Nickel and Dimed: Full Book Summary

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist and activist then in her late 50s, sets out to document the daily struggles of America’s working poor. Having trained as a biologist, she decides to do fieldwork: in three different U.S. cities, she takes minimum-wage jobs and looks for affordable places to live. She leaves her Ph.D. and most of her skills off of her applications, to ensure that she is given the lowest-level positions available to a white, native-English speaking woman. However, she will use outside cash, if necessary, to ensure that she will never be without a car, she will not have to skip meals to save money, and she will never be homeless.

Ehrenreich’s first experiences are in Key West, Florida. Her most affordable living option, cheaper than a trailer in town, is a shabby efficiency apartment thirty miles away. Although she expects to earn $7 per hour, the first job she lands, as a diner waitress, pays much less, because she will also earn tips. The job requires not only serving tables but also additional work, like cleaning and restocking. Although Ehrenreich gets along well with her coworkers, she struggles as a waitress, because of her lack of experience. Realizing that she will not be able to stay in her apartment on what she is earning, she tries takes a second waitressing job, at another diner. She quickly realizes she will be physically unable to work both jobs, quits the first job, and takes a hotel housekeeping job next door to the second diner, instead. However, when her supervisor at the second diner yells at her, Ehrenreich has had enough and walks out.

Ehrenreich’s next location is Portland, Maine. There, after much searching, she finds a small apartment she will be able to afford. She takes two jobs. The first is with a maid service that cleans the homes of affluent clients where she works on a cleaning team with several other women. The work is back-breaking, and Ehrenreich develops a skin rash of unknown origin. She sees the other women continue to work even when they are injured or feeling sick. She notices that the cleaning techniques the team is taught to use are more about making homes look cleaner than about actually cleaning them. She learns that her employer charges customers $25 per person-hour, while she will earn $6.65 an hour. Ehrenreich’s other job is at a nursing home, where she helps serve food to residents with Alzheimer’s. The interactions with the residents are pleasant, but the cleanup work after meals is overwhelming, partly because one of the automatic dishwashers is broken.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, finally, Ehrenreich has a very hard time finding safe, sanitary housing she can afford. A charity worker suggests that she check into a shelter while saving up first month’s rent. She has two job applications accepted, but backs out of one job, at a hardware store, when her very first shift is scheduled to last eleven hours without overtime pay. The other job is in women’s clothing at Wal-Mart. The day-long orientation for new employees includes criticism of labor unions, while the pay is less than typical for the area. The store layout is constantly changing, and customers make extra work for her by leaving unbought merchandise in other departments. The job makes Ehrenreich, by her own account, callous and spiteful. Meanwhile, she has been unable to secure a long-term rental situation. Fed up, at one of the employee meetings she starts talking about the need for a union. By now, she has already decided to quit.

Reviewing her experiences in light of the data from many different studies, Ehrenreich comes to several conclusions. She finds that workers cannot support themselves on minimum wage in America unless they work multiple jobs, and only so long as there are no unexpected expenses, such as for medical care. Ehrenreich also finds that employers try to keep information about the wages they pay from becoming general knowledge among workers. Additionally, she finds that the ways in which workers are supervised, including random urine tests for drug use, encourage the workers to accept being dehumanized. Ehrenreich adds that the attitudes found in managers of low-wage employees are based on class or racial prejudice. Finally, she states that medical benefits and child care are too expensive even for middle-class workers, let alone ones on minimum wage. She notes that perhaps someday the working poor will refuse to stop accepting their situation and will demand that things change—and concludes that the country will be a better place when they do.

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