Rios 1
Amanda Rios
Professor Alisa Allkins
English 1020
6 February 2012
Rhetorical Analysis Essay for Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by In America, we read about a middle aged journalist undertaking a social experiment of the greatest magnitude.
The journalist is Ehrenreich herself and the experiment was to find out how a woman, recently removed from welfare, due to policy reform, would make it on a six or seven dollar an hour wage. The experiment itself started out as just a question in the middle of lunch with one of
Ehrenreich's editors, it soon turned into a job assignment. Before starting the experiment,
Ehrenreich laid out some ground rules for her to follow during the duration of the assignment.
First she could never use her college degree, or other work experience to land a job. Second, she had to take the highest paying job that was offered to her, and do whatever she could to hold it.
This means not quitting a job, no matter how grueling the work place environment was. Third, she had to find the cheapest living conditions she could find, with reasonable respect paid to personal safety, and basic privacy. Also before starting out Ehrenreich was sure to point out that while she did try to adhere to the rules as best she could, there was minor rule bending and occasionally rule breaking. The final problem Ehrenreich worked out before embarking on this journey, is how to market herself to the people she was about to work for and with. She decided to go with a cover story that was more of a succinct version of who she really is. While it is true

Rios 2 that she is a divorced wife, it is untrue that she has not been employed over the past few years.
This was required to keep from receiving preferential treatment, and to prevent her test environment from becoming tainted. Ehrenreich decided that since she already lived in Florida she might as well start there with her experiment, moving to nearby Key West, Florida. She shares in the opening that she is scared that a neighbor or outgoing business owner will discover who she really is, causing her to have to explain what she is doing. She soon realizes though that there is no need to worry, because she is barely noticed on her travels, let alone discovered  by an acquaintance.
The First priority she sets for herself is securing some type of living arrangement. She
Budgets about 500 dollars a month for rent, on the basis that she will be able to find work that will pay around seven dollars an hour. Because of where she is hunting for housing, her housing choices are rapidly reduced, due to the low price range she plans to live in. The first place she finds close to her price range in Key West is a small broken down trailer, lacking airconditioning, screens, and no fans. This Squalor still proves to be too expensive for her budget, and Ehrenreich is forced to move thirty miles up the road to a 500 dollar a month cottage like efficiency. The only real problem with this new home  is it is a forty-five minute drive down a highway to get back to Key West, meaning even more of her scarce money will be devoted to travel expenses. After finding her a place to live, Ehrenreich moves onto the next task of actually securing employment. Ehrenreich starts out with a list of jobs she will not, or cannot do, due to physical conditions or potential of being isolated, causing the part of the experiment, which is to observe and learn from fellow working poor, to be voided. Ehrenreich finds her first hit in the job market at a local Winn-Dixie. She successfully completes the job application and computer interview, and seems well on her way to her first job until she realizes she would be required to

Rios 3 take a drug test. Because she views this as a degrading way to have to gain a job that pays the bare minimum, she decides to continue her job search elsewhere. Three days end up passing before she ends up finding another job lead. In this time she finds out that want ad postings are not true indicators of a company’s hiring activity. It is actually a way of building up a stock of replacement workers to take over for the eventually departed. High turnover is something that goes hand in hand with low wage jobs, so companies are always looking for a workers replacement. Finally Ehrenreich is able to secure employment at a place she gave an assumed name, Hearthside. To help protect identies of companies and people she actually worked for and with, Ehrenreich decides to use fake names to achieve anonymity. Ehrenreich starts out at 2.43 an hour plus tips. One of the first things Ehrenreich notices is that the people around her are only working hard enough to get by. Because the managers will yell at anybody who is done with their work, and not doing something new, the workers seem to be happy with just working at a slow pace, doing just one job. Because the only reward for finishing early is being yelled at by a manager, that apparently spends his day doing nothing, there is no real bonus to go the extra mile. Due to this negative reinforcement, Ehrenreich notes that the restaurant is almost moving in counterproductive mode. With less being worked on, less is being accomplished, attributing to the overall sad appearance and low morale of the restaurant and its employees.
The next problem Ehrenreich encounters is the constant berating handed out by her supervisor. Ehrenreich observes that due to this constant barrage of insults and degradations, workers are forced to feel like they are subhuman. Weekly the managers announce a new set of rules that prohibit workers from talking amongst themselves, eating in the restaurant on or off the clock, and even who they are allowed to talk about. Besides the constant abuse dished out by her bosses, Ehrenreich observes a new problem amongst her coworkers. The ever looming living

