Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Background

Socio-historical Context: The 1996 Welfare Reform Act

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act limited access to welfare for women and children, ultimately removing approximately 4 million women from welfare and into the labor market. As Ehrenreich writes, “In the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one” (196). Both Democrats and Republicans were in strong favor of the passage of this act, which was championed by President Bill Clinton, and the legislation was built on the premise that low-wage work will be more effective than welfare at lifting people out of poverty. In the years that followed the act’s passage, social scientists and economists highlighted the lower number of people on welfare and argued that this was proof that the welfare reform act was a success. Ehrenreich notes that this is not at all the case; the act did not provide any sort of requirements for tracking what happened to people after they were no longer receiving welfare benefits.

She notes that the terrible effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act on the state of poverty were largely obscured by the media. The media presented this act as a panacea for those who are impoverished, who would now have the dignity of work to uplift their spirits. Ehrenreich argues that many impoverished people were in fact far worse off, as now they had to work back-breaking, dead-end jobs without health insurance and with little prospect of accumulating savings due to the rising cost of rent. Though the “signs of distress” (218) are there, there were many articles in the media championing welfare reform and cherry picking individual success stories while ignoring the widespread misery. Ehrenreich notes that food pantries in Massachusetts saw a 72% increase in demand following welfare reform, and that Texas food banks did not have enough food for people (218). Ehrenreich draws a contrast between “real humans” and the “economic man” (a portrayal of humans as perfectly rational agents who consistently seek to maximize their utility), illustrating that one must examine the lived realities of poverty before making judgments about people who perform low-wage work. Ehrenreich shows that economic abstractions used to make policy decisions that dramatically affect the lives of millions of Americans are oftentimes based on pure fiction that does not reflect lived realities.

Literary Context: Barbara Ehrenreich and Investigative Journalism

Ehrenreich received much praise as well as plentiful criticism following the publication of Nickel and Dimed. She was especially criticized for her journalistic methods and the ethical issues of a person with a background in investigative journalism embarking on an experiment that involves so much deception. She was accused of “poverty tourism” because it would never be possible to replicate the true conditions of poverty, nor could Ehrenreich understand the real fear and instability of the life of a low-wage worker. Many critics noted that Ehrenreich always had the option to return to her solidly middle or upper-middle-class life as a successful journalist.

Despite the stressful and difficult situations she endured for the experiment, both Ehrenreich and the readers know that the experiment is temporary. A friend of hers connects her with an aunt named Caroline, a woman who endured the life of a single mother supporting her family with low-wage work. Ehrenreich admits that she is the “imitation, the pallid, child-free pretender” (134) compared to Caroline, who moved from New Jersey to Florida with very little money and several children following a separation from her husband. Caroline worked as a housecleaner and eventually got married, but she still experienced bouts of houselessness. Ehrenreich realizes that the experiment is inherently artificial, but she still sees the value in the attempt. One response to this critique is that Ehrenreich’s goal was not to capture the psychological or subjective experience of poverty in full, but simply to see if it was feasible to survive on the wages she received in these low-paying jobs in the best of circumstances. She notes that she understood from the outset that there was no way she would discover “how it ‘really feels’ to be a long-term low-wage worker” (6).

In addition, the fact that Ehrenreich deceived her coworkers introduces another ethical conundrum into the social experiment. Ehrenreich gleaned information about their lives and wrote about their stories without them knowing that she was an investigative journalist. She profited off of their stories by writing a book that is replete with anecdotes of their miseries and, although she includes direct quotes, their stories are filtered through Ehrenreich’s white, middle-class worldview. Also, Ehrenreich’s depictions of her coworkers are sometimes quite harsh, particularly in the case of some of the management. She attempts to hide their identities with fake names, but she nonetheless includes sensitive biographical details and personal anecdotes that could be used to identify her coworkers.