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EXCERPT: Nickel and Dimed
The following is an excerpt from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Listen to an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich here.
The idea that led to this book arose in comparatively sumptuous circumstances. Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, had taken me out for a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place to discuss figure articles I might write for his magazine. I had the salmon and field greens, I think, and was pitching him some ideas having to do with pop culture when the conversation drifted to one of my more familiar themes -- poverty. How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? Then I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret: "Someone out to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism -- you know, go out there and try it for themselves." I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands. But Lapham got this crazy-looking half smile on his face and ended life as I knew it, for long stretches at least, with the single word "You."
I rememeber reading this work for a class in college. I am not into reading, but this book hit home. At that particular time in my life I was working at an office complex doing janitorial work. It paid maybe a dollar over minimum wage in Miami, Florida. I didnt struggle as much because I lived with my parents and this was just spending money, but I always though, how in the hell do people with a family and other responsabilities make it with this salary? When you work in low paying jobs some people treat you without respect. Just because you clean someone's mess or serve them food, it does not mean that they are less than you. The managers or bosses in this kind jobs want to keep you down, because they are affraid that if you are better at the job, they might loose their!! I understand must people dont have the oportunity I did, I was able to go to college and now I have a reasonable job with the IRS, but I feel for all the minimum wage folks out there. The only thing I can tell them, is to never quit, and dont let nobody belittle you because of your ocupation. When you feel bad, imagine a world where there were no waitresses or waiters, or cleaning people. The world would look very different!! great book, wished more books with this kind of insight were publish more often to see the real side of living in the USA.
