First Published: 2001

Rating: Average

"Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city."

My senior year in college, I was part of the orientation staff that led a discussion on an excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. This was the first I’d heard of Ehrenreich’s book, but the few pages I read intrigued me, and I was eager to read the entire book.

By the time I finished the book, I’d learned that my eagerness had been sorely misplaced.

The premise of Nickel and Dimed is actually a wonderful one. Ehrenreich is a journalist who decides to explore how blue collar Americans survive on low wages by becoming a low-wage worker herself. Her goal is to find a place to live, find a job, and then make enough money from that job to pay the next month’s rent. To that end, she waits tables in Key West, cleans houses and feeds Alzheimer’s patients in Maine, and works at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota.

Her experiences in each place are, for the most part, interesting to read, and they’re likely to be eye-opening for members of the middle and upper classes. But Ehrenreich herself is—to put it bluntly—something of a snob, and this colors her writing to the point that it’s unbearably elitist a good deal of the time.

What gets me is that she disparages the very people that her book is trying to help. When trying to decide where to go after Maine, she writes of “[her] worry that [in California] the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do.” She constantly wonders why anyone would lower themselves to jobs like cleaning, waiting tables, or working in retail. Answer: it’s honest money, and people have to eat, and not everyone gets to run home to their cushy job and their Ph.D. and their gym membership at the end of the month.

Ehrenreich doesn’t seem to understand this, and that creates a noticeable disconnect between her and the people she works with. Although her assignment is to immerse herself in the world of the low-wage worker to see how they survive, she doesn’t live the lifestyle—she constantly goes out for fast food, she refuses to be without a car, she solicits her doctor in Florida for prescriptions, and she refuses to go to the church for help (despite the suggestion of someone who has been through the very experience that Ehrenreich is simulating).

Parts of the book are good—mostly the parts where Ehrenreich isn’t making snotty comments about various groups of society or pointing out how lean and toned she is despite being in her 50’s. Other readers have been able to get past these parts of the book, but others—including me—can’t move past Ehrenreich’s elitism given the context. In summary: excellent premise, failed execution.

[Buy Nickel and Dimed at Amazon.com] | [Buy Barbara Ehrenreich books at BookCloseouts.com]