Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“I am, of course, very different from the people who normally fill America’s least attractive jobs, and in ways that both helped and limited me. Most obviously, I was only visiting a world that others inhabit full-time, often for most of their lives. With all the real-life assets I’ve built up in middle age—bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home—waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to ‘experience poverty’ or find out how it ‘really feels’ to be a long-term low-wage worker.”

Ehrenreich clearly defines her objectives in the introduction, which are to see if she can survive the material realities of sheltering and feeding herself on a low-wage income. She humbly admits that there are limits to this experiment, specifically regarding the emotional and psychological toll of a lifetime spent living hand-to-mouth. Being transparent and showing self-awareness about her real-life financial situation, lends more credibility to her experiment and clearly sets the bounds of her experiment and her purpose.

“I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way–more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me ‘special’ was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright.”

To combat pervasive myths that low-wage workers are less capable, Ehrenreich notes that even though she was more highly educated than her coworkers, there was no difference in how she was perceived. This lends a tone of humility to the text and shows that Ehrenreich sees the full humanity of her coworkers; she wants readers to understand that low-wage workers are not worth less or lack value as people.

“...I was raised by the absurd Booker T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you’re going to do something, do it well. In fact, ‘well’ isn’t good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition.”

This quote highlights Ehrenreich’s personal connection to the class struggle and the views about class mobility that she was exposed to while growing up. These views echo a common view in the US that hard work is the solution to poverty, and the example of Ehrenreich’s father, who worked his way up the corporate ladder, is an instance in which this was true.