Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
I really wanted to like this book. The premise was interesting, at least - feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich, self-declared member of America's upper class, goes undercover to write about what life is like as a $7/hour wage slave.
I agree with a lot of Ehrenreich's ideas. The gap between rich and poor in the US is too big. Not enough people have access to affordable housing, or to any health insurance at all. Wal-Mart employees should be able to form a union without being threatened with losing their jobs. Her style is conversational, and I felt sympathy for many of the people she described.
It was Ehrenreich's attitude about it all that got to me. She starts out regarding the whole thing as a great adventure, an anthropological study perhaps, about her sojourn into a foreign culture. Then she spends the rest of the book regarding herself as a person apart from the working class people around her. For example, she expresses surprise that no one notices she was so highly educated, even though she keeps her true background hidden. I got the feeling she'd expected her awestruck coworkers to treat her like a celebrity, to ask why one of America's intellectual elite was rubbing shoulders with members of the lowly working class.
Perhaps she might have had more insight had she spent more of her time away from work socializing. Ehrenreich keeps herself apart from her coworkers when she's not at work, which contributes to the one-sidedness of the book. The actual working people can't speak for themselves, because she doesn't interview them, or befriend them, she just obeserves. I found myself wondering what they would say about their lives, but all Ehrenreich gives us is a couple of short quotes from people that she tells about her project just before she leaves town.
She does befriend one person at last, Caroline, who gives her advice about how to make ends meet. The first thing to do in a new city is to "find a church," advice which Ehrenreich ignores completely. She's more interested in insulting religious people than asking for their help; she ridicules Christians as greedy evangelists and bad tippers, and Buddhists, well, I'm not sure excatly why Ehrenreich doesn't like them, except that they're the kind of people that hire maids. I'm not a particularly religious person myself, but I found Ehrenreich's prejudice to be tasteless, at best.
In the end, Nickel and Dimed came off as more of an economic study than an anthropological one. I wanted to find out if Carlotta lost her job working housekeeping at the hotel, why George immigrated to the US only to work in a diner, and why Holly was so frightened of telling her boyfriend she was pregnant. Ehrenreich wanted to tell me how far real wages have fallen since the 1970's, and how the housing market works to exclude people who can't afford a down payment. It was a short book; she might have included both.
Maybe to a person who has lived their whole life as one of the elite, this book would be an eye opener. I just have too many friends who work as waitresses or secretaries or baristas or sales clerks. Ehrenreich is trying to do a good thing, but in this case, she missed the mark.
Cross posted to literal_libris
I agree with a lot of Ehrenreich's ideas. The gap between rich and poor in the US is too big. Not enough people have access to affordable housing, or to any health insurance at all. Wal-Mart employees should be able to form a union without being threatened with losing their jobs. Her style is conversational, and I felt sympathy for many of the people she described.
It was Ehrenreich's attitude about it all that got to me. She starts out regarding the whole thing as a great adventure, an anthropological study perhaps, about her sojourn into a foreign culture. Then she spends the rest of the book regarding herself as a person apart from the working class people around her. For example, she expresses surprise that no one notices she was so highly educated, even though she keeps her true background hidden. I got the feeling she'd expected her awestruck coworkers to treat her like a celebrity, to ask why one of America's intellectual elite was rubbing shoulders with members of the lowly working class.
Perhaps she might have had more insight had she spent more of her time away from work socializing. Ehrenreich keeps herself apart from her coworkers when she's not at work, which contributes to the one-sidedness of the book. The actual working people can't speak for themselves, because she doesn't interview them, or befriend them, she just obeserves. I found myself wondering what they would say about their lives, but all Ehrenreich gives us is a couple of short quotes from people that she tells about her project just before she leaves town.
She does befriend one person at last, Caroline, who gives her advice about how to make ends meet. The first thing to do in a new city is to "find a church," advice which Ehrenreich ignores completely. She's more interested in insulting religious people than asking for their help; she ridicules Christians as greedy evangelists and bad tippers, and Buddhists, well, I'm not sure excatly why Ehrenreich doesn't like them, except that they're the kind of people that hire maids. I'm not a particularly religious person myself, but I found Ehrenreich's prejudice to be tasteless, at best.
In the end, Nickel and Dimed came off as more of an economic study than an anthropological one. I wanted to find out if Carlotta lost her job working housekeeping at the hotel, why George immigrated to the US only to work in a diner, and why Holly was so frightened of telling her boyfriend she was pregnant. Ehrenreich wanted to tell me how far real wages have fallen since the 1970's, and how the housing market works to exclude people who can't afford a down payment. It was a short book; she might have included both.
Maybe to a person who has lived their whole life as one of the elite, this book would be an eye opener. I just have too many friends who work as waitresses or secretaries or baristas or sales clerks. Ehrenreich is trying to do a good thing, but in this case, she missed the mark.
Cross posted to literal_libris