Nickel and Dimed

The most positive thing I have to say was that this was an easy read, which was vaguely enlightening on what it's like to work minimum wage. And it's well annotated with multiple scholarly citations.

On the other hand, I'm a resident. It's like the trump card in all pity poker games forever. Which makes pity poker no fun at all. Oh, normal people whine about not getting paid time and a half to work 11 hours in a row? I've worked 34 hours in a row for less than $10.00/hour. You stand for four hours in a row? I've stood for 30 hours in a row, in an operating room. You had to clean up peoples pubic hairs? I've had to put my hands in people's orifices, including orifices that someone just created with a scalpel and hold their spleen in the air so that the stool that accidentally just entered the peritoneal cavity doesn't get on it. And I've had almost every bodily fluid imaginable on my hands, feet, and occasionally face. When I was a med student, I paid for such privileges. Cry me a freaking river. I just can't be bothered to feel sorry for someone working 60 hours/week or 7 days/week with some of them being part time.

Also, while I agree that the amount of money spent on the criminalization and prosecution of marijuana (in this case, evidenced by drug testing) is nothing short of inane, you lose your moral high-ground if you actually were using marijuana just proximal to the time you knew you were applying for a job. Like seriously, ideals are all well and good if you serve them with a side of common sense.

And there's just no answers offered here, either. You think the minimum wage isn't a living wage? You do realize that if you pay everyone more, prices will just go up, right? And as much as I'd love to live in the socialist wonderland that she proposes in her afterword - with government-subsidised school and healthcare and housing, I'd rather read a book about how she's trying to get there or stop-gap measures we can employ, rather than "I worked at Walmart and it was awful, but the people who worked there full time didn't seem to mind so much."

   Nickel and Dimed follows the smart and spirited Barbara Ehrenreich as she tries, as well as she is able, to hold down dead-end blue collar jobs in three cities- waitress/hotel room cleaner in Key West, Florida, Maid/Retirement Home helper in Portland, Maine and Wal-Mart worker in Minneapolis. Written in the late nineties, her analysis of housing is no longer relevant,(except in Key West)  one is forced to think, if it was that difficult to support oneself with unskilled labor in an up-swinging pre-Bush economy, how would it be now? <br/>       It isn't just that these jobs don't pay well, it is that, as she puts it, time is your life- and these jobs are physically demanding, thankless, boring, and in some instances, demeaning. <br/>    I did this book with my prison bookclub and I wasn't sure how the guys would like it, but the few who finished it enjoyed it. One convict talked about working in an ice factory, and how you have to work slow so that you get paid or else you finish to fast and leave. There is little to take pride in, and for the easily offended (i.e. some convicts- or people from stressful homes) such jobs are hard to swallow. <br/>      It is a great book to start a conversation about social class, poverty and conditions in the working class. Her description of working at Wal-Mart were particularly creepy. This is a quick and interesting read, it made me long for quality, realistic fiction reading by and about the working class.

I made the mistake of looking over some of the reviews when I was adding it here to my list. The opinions are pretty divided: the conservatives pretty much attack her credentials (or attack her ad hominem; point is sympathy is usually lacking in these folks), and those who agree seem to do uncritically (i.e. they don't question the author as much). I will try to put those opinions aside as I read it myself. I have been meaning to read it because some of the freshman composition classes where I used to work as a librarian read it for their classes. I finished the introduction, so I am already clear on the conditions of her experiment. We'll see how the rest of the book goes.

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See my blog post on it:

http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/12/booknote-nickel-and-dimed.html

In the GoodReads scheme, I gave it 3 stars for a book I liked. It is not a book I really like since I wish things were better, thus not needing to write books like these. That is the idealist part of me. She does get a bit preachy at time,s which I think can detract, so that also made me not give it a higher rating. However, I do highly recommend it to others out there.