This paper will explore Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America and relate it to society and History (Ehrenreich 42). In essence, as much as history shaped America, it keeps the low-income group at bay. This may be the case in middle to upper income groups but not with low-income workers. It is common knowledge that values of a society require fairness and presentation of opportunities to all members. In fact, as Ehrenreich puts it, they survive in “unlivable” conditions, which are not quite different from slavery. These people toil to earn meager wages that are less than their monthly expenses and needs. This may not be official, but is witnessed in the pathetic lives of low-class workers. Nonetheless, apart from working for the same purpose, American society has pending issues that seem to remind them of the past. They have also moved to achieve the American dream. They have increasingly united for a common purpose. However, the past two centuries have seen a significant break from internal conflict. American History has undergone through various turmoil, with periods of slavery and conflict covering most of its past. It also emphasizes on respect as well as sharing of resources. You will never see anything–from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal–in quite the same way again.Society encourages people to work hard and maintain good moral values. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity” looks from the bottom. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity–a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job–any job–can be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them.

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes “undercover” as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

Nickel and dimed pages