You know that feeling when there are several more productive things you should be doing, but you just can’t seem to put your book down? Yeah, that was kind of my life this week. When I picked up Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich at my mom’s recommendation, I thought it seemed a little dated (don’t you hate it when your mom is right?). Though it was published more than ten years ago, this nonfiction work has a pretty intriguing concept. Barbara Ehrenreich, a respected journalist and self-proclaimed member of the upper-middle class, attempts to live on minimum wage in various urban areas of the U.S.
Beyond that, Ehrenreich’s evaluation of her experience is eye-opening. While the cost of living (housing, groceries, gas, etc.) has risen with inflation, the minimum wage has been stagnant for decades. Employers will go to extreme measures to avoid increasing pay, Ehrenreich notes, whether it’s offering employees cash rebates and store discounts or giving them official-sounding titles such as “sales associate” or “team member.” Even worse, employers will require drug tests, personality surveys, and other equally degrading hoops for their employees to jump through. Just to give you an idea, the manager of the maid service she worked for would force his employees to clean his own house when business was slow. Tactics such as these, Ehrenreich says, shame the employees to the point where they don’t even believe they deserve better pay.
There are very few books that I would say changed my worldview, and Nickel and Dimed is certainly one of them. Ehrenreich’s accounts of working as a waitress, a maid, and a Wal-Mart sales associate are equally fascinating and horrifying.