Nickel and Dimed
On (Not) Getting By in America

I'm going to step on some toes here and I apologize if I do. I AM one of the working poor that she talks about here and I DO believe in pulling myself up and making a better life for myself. But what I want to know is this. Unless you have been where I am, how can you comment? How can you also call......more

Ehrenreich, a woman who has a Ph.D., goes "undercover" working low-paying jobs to see if one can earn a living with such work in America. One can't. She tries to make ends meet on the following jobs: waitressing, hotel housekeeping, Maid Service, nursing-home attendant, and Wal-Mart employee, often wo......more

Here's a down and dirty assessment of Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich: First the positive: - Interesting premise: writer decides to try to live on the wages that unskilled workers (waitresses, home/hotel cleaners, department store [Walmart, for instance] clerks) earn to see if she can do it an......more

Welfare reform in the mid-1990s was meant to get people off the welfare rolls and into the workforce. As the U.S. had a strong economy at the time, and jobs were plentiful, this was supposed to work out pretty well all around. The problem was that most 'unskilled jobs' paid minimum wage (which was s......more

A classic now in the field, and I've long used an excerpt from this in my Intro. Sociology reader for our week on Poverty in the U.S. Still, I remind students that this is the only author we read that doesn't have the "street cred" of a "real" sociologist, some "union card" (Ph.D., mostly) as a beha......more