"Nickle and Dimed"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the phenomenon in the United States of people who hold down two or three jobs and still are unable to afford basic living requirements. Based on Ehrenreich's book, the paper discusses this problem, but explains that there are no simple solutions.

From the Paper:

"When she wrote Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America., Barbara Ehrenreich did not set out with the intention of making her readers feel sorry for the subjects of the book, who are workers who scrub floors and hand up clothes in discount stores and help care for older citizens in nursing homes and for all of this hard work receive extremely low wages and often no benefits. She wouldn't mind if you felt compassion for such workers, who often hold down two or three jobs, working sixty or seventy or eighty hours a week, and yet still can't afford to pay medical bills or for decent housing. Most of these workers are women, and many of them are racial minorities, and so in addition to asking you to remember the problems that being poor brings with it she is reminding her readers that women and minorities pay a steeper price for being poor than do white men."

More papers on "Nickle and Dimed":

• Analytical Essay # 55502 : "Nickle and Dimed"
• Book Review # 120940 : "Nickel and Dimed": The Poor in America"
• Book Review # 114675 : "Nickel and Dimed"

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