Nickel and Dimed
On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
(review written: May 24, 2003 by Kevin D. Hendricks)
Non-fiction
221 pages
Henry Holt and Company
2001

You're an unskilled worker in Anytown, USA. You make $7.50 an hour in a dead end job that required a cup of your urine and a piece of your soul. You live in a hotel where you pay $225 per week to live with no screens on your windows, no privacy, no quiet, and a bathroom so close to your kitchen you try not to think about spreading bacteria. Fun for the weekend involves sharing a 40 ouncer with your friends because both bad beer and talk are cheap.

Nickel and Dimed is classic journalism: an upper-middle class, well-educated, white woman tries to survive in the post-welfare boom economy of 1998-2000 as a low-income worker. She casts off every vestige of privilege she can (Ehrenreich would have to become a non-English speaking immigrant for this book to be truly accurate) and joins the low-income workforce. She poses as a waitress and briefly as a hotel maid in Key West, Florida, a house cleaner and nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and a Wal-Mart lackey in Minneapolis.

Ehrenreich barely survives in each location, struggling through the grueling workdays filled with indignity, and trying to find a safe place to live in the off-hours. In most cases she kept from going under by pulling up stakes and starting again in another part of the country, an endeavor made possible only by the savings of an undercover reporter.

Her experience is tiring, the situation deplorable, and her writing peppered with intriguing footnote factoids and humorous observations. Ehrenreich's ability to bailout of poverty and return home makes the book seem like a cop-out--if this is her experience, what's it like for the millions who have no way out of poverty?