ND from Keegan Gallery

Nickel and Dimed Blog

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich dives into the world of low-wage jobs and poverty, trying to discover if impoverished people had any secrets to getting by on minimum wage jobs. She faces many struggles on her journey through three different cities. These struggles are both mental and physical and are noted in all three cities. In Minneapolis she faces a couple of mental struggles. She had to do monotonous work in the ladies’ department at Wal-Mart for sometimes eight to nine hours straight. She also had many horrible managers who were only concerned with keeping the business running and making money. In Minneapolis her manager called many pointless meetings and reinforced not to talk to other employees on the job. In Portland, Maine she found her work as a maid to be both physically demanding, requiring a lot of bending over and carrying things, and degrading to her. She also found out that many of her co-workers are just barely scraping by. She describes the situations of many of her co-workers such as Gail who lives in a room with a roommate for 250 dollars a week. Or the Czechoslovakian workers who live in an extremely crowded flat with not even enough beds for all of them. Ehrenreich soon found out that her co-workers had no secrets to getting by other than continually grind out every single day and just dealing with your situation.

Reader’s Guide Question #8

The goodwill and generosity displayed by Ehrenreich’s colleagues was extremely surprising to me. These people are struggling with payments every month/week/day. They’re working extremely long hours and oftentimes two jobs. To display generosity with that amount of stress put on you is extremely impressive. This generosity shocked me.