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

Ehrenreich summarizes the experiment overall in the first section of this chapter and compares her experiences in the three different locations. She states that low-wage jobs are not as easy or “unskilled” as they appear, and she had to draw on her deepest reserves of energy to perform the jobs well. She also states that navigating the social milieu is difficult, especially because it is far more difficult to understand these dynamics when one is at the bottom of the social ladder. Despite these difficulties, she determines that the hardest part was surviving on such low pay; finding affordable housing was consistently the biggest challenge.

Ehrenreich describes several problems around assessing poverty and addressing it in the US. One problem is that the method for calculating the poverty rate makes it appear as if there is no housing crisis because the official poverty rate is calculated based on the cost of food, which has not inflated nearly as much as the cost of rent during this same period. In addition, wages for the lowest-paying jobs have remained stagnant, despite the shortage of labor. The “money taboo,” or the fact that American workers are reluctant to share how much they make with each other, strongly

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