Nickel and Dimed

I finished reading Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America a couple of weeks ago and was disappointed. It felt too much like a book written from the point of wealth guilt, and while it purports to expose the injustice of the low threshold of the minimum wage, the book does its subjects a disservice.

Too often, Barbara Ehrenreich congratulates herself on being able to make ends meet on minimum wage for a month, while there are people around her trying to make ends meet for the entirety of their lives on the same sum. Too often she pines for the luxuries she denies herself, while those around her pine for a middle class lifestyle they'll never attain. When she tries to convince those around her to unionize against Wal-mart, it plays as an experiment. In a month, Ehrenreich is off to another city, another challenge, leaving those she has tried to organize to return to a life she has potentially made a little more difficult to live. The impulse is, perhaps, a good one, but it's misplaced.

While I suppose it's commendable that she's raising the issue, the book as its presented could only work if it were written by a minimum wage worker summing up his or her life. The other (better) option would have been to interview the people she works with and write a book about them specifically, presenting the stories of the people who are living at the poverty line, rather than focusing on herself as a tourist among them.

By masquerading as one of them, she tells a skewed story. Neither does she represent the individuals working low income jobs, nor does she fully embody the life of a low income individual. For as much as she may suffer for the month(s) that she's denying herself, at the end of the day she returns to her upper-middle class life, perhaps enriched by her experience, but still leaving it (and the people who still live it) behind. Posted by eku at July 13, 2004 4:50 PM