As Ehrenreich worked restaurant, retail, and house cleaning jobs across the United States she found coworkers sleeping in cars, depending on relatives, forgoing medical care, and not getting enough to eat, and she herself could barely subsist. It’s true that a central finding of Nickel and Dimed was that it’s really difficult to survive on the minimum wage. The Times obit says Ehrenreich “found it nearly impossible to subsist on an average of $7 an hour” and says she concluded that “every job takes skill and intelligence… and should be paid accordingly.” The Guardian says the book “helped spread awareness of an economy in which it was necessary to work two or three jobs to survive, and acted as a catalyst of the minimum wage movement.” The New York Times review of the book, which deemed Ehrenreich “our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism,” said the takeaway of the book was that for “a worker holding two jobs, wages are too low, housing costs too high for minimally decent survival.” Indeed, in obituaries for Ehrenreich, the point of the book is summarized as: working class jobs do not pay enough to cover a minimally decent standard of living. Barbara Ehrenreich will probably always be best known for Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a bestseller that recounted her time spent working low-wage jobs across America.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |