Nickel and Dimed

In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich experiments with working low wage jobs in three different cities in America to see if she can survive financially. Like many people in America, she sees if these wages will cover necessary things such as housing, food, transportation, and other every day necessities.
The first of the three cities that Ehrenreich tries to survive is Key West, Florida. Right away she finds it difficult to find cheap housing close to where she finds a waitress job. She picks up another job and then moves from an apartment to a trailer park because she could not make enough each month to pay for rent and have enough money for food and gas. She finds out that many low wage workers can not afford to pay for health care and so if they become injured or ill, they have to pay through the roof or may loose their job while trying to recover.
From Florida, Ehrenreich moves to Portland, Maine where she works at a maid service on the weekdays and in the kitchen at a nursing home on the weekends. She soon learns that people who do "dirty" jobs for example maids, janitors, garbage men, etc. are looked at differently by people. They are working the jobs that no one else wants to do and yet they are ignored by society and treated badly when they try to interact with society.
After Maine, Ehrenreich moves to Minneapolis, Minnesota where she takes a job at Walmart. She stays in motels because there is not cheap apartments with leases that are less than a year long. When in Minnesota, she visits a friend of a friend and realizes that she is very lucky that she is able to walk out and go back to how she was living before when other people can't. They don't have a choice everyday on whether they are going to keep working and living in the conditions that they are in or not. While staying in the motels, she realizes that women in the low wage work force are very vulnerable and much more susceptible to being taken advantage of.
Over all, Ehrenreich concludes that wages in America are too low, while rent is too high. If she could have found cheaper places, she may have been able to stay in the places and survived rather than having to quit the jobs and move to different places.

10. I think that a living wage should be calculated by the amount of experience on the job and how hard the job is or how much you get done in a day. I don't think that it is fair if someone has been doing a job for 30 years and someone comes in and does the same job and after one year gets the same amount of pay. I also think that living costs should be calculated into the minimum wage. If housing across America is going up then the minimum wage has to go up or thousands more people are going to become homeless.