Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

Living on a tight budget for a while is about as close as many upper-class people get to being poor. This, of course, is nothing like actually living in poverty. About 25 years ago now, as the Clinton-era “welfare-to-work” push was underway, writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickel and Dimed, in which she (as a woman of means) went “undercover” to experience what it's like to actually live on minimum wage in America. She lived in three different areas (Florida, Maine, and Minnesota), experiencing several different kinds of jobs: waitressing, hotel housekeeping, maid service cleaning, working at a nursing home, and retail at Walmart. She gives herself a couple thousand dollars to start with and to cover any true emergencies, and then gets to it.

In what should not have been but seems to be a surprise, being poor is really hard. There's no getting ahead. There's barely even keeping her head above water. Being on your feet all day is physically exhausting and trying to figure out whether she can make her body get through a second job or if she can afford not to is a constant struggle. Housing absorbs nearly all of her income, and it's a constant struggle to find something cheap enough that she can afford, but close enough to work to not drain her resources (her Rent-A-Wreck car and gasoline, not to mention time) excessively. At her price range, these apartments often lack full kitchens, so fast and packaged foods are her only real options. She can't absorb the cost of unscheduled time off, so feeling like she might be getting sick just means pushing through.

There has been a lot of criticism of this book over the years, some of it very valid and other parts of it less so. Ehrenreich admits to some unattractive and classist beliefs as she begins her experiment, like that her education (she holds a Ph.D.) and other markers of her status will somehow be recognized, that it will be obvious that she doesn't really belong among the working poor...which of course never happens. And it's hard to believe she's as surprised as she claims to be at how difficult getting by on minimum wage actually is, but her whole life experience has worked to shelter her from that knowledge. Generally, I found that she acknowledged the privileges she brought with her, like the ability to have any sort of savings and a lifetime of straightforward access to health care. Her interest in and concern for her coworkers seems genuine, if a bit shallow because she doesn't stay any one place long enough to form strong bonds.

Reading this in 2019, ultimately, meant that the initial shock and/or surprise about the insights that it offers aren't really to be had anymore. The issues she highlights (the difficulty of putting together a security deposit while living paycheck-to-paycheck, workplace injuries covered up by shady employers, the inane “personality tests” that are often required for retail work) are long since old news to anyone paying even cursory attention. This isn't a bad place to start, if you are a person who has never been poor wanting information about what poverty might be like to experience. But if you've already got a firm grasp on the basics of why life below the poverty line might be challenging, you won't find anything new or paradigm-changing here.