2001 NickelandDimedOnNotGettingByinA
- (Ehrenreich, 2001) ⇒ Barbara Ehrenreich. (2001). “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” Henry Holt and Company. ISBN:0805063889
Subject Headings: Meaningless Job, Low-Pay Service Job, Low-Pay Service Worker, Undercover Journalism, Personal Responsibility And Work Opportunity Act, Working Poor.
Notes
Cited By
2014
- (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed Retrieved:2014-3-11.
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States. In some ways it is similar to George Orwell's much earlier Down and Out in Paris and London, German investigative reporter Günter Wallraff's Ganz Unten (The Lowest of the Low), John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, or, even earlier, Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Jack London's The People of the Abyss.
The events related in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000. The book was first published in 2001 by Metropolitan Books. An earlier version appeared as an article in the January 1999 issue of Harper's magazine. Ehrenreich later wrote a companion book, Bait and Switch (published September 2005), which discusses her attempt to find a white-collar job.
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States. In some ways it is similar to George Orwell's much earlier Down and Out in Paris and London, German investigative reporter Günter Wallraff's Ganz Unten (The Lowest of the Low), John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, or, even earlier, Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Jack London's The People of the Abyss.
Quotes
Book Overview
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.
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 a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you want to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 NickelandDimedOnNotGettingByinA | Barbara Ehrenreich | Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America | 2001 |