Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich: Difficulties of Living on Minimum Wage

Nickel and dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a novel by Barbara Ehrenreich which portrays Barbara in an experiment to experience difficulties faced by a low wage worker. It takes place in early 1990s. During her journey, she travelled to Florida, Maine and Minnesota to learn about struggles of living in poverty. Florida, her hometown was the easiest place to start her experiment. Her budget for accommodation was $500; however, because the cheapest she could find was $650 a month, her only option was a small trailer which was 45 minutes away from her work. She saw ads of workplaces that pay enough to provide her with minimum meals of the day. She spent the month working as a waitress in two different restaurants with a $2.13 an hour. When looking at the bills, she thought that a person might end up paying for groceries and medications through the nose. In the book she stated that most of her money as a waitress came from tips and that’s where she learnt about the “hidden costs” of being poor.

Living on just minimum wage has its own disadvantages. If you have more than one job; You feel exhausted and sleep deprived from overworking. Most of your time is spent switching between shifts and not eating properly. Soon, Barbara realized that a waitress has other duties like cleaning, stocking, etc. Barbara also learned that most of her coworkers are kind-hearted and always available to help. When she started her job at the hotel, Carlotta, an African American woman has missing teeth and wide gaps because she just cannot afford to pay for any sort of insurance to get them fixed. Barbara was shocked to see that and reminded herself that most poor people must deal with lifetime of face appearance that could have been fixed if they had money. Now if you are an adult who is not healthy enough to lift heavy weights, you may experience back and muscle pains, which we take for granted because we can go see a doctor for it and get massages; But many people living in poverty have no option but to deal with no health insurance and continuous pains in their body. They live off Tylenol and Advil. Living in poverty distracts people from normal life. They forget that health is wealth.

In chapter 2, Barbara’s coworker at the Maids, Holly, was working through dizziness and severe stress. Barbara became frustrated with their boss, Ted, and screamed at him for not taking care of his workers. All the work she wrote in her book is basically a monotonous labor. Most of these people lack basic rights, they do not have freedom of speech and always take unavoidable drug tests for workplaces. One of the things that Barbara points out is embarrassment and humiliation of working poor. They deal with constant disrespect from society because society thinks that poor people ‘waste’ all their money in useless things. In reality, these people have no savings due to minimum wage and high demands of housing rent and healthy food. The conclusion is definite that it is hard to survive on minimum wage and many Americans suffer daily to provide themselves with 2-3 meals.