Sophia C. reviewed on 1/7/2010 + 289 more book reviews

While Nickel and Dimed chronicled an important experiment, Barbara Ehrenreich was not the ideal person to conduct it. Conceived as a hypothetical study of how low-wage workers--especially women recently removed from the welfare rolls in the late 1990s--manage to survive, Ehrenreich emerges from a fancy lunch with an editor with a missive to find out. She has several self-imposed conditions: always live alone and with a car. Her reasoning: a book about waiting for buses wouldn't be interesting. This reveals the attitude which pervades through her experiences serving in Florida (waitress), scrubbing in Maine (maid service), and selling in Minnesota (Wal-Mart associate)-- an inability to shed her highly educated and classist assumptions resulting in what the New York Times Book Review described as "a deep moral outrage" on behalf of the working poor, but rubbed off as an indignation that this is happening to her. Some of the remarks are downright racist and betray a belief that she rightfully belongs to the elite side of a persistent class divide. She never really gets into her role as a migrant entry-level wage earner, with her relative lack of social connections, issues from persistent poverty, or desperation from real hand-to-mouth survival. (She decided at first not to apply to jobs with urine drug screens.) There was also relatively little time devoted to investigating how the real working poor make do. Nonetheless, Nickel and Dimed does demonstrate to all but the invisible working poor (who already knew this) that employment alone -- in the form of entry-level minimum wage labor during a time of relative prosperity -- is not sufficient for a person to balance the books in a way that allows the minimum of middle-class comforts.

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