NICKEL AND DIMED

Nickel and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed

To research the book, Ehrenreich conducted an experiment that is easy to describe: She moved to a new town and found a place to live which is the cheapest offered and there is a acceptable level of safety and privacy, paying the first month's rent from her own savings. She accepted the highest-paying job she could find without drawing on her college degrees or her writing skills and lived off what she earned (Kerr, 2001). At the end of the month, she hoped to have enough money saved to pay a second month's rent. Ehrenreich lived a month each in three cities over a time span reaching from 1998 to 2000, working low-end jobs during the day and maintaining a journal on her laptop computer when she could summon the energy at night.

Over the past 20 years, the increasing use of the term working poor has yielded a fusion between these two imagined classes (laborers and the poor). This hybrid concept thus began to question the belief that labor alone could secure independent self-sufficiency in a growing economy, while also signaling a crisis of labor faced by the working class of developed nations (Lionel, 1996).

The modern use of the catchphrase, working poor, conveys several sociopolitical functions in a postindustrial world: first, it firmly evokes the contradiction inherent within the idea that people who work can also experience poverty, despite their attempts to acquire self-sufficiency through employment; second, it dethrones the biased myths that the poor are not laboring citizens and the poor lack success because they lack a work ethic; and third, it evokes a response among the populous, its government, and its policymakers to ensure justice for the working poor, that is, laborers struggling are given the tools needed to afford a decent livelihood (Ehrenreich, 1993).

Despite its controversial political currency, as a community in need, the working poor carry on as a largely ignored, marginalized, and low-priority topic of national and worldwide debates on poverty. With Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich puts a needed spotlight on one overlooked portion of the lower class, drawing attention to a group of people with whom her readers interact every day, but who are usually ignored. Ehrenreich's aim is not to shed light on her own heroic passage through poverty (she points out that “millions of Americans” do for years what she did for only a month at a time, “and with a lot less fanfare and dithering, but to illuminate the day-to-day challenges of making ends meet on a low-wage income” (Ehrenreich, 1980, p.35)Direct Quote. The focus is on numbers—the dollars and cents, the minutes and hours—instead of on personalities.

In her introduction, Ehrenreich shows that she has a clear sense of what her experiment can and can not establish convincingly. She is aware of the ways in which she is not typical, aware of the advantages she brings to her new life: education, good health and good health habits, white skin, English fluency, and the knowledge ...