Nickel and Dimed

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (German edition: Arbeit poor. Unterwegs in der Dienstgesellschaft ) is a book by the investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich .

The aim of the book is, among other things, to research the effects of the 1996 reform of US social legislation on the life of the so-called working poor in America. The undercover research reported in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000. The book was published by Metropolitan Books in 2001. A preprint appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1999 . The book was also published in German in 2001.

Plot of the book

It is not an experience report, but investigative journalism a la Günter Wallraff . Ehrenreich, a journalist with a middle-class background, decided to do a self-test for a few months to explore the everyday life of the “working poor”. She hid her university degree from her employers.

At the beginning of the experiment, she owned $ 1,300 and a car. Ehrenreich moved to Key West, Florida. Like those actually affected, she accepted work as a waitress in two restaurants at the same time, as the earnings were only enough to make a living.

For another test case, she moved to Portland, Maine. After four days of job hunting, Ehrenreich had two new jobs. She was now an assistant in a nursing home and she also worked for a building cleaning company. For a third assignment, she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she took a low-paying job at Wal-Mart for a few weeks . Then she finished her experiment. As a result, she found that she had not been able to earn a living from the income from her jobs.

Social problems

With her book, Ehrenreich wants to point out social problems in US society. She describes the work in the jobs of the working poor as exhausting, uninteresting and degrading. She opposes personality tests and drug tests that many job applicants in the United States take. These are degrading and violate civil rights. With her research, Ehrenreich has shown that a low-wage job in America is not enough to make a living from it. She writes:

If someone works for less wages than he needs to live [...] he has made a great sacrifice for you. The working poor are really the philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children to take care of others. They live in substandard housing so that other people's homes are clean and tidy. They go on hardship, and that makes inflation low and stock prices high.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America (2001); P. 221