#31 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6-$7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
This was an interesting experiment. I thought she did a decent job of illustrating (within narrow parameters) the difficulties of surviving on $6-7 an hour wages. A lot of the author's bias came through with many insulting comments such: the rich people whose houses she cleaned 'really didn't read all those books"; the 'overweight caucasian population that frequented Walmart', her outrage of having to take a drug test for employment, her dismissive comments about people who hire cleaners (and, can you imagine, their houses were, gasp, dirty?).. And then she was hurt/surprised when people didn't react to her 'secret' that she was actually a journalist? These types of studies are much more effective when the author follows the lives of the people who live under these circumstances over a longer period of time.
