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Nickel and Dimed

The Big Idea

Having a job and working hard do not guarantee a better life even for low-level workers in America. What is needed are fair, living wages and a government sincere in promoting sustainable development by providing generous subsidies in public services like housing, healthcare, transportation and child care.

Reality Check

In the land of much-touted milk and honey, where opportunities are believed to be a-plenty and never scarce for the hardworking comes a bubble-burst, wake-up call, personal retelling by Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich. This book is an unflinching, courageous eyewitness account of America’s social and economic paradox.

Not content with secondary research, noted author and academic biologist, Dr. Ehrenreich, at a time of America’s unprecedented prosperity from 1998 to 2000, lived the down-under life of a working class minimum wage earner. She moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota to take on low-wage blue-collar work as waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide and Walmart salesperson while chronicling the economic and social struggles of America’s underprivileged.

This book stirs the reader from what seems a simple read of the author’s life experience and personal struggles to an intensely electrifying discovery and self-reflection of how America’s privileged and ruling class have paid lip service and rhetoric to welfare reforms; how profit-driven corporations enjoy an economic boon while its unskilled labor content themselves with scrap, poverty-level salaries instead of fair, living wages; and how a widely perceived, democratic government resort to substantial dole-outs of food stubs and big boxes while turning blind eyes and deaf ears to more sustainable human development programs that can compensate for inadequate wages and could have included more generous subsidized public services in health insurance, housing, child care and public transportation.

Dr. Ehrenreich reveals how despite, serious and countless adversities, the same workforce have found a hundred and one creative ways to survive through sheer grit, determination, family and peer group support, humor, modest dreams and aspirations and even resignation to fate.

In this book, Dr. Ehrenreich brings across the real-life struggles of America’s lowly workers to full public view when she debunks the age-old myth that simply having a job allows one to live a better life. The author makes a strong point when she states that sustainable development means having a job with fair, living wages while enjoying adequate government subsidies where it matters – in housing, healthcare, transportation and child care. . . . . . .