Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America
B. Ehrenreich
“Introduction:
Getting Ready”
Introduction -- Lunch
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The setting (ethos)
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Lewis Lapham (Harper’s)
Salmon & field greens
The Problem: Clinton’s welfare to work
reform
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Will 4 million women make in on minimum
wage?
“You.” – the muckraker
Introduction – Why Ehrenreich
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Ehrenreich’s family context
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Sister, husband, father
Middle class duty…
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Refuses “proletarianizing” 1970s
(empathizes with parents)
“Sitting at a desk all day was not only a
privilege but a duty” (italics mine).
Introduction – Why prove
what we know to be true?
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The odds (logos/ethos)
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National Coalition for the Homeless ($8.89)
Economic Policy Institute (97:1)
“I began to feel like the elderly man I once
knew who used a calculator to balance his
checkbook and then went back and
checked the results by redoing each sum
by hand” (3)
Introduction – The Scientist
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Ethos/Pathos
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“plunge into the everyday chaos of nature”
Questions – getting your hands dirty
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Hidden economies (30%of workforce makes
less that $8/hour)
Tricks
Unexpected psychological, financial and
emotional costs
Rules (pg.4)
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Don’t fall back on skills derived from
education or work experience
Take highest paying job and do best to
keep it
Find cheapest accommodations (“hazy .
. .”prone to deterioration time”
Bending & Breaking Rules (4)
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Bonjour and Guten Tag
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Fails to take highest paying job
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Break down and rant
Problems – LIES (5)
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“Stripped-down version”
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Divorced homemaker
Omit PhD – (over qualified)
True alma mater, 3 years
Friends as references
Boundaries (pg. 5-6)
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Always have a car
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No Homelessness
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End project
No hunger
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Paid for outside of wage experiment
Backup ATM
Comes home to “real “ life
Laptop – 2 hours each night
Privileges
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Always a visitor
Race
Native English speaker
Car
Childless
Health
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De facto ways she employs education, etc.
Additionally . . . (7-8)
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No performance of stereotypical poor
Usual clothes
Usual hair and makeup
Talked about real relationships/family
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Did modify vocabulary . . . No cursing
Passing to the “educated” (8)
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No one called her out as “above” her
newfound class
Low-wage workers are as
heterogeneous as any class
Routine
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Work (not for $) – work for writing
Names changed
“Coming out” – anticlimactic “does this
mean you’re not going to be back on
the evening shift next week?”
Self-Deception
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No pretending to wait tables
ALL jobs absorbed energy + intellect
Tried to make each situation work
Her faltering is faltering in BEST case
scenario with every advantage
Ehrenreich on writing …
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“[T]he low wage way of life…was close
enough… to make me treasure the
gloriously autonomous, if not always
well-paid, writing life” (2).
“I could not…fall back on any skills
derived from my education or usual
work–not that there were a lot of want
ads for essayists anyway” (4).
Ehrenreich on writing …
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“When…an exceptionally chatty
interviewer asked about hobbies, I said
‘writing’ and she seemed to find nothing
strange about this” (5).
“This is not a story of some deathdefying ‘undercover’ adventure
…Americans do it every day, and with a
lot less fanfare and dithering” (7).
Ehrenreich on writing …
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“[My second husband] proudly told his
uncle, who was a valet parker at the
time, that I was a writer. The uncle’s
response: ‘Who isn’t?’ Everyone literate
‘writes,’ and some of the low-wage
workers I have known or met
throughout this project write journals
and poems—even, in one case, a
lengthy science fiction novel” (9).