Nickel

it is like to be a “low-income” worker. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, points out many flaws in our economics through her own experience by going undercover as a low-income employee and recalling her journey throughout her book. Although she had set limitations prior to embarking on her experiment like always having a car, never allow herself to become homeless, and never go hungry; she could not truly say or fully experience the true nature of what a low-income worker goes through. The fact of the matter is those who have a lower income will less likely to have the same options that middle-class americans have when it comes…

working class is a major resource to the lives we live as citizens in the United States. From day-to-day, the working class drifts in and out of our reality, but sociologists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Sudhir Venkatesh takeBarbara Ehrenreich it upon themselves, to try and understand the lives of those whom are apart of the labor force. In the case of Barbara Ehrenreich, her novel Nickel and Dimed is a compelling story that conveys her experiences while discovering what it is like to be a blue…

Nickel and Dimed recounts Barbara Ehrenreich’s objective attempt to live as an unskilled minimum wage worker in Florida. She rents a trailer for $500 a month and she works as a waitress at Hearthside as her first job. As she describes her first workday, Ehrenreich does an amazing job intertwining the sad, tough lives of the workers with the monotonous tasks of her job. She also highlights that she misses her competence most (Ehrenreich 1998). The managers of the establishment do not try to help…

Poverty effects thousands of Americans everyday, no matter the persons race, gender or age. In the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, writes about her "experiment" on low paying jobs and blue-collar Americans. Ehrenreich reported on life at minimum wage by settling into three areas of the country. At each place she worked a month, working as a restaurant server, Wal-Mart employee, and as a maid. Ehrenreich learned quickly how difficult it was to live off of a low wage paying job. The…

The nonfiction book, Nickel and Dimed, written by the undercover journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich goes out to investigate what it’s like to be a low-wage worker and how it’s like for them to get by in America. Ehrenreich does this by leaving her life of well paying job as journalists, forgets the fact that she has a Ph.D. in biology along with her normal life, and sets out to working six to seven dollars an hour in different places by doing different jobs. Along the way of her…

living off of minimum wage, Barbara Ehrenreich, embarks on a journey that is followed throughout Nickel and Dimed and shows the struggles that she encounters living the life of a person in poverty. Ehrenreich argues that different systems in America are setup to actively keep those people working for minimum wage in poverty and this system prevents them from moving up in economic status. Ehrenreich’s argument is strengthened by the many experiences she presents in the book showing the…

Does the United States truly support its citizens and allow them to prosper? In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Ehrenreich investigates this question by living as a low-wage worker for three months in cities around the United States. Her experiences teach her that as her jobs change, so does her place in society. Nickel and Dimed effectively argues that low-wage jobs severely restrict the workers’ mobilities and that American society does not properly…

Authors employ rhetoric in their writing by implementing a variety of writing techniques and styles, but they all use them with one goal in mind: To persuade the target audience. In the books Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard and Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, there are several instances in which both authors use specific styles of rhetoric to persuade the audience to side with certain issues endure throughout their books. The goal of each author is to get the target audience to…

This essay is about the Nickel and Dimed book that was written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Here is a quote found from the book, “Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.” Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001. The following is cited after this paragraph, “Barbara has written many other books that have awards. She is the author of twelve books, including the New York Times bestseller…

In the late 1990s, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover in three cities throughout the United States to perform various blue-collared jobs. Her goal was to see if a person could really survive on a minimum wage income. In her novel Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America she describes the experiences and obstacles she faced during the experiment. After reading her book in college, Adam Shepard disagreed with Ehrenreich’s views about the life of working class Americans, and he…