Nickel and Dimed (20th Anniversary Edition): On (Not) Getting by in America

by Ehrenreich, Barbara
3.4 out of 5 Customer Rating
ISBN: 9781250808318
Availability:
$8.49
Used - Trade Paperback - 9781250808318

Available Offers

Overview

In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, 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 intend 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.

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
  • ISBN: 9781250808318
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.20 x 0.80
  • Number Of Pages: 256
  • Publication Year: 2021

Customer Reviews