Nickel and Dimed is a work of investigative journalism. In the book, author Barbara Ehrenheich takes a series of jobs that pay minimum wage to discover how people who earn a low income make ends meet. She learns that surviving on minimum wage is so difficult that most workers can't afford to rent apartments or live on their own. She also learns that the work is degrading and that the people who are meant to provide assistance to the poor aren't always helpful.
The last chapter, the evaluation, begins with an analysis of how she actually performed at each job. She feels that her performance was good at each position, especially as each job took concentration and skills she didn't know she would need. She laments the lack of any encouragement or compliments from her coworkers on her performance, and decides she was average, but capable.
She also describes the unskilled jobs as being not only physically and mentally challenging, but a difficult place to work because of the employee politics that go on. She decides that had she continued in a few of the jobs, such as the one at Wal-Mart, she would have fared well and been eventually raised in position and pay.
The problem, Ehrenreich found, was that has he markets are increasingly becoming competitive. The rise of rents is greatly outstripping the rise in pay, especially for hourly workers. Low income housing is disappearing for many cities, forcing people to live further outside the city or to live three and four to an efficiency apartment. The labor shortage she had been expecting to drive up wages had no effect on the wages she was able to get. She found that employers used many tricks in order to keep wages low and employees coming back to keep their jobs. The drug tests required of many jobs, she believed, were mainly in force to denigrate the employees and force them to see themselves in a lowly position. The housekeeping company offered free breakfasts but would not raise their wages even as they repeatedly came up short handed. Most of the places where Ehrenreich worked had policies against the employees talking to each other in one capacity or another. This was thought to keep employees from airing any grievances or even attempting to organize against the management.
Because low-wage workers have very few options, little education, and transportation problems, they may be unable to find a better paying job even knowing that they exist. The problems that the people at the bottom 20% of the economy has are so many and so complex that changing their places in life is extremely difficult. Coming from the top 20%, Ehrenreich she found her needs met, mainly by low-wage workers.
The main way that wages are kept low is by reinforcing the low self-esteem portion she found inherent in each job. This included random drug tests, being yelled at by bosses, being accused of rule infractions, and being treated in many ways she felt was more like a child than a woman in her 50s should be treated.
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