Nickel and Dimed

Overview

Twenty years ago, a national debate about welfare inspired Barbara Ehrenreich to see if she could support herself on minimum wage. She took the cheapest lodging available, any minimum wage job offered, and tried to make it work. This book helped set a path for writers to dig into complicated social issues with personal narrative (books like Maid, Heartland and Nomadland), framing how we talk about these issues even now. As relevant today as it was when first published, this anniversary edition includes a foreword by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted.

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. 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. 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. 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. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

The book, Nickel and Dimed [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN# 9781250808318 in Paperback by Barbara Ehrenreich may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.