I reviewed one chapter each week of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” back in January with Dreamy.  Quick synopsis:  Ehrenreich went out with “the people” and took low-wage jobs to see if she could get by for a month in three different locales.  She failed (miserably in my opinion).  Now, it’s April and my class is finally getting around to reading the book and doing discussion on it.

I wrote a huge posting, following all the rules, and I also put in there that my personal opinion was that Ehrenreich is a spoiled rotten brat, because she lamented throughout the book how horrible things were.  There are people that live this way everyday.

I offended a bunch of women in the class who think that Ehrenreich is some kind of hero for being a PhD and “subjecting herself to such conditions” (their words, not mine).  I would think that most people understand that there are millions of low-wage jobs out there and real people that work them.  For these people, these are not horrible conditions, but life.  That is more offensive to me.

Anyway, even if you have no idea what book I’m talking about or think minimum wage is horrible, you should check out Get Rich Slowly’s post on Adam Shephard’s book.

Each Wednesday, Dreamy and I are reviewing a chapter from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, where Ehrenreich does minimum wage jobs around the country to see if she can "get by" on minimum wage.  Today’s chapter is Chapter 2, about her work in Maine.

In this chapter, Scrubbing in Maine, Ehrenreich immediately found a job on the weekends as a dietary aide in a retirement home. One of the perks of this job is that when the residents were finished with their meals, the employees were allowed to feast on whatever food was left over and not served. I think this is a great idea. Finding a job with "unknown perks" is always a frugal idea, even if the meal cost $1 it’s still a way to eat for cheap.

She applied for jobs doing anything under the sun to fill in the weekdays, and to afford the place she rented for $110 a week, which in my opinion is way too much for the one room she was renting. She found a job as a housekeeper for "Merry Maids" or something like that. After taking the personality test, this job as offered to her had a salary of $6.65 per hour. After two weeks of "exceptional work" (she even broke a clients vase while cleaning) she received a raise of $.10, to bring her salary to $6.75 per hour.

One thing that bothers me about her experiment is that she doesn’t last at these jobs for more than 2 or 3 weeks. Most people who work these jobs don’t have the luxury of "shopping around" like she does. I think it’s unrealistic to move about so much, especially if she really was a low income worker and had to forfeit her security deposit on her apartment. Low income workers have to struggle to have clothes on their backs and food in their cabinets, and to me it just seems like to her it’s a mini vacation with some work intermingled.

Ehrenreich actually doesn’t have enough money for food in one part of this chapter.  She calls several different food pantries in the area, and comes up with dinner and breakfast for one evening.  I was a little confused on how she could think this was ethical for her to take a voucher that was meant for someone that was truly poor.  I don’t know if I could have done that.  Or it is also possible that she was trying to make her work as journalistically realistic as possible - but it would still make me feel a little guilty.

Another thing that bugged me is that Ehrenreich always talked about the other workers having roommates.  If Ehrenreich really wanted her story to be as realistic as possible, she probably should have had a roommate at some point in the story.  I’m not sure if she was trying to conceal the fact that she was typing up reports each night or not, but I didn’t think this was realistic.  Everyone knows that an efficient way to save money is to start living with others, but obviously, that was "too much" for Ehrenreich.

Also, I found this article on MSN about minimum wage workers.  It is interesting to see these days how much money minimum wagers make.
 
Check back every Wednesday for another Chapter of Nickel and Dimed.