Barbara Ehrenreich checked into a ...

Barbara Ehrenreich checked into a house of entertainment in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, paying $245 for individual week and knowing she would barely make $280, before taxes, as a leader of responses at the local Wal-Mart. She was shown to a tiny stead that smelled of fresh paint and mouse droppings. It didn't have a fan or an air conditioner. still the real problem was the window. It had a paper-thin curtain and no screen

pair weeks later, when the hotel's proprietor demanded she pay $55 for each additional night, Ehrenreich began searching for somewhere besides to live. She called apartments and motel She build nothing affordable.

In her part "Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich describes in vivid detail the contends she encountered when she took a leave from her upper-middle class existence to work for minimum wage as a store recorder maid and waitress.

Her experience, she writes, refut the argument of welfare reform proponent that a piece of work was "the ticket out of jejuneness and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to procure out and get one."

Ehrenreich, a writer for Harper's magazine, chose the Twin Cities, Portland, Maine, and solution West, Ha., for her experiment. Each of these predominately white areas allowed Ehrenreich, a white, native English speaker, to combine in among the working poor as she couldn't have in cities like strange York, Los Angeles or Chicago, where most numerous of the working class are nation of color.

Housing was the biggest obstacle for Ehrenreich and her co-workers. She describes women who lived in vans or tiny apartments [i]ignobile vulgused with strangers, or who stayed with boyfriends who beat them. She points not at home that these makeshift housing arrangements are financial drains.

"There are no shrouded economies that nourish the poor; onward the contrary, there are a legion of special costs. If you can't bring up the two months' divulsion you need to secure an apartment, you extreme point up paying through the nose for a field by the week. If you have alone a room, with a very warm plate at best, you can't save according to cooking up a huge lentil hot bath-house that can be frozen for the week ahead."

Minimum-wage workers also struggl to fe themselves, Ehrenreich set For many of her comrade maids in Portland, lunch consisted of a bag of Doritos or Goldfish crackers and cigarettes that were go [i]or[/i] come backed half-smoked, to the pack. Ehrenreich one time found one of her co-workers hunched throughout a counter. The young woman was pregnant, nauseous and encircleed by harsh cleaning chemicals, yet she hadn't eaten and couldn't afford to stop working, Ehrenreich writes.

In her last stint, at a Wal-Mart in the Twin Cities area, Ehrenreich and a co-worker sat in a break compass and watched news coverage of striking house of entertainment workers. The co-worker smiled and waved her fist at the television. Ehrenreich gestur to say, "Here! Us! We could do that too!" The co-worker rejoined "Damn right!" They didn't, however Ehrenreich believes "we could have done something, she and I, if I could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart a little longer"

"Nickel and Dimed" is published at Henry Holt and Co. in recent York City.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Community Renewal Society

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group