From 1998 to 2000 she traveled to Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, working as a waitress, a hotel cleaner, an assistant in a nursing home, and a retail saleswoman. Too often, the thought is: if they just work harder, they won’t be poor.īut Ehrenreich proves to her readers that this sort of thought has no basis in reality – it really is just prejudice and social stigma that shapes these derisive ideas against the poor. It’s all too easy for those in comfortable financial situations to ascribe poverty to laziness and making troubles for themselves, or for being morally lacking because they utilize the governmental welfare systems and a general unwillingness to work hard. Prejudice against the lower class and blue-collar workers is more common than one might think. She originally intended her work to be a simple newspaper column – but the experience was so vast and affected her so much that she turned it into a memoir. She then decided to temporary leave her life behind in order to subsequently write and better understand how people make a living on minimum-wage “unskilled” jobs.

in biology and started a career in writing that eventually lifted her out of working in labor-intensive jobs. Although she came from a working-class family, she earned a Ph.D. The author of this book is Barbara Ehrenreich, who identifies herself as a feminist, democratic socialist, and political activist passionate about writing on social issues that she sees in the United States. The book Nickel and Dimed, albeit old, illustrates to those who have not lived at or below the poverty line in America what life is like, through the words of the author’s experience tasting that life herself.

If you find yourself agreeing with this, you might be someone who’s socioeconomic status has limited your imagination of poverty. After all, they may be thinking, poor people are also living a life, just like everyone else. However, no matter how poor someone is, life will go on. What is it like to be poor? If you ask a person who is not poor to imagine what poverty is like, they may say that poverty includes socioeconomic difficulties. The author of this book, Barbara Ehrenreich, put aside her money and time to gain personal experience and go undercover as a blue-collar worker to truly reveal working-class life to those not in the lower class of the United States. Today we will unlock the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Nickel and dimed cliff notes