Rios 4 situation that so many of them didn’t seem to have. One lady was living in a truck because she felt more comfortable there than in an apartment with a man that was starting to hit on her.
Another man, one that everybody felt was the richest amongst them, owned an eight food wide trailer on a piece of rental property. Because she observes it cost so much just to start living in an apartment, many workers are forced to spend in upwards of sixty dollars a week to live in a hotel room. Also because her coworkers cannot land steady housing, they are constantly experiencing turmoil in their lives, from lack of safety due to living in a car that anything can get into, to not being able to sleep because one of the other nine living partners haven’t vacated one of the few sleeping areas in a small apartment. Because Ehrenreich spends so much of her money on her housing, even after she has moved, about fifty percent of her cost is applied to living expenses; she is forced to find another job. She falls into a small bit of luck here, finding a job at the attached hotel, but soon runs into the same problems she has at her waitressing job. Before long she sees the class separation exhibited by the manager/employee relationship. At her new job she cleans bedrooms, and is being constantly pushed to perform more and faster, under threat of pay being based on quantity and not quality. Because the pay is not based of quantity she soon witnesses workers spending an entire day doing the bare minimum, since they get paid the same no matter how much they achieve. At the end of the chapter Ehrenreich is overloaded by complaining customers, and screaming managers that after all the pressure of working two jobs, to make very little money finally takes its toll, Ehrenreich gives up on her hotel jobs and walks out, deciding to see what different surroundings will hold.
Thru Much of Ehrenreich first chapter, she focuses on three real factors the working poor have to face. The big issue that ultimately ends up getting the better of her is the fact that affordable housing is not available to people who need it. In order to secure an apartment with no

Rios 5 security deposit, or first and last month’s rent, you must have immaculate credit. In a lot of cases it’s not that the working poor have horrible credit, it’s that they have never bought anything large enough to require credit, therefore they have zero credit, putting them at the mercy of security deposits, and huge down payments on simple 500 dollar a month apartments. Because of this, a lot of working poor are forced to live at hotels featuring weekly rates, and must also sometimes put up with sleeping in their car, and that’s for the lucky people that are able to afford a car. The second main focal point of Ehrenrich’s first chapter is the claim that managers are detached from their workers. Ehrenreich based a lot of this off of the claims that managers are tools for corporations that care more about money making than they do about the people. In some sense this is true, but the manager should not take all of the blame for this. Something that she should have done a better job of is get concrete evidence as to what a manager does in a day. It must be kept in mind that managers also have bosses, and those bosses yell at them a lot more than the manager usually yells at his or her employees.
Although Ehrenreich did get bad luck of the draw with having to work for a manager like Stu, all managers are not corrupt, self-satisfying pigs. It can be said that a lot of times corporations are self-satisfying identities, only interested in making a buck, but a lot of times managers come from the same place the worker did. Ehrenreich did propose this idea for a moment in her writing, but it seemed as if she wanted to find more wrong in the manager, instead of analyze what that person has to do on a day to day basis. The third factor that Ehrenreich really hammered at was the role race plays into being poor. There is no problem with making that observation, because there are books upon books to back that claim up, but Ehrenreich seemed to be on a mission to make sure this was true. It seemed at times she forced the race issue to be part of a person’s problem, or made sure to point out how her fellow yuppie white people

Rios 6 were acting. Instead of letting the oil separate itself from the water, she forced us to take note of the oil compared to the water. In that I mean instead of letting race be something that presents itself in her writing, Ehrenreich went out of her way to make sure it was a Mexican cook, or a
Czech worker, or an African-American maid, so the reader never has a chance to make up their own mind about the effect of race in the real world of poverty. A preconceived notion that
Ehrenreich was stripped of in a very quick manor, was that her intelligence would cause her to rise above all else, as if she was wearing an invisible sticker that only managers could see. Her arrogance was soon replaced by understanding that in the world of the poor, it is not what or who you know; it’s how often you will show up, and how fast you can get work done. Dependability is the one problem facing all companies, they can teach a person 2+2 but they cannot teach them to get out of bed in the morning.
Throughout chapter one, it was evident that Ehrenreich did as good of a job as can be expected in such an extreme environment to stay neutral and just report what she saw, mixed with what she felt. Not too often did her biases, or preconceived notions come into play, only with the race subject did Ehrenreich try to really guide the reader into thinking a certain way.
The best part of her writing is she did not really go into mindless rants. She seemed to adequately report things on an even keel and still manage to let the reader know the emotion she was feeling. I think this was done by using separate sentences and paragraphs to describe the situation, then describe her emotion to the situation. This made it much easier and palatable to ingest because the facts were presented whole heartedly and not tarnished by hard emotion.
While reading this chapter I approached it with the same mindset that Ehrenreich seemed to approach her writing. A neutral, objective mind opens to all that is presented. Because of this,

Rios 7 her book was very fascinating to me. I think it would be impossible for anybody that has lived any life but an impoverished life to do this experiment with one hundred percent effectiveness. I think this because we will always carry our preconceived notions with us into everything we do in life. Ehrenreich does a great job of taking the proverbial blinders off and presenting the plight of the poor in a new light. Breaking down the main problems facing a poor person was a very effective way of showing the severity of a life in poverty. It also helped point out that without some kind of outside help there is no way that these people will ever make it on their own.