ehrenreich turns her wit on the absurdities and injustices of the world she enters, especially with regards to what she had to go through to get the job, like drug testing, farcical orientation programs, and brief but bizarre interviews. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of the Wal-Mart onboarding process, and how the company cleverly sort of just slips people from the role of “applicant” to the role of “new hire” like a magician performing a slight of hand trick, so that they don’t have much chance to negotiate the terms of their employment before getting caught up it the momentum of the situation. It’s a nice glimpse into a world that many of us have never seen, or have only seen from the point of view as a relatively well off teenager looking for a part-time job.

Ehrenreich rounds out the social experiment by spending a fair amount of time discussing how she tried to make ends meet in the realm of housing, transportation, food, and basic health care. Her self-imposed rules allowed her to only use the money she earned from her menial jobs, which quickly became a rather masochistic exercise –one that millions of Americans have to endure constantly. When you earn so little, dinner can be whatever unhealthy fare you can scrounge and home becomes whatever hovel you can find within your means –no matter how unsafe or far from work. Or worse, you end up in a vicious cycle living beyond your means when you have to rent a ramshackle hotel room because you can’t find any housing or you can’t afford the required deposit. And recreation time is all but crowded out by the demands of working two full-time jobs and not having enough money to afford anything but sitting on a park bench anyway.

There were just a few things about the book that irked me. The author wears her politics on her sleeve throughout the book instead of being totally objective (her rant against drug testing after having partaken of a certain illicit substance struck me as lame). Things also seem a little contrived after she turns down a job paying around $10 an hour at a home repair superstore just so she can take a job for less money working at a more controversial target, Wal-Mart. One has to wonder if she did it just so she could include the “how terrible it is to work at Wal-Mart” hook in the book.

So sure it’s liberal White guilt galore, but it’s still an interesting, thought-provoking, and often entertaining read on balance. Though you may never look at your housemaid or waitress the same way again.

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