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

I loved Ehrenreich's original Harper¿s piece that turned into Nickled and Dimed, but the book is even better. In the face of all the glib talk about how easy it is get by on minimal wage jobs whose pay has stagnated for 20 years, Ehrenreich tries to actually do that--to live on the $4.80 or $5.50 an hour jobs that are the sole livelihoods of millions of Americans. She creates a wonderful portrait of a world that to most professional class Americans is absolutely invisible. Ehrenreich tells wonderful stories about all the ways that low-wage jobs grind people down, and about how the people caught in those jobs respond with human dignity and solidarity. in the middle of all the forces that grind people down. She's talking about real and urgent issues, but the book is also terrifically funny, both in documenting the blythe callousness that affluant Americans express toward those who serve them, and in her handling of her own role. The humor helps make this a terrific read, and it makes her core points all the more powerful. I also thought constantly while I was reading this book about the Republican overturning of the ergonomic standards. The jobs she describes routinely destroy people's bodies, because of their pace and because of the conditions people work under. Yet we've now ditched the very standards that would have begun to prevent this. With union contracts, people have some protection against the most destructive situations, without them, like in the jobs she describes, they¿re totally thrown to the wolves. In my dreams, every political and corporate leader would read Nickled and Dimed and heed its lessons, but since that's probably not going to happen, the rest of us better read it and start demanding we actually become a nation of 'liberty and justice for all.' Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical TimeShow Less