She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job-any job-can be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly unskilled, that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort.

She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. This Description may be from another edition of this product.īeautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.Ī publishing phenomenon when first published, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed is a revelatory undercover investigation into life and survival in low-wage America, an increasingly urgent topic that continues to resonate.

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