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 enlarge | Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 319
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0805088385
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.569092
EAN: 9780805088380
ASIN: 0805088385
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Inside experience of the agony of minimum wage September 29, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The most unsettling aspect of Barbara Ehrenreich's eye-opening foray into the world of the working poor is that the situation hasn't improved. In fact, it's gotten worse. The U.S. economy was booming in the late 1990s when she began her project, working anonymously in various minimum-wage jobs and reporting about the experience. Though she steps in and out of the lives of the minimum-wage workers who befriend her, she is a very powerful, effective advocate for them. In her book, she shows that living decently on about $7 an hour (still the minimum wage in most states) is impossible. However, Ehrenreich gives it a try in three cities, working as a waitress, housekeeper and Wal-Mart clerk. She reports from the front lines, where the working poor eat potato chips for dinner and sleep in fleabag motels, and she does the same. She finds that minimum-wage workers lead a dreary existence, toiling away in obscurity day after day with little hope, just getting by as long as they don't fall ill, need dental work or get in a car wreck. The terribly sad part is that many see no light at the end of the tunnel. getAbstract finds that Ehrenreich is a gifted writer with keen perceptions and a wry sense of humor. Her narrative flows effortlessly as she enlightens, educates and entertains. If only she had a magic wand.
 nickel and dimed September 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
the book arrived in a timely manner and is in excellent condition as described. I will definitly buy again.
 Hypocritical to the max! September 11, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
There are certainly many issues facing those who are trying to climb up from low paying and/or minimum wage jobs. However, this author's attitude that all those in this position are helpless victims doomed to lifelong poverty is ridiculous! As is the idea that anyone NOT mired in a tedious, low-paying job is somehow bad and to be blamed for those who are. She identifies with the poor almost pathologically without fair consideration to all involved, including the employers. And I found that very strange considering she is a well paid, successful writer living in a very high-rent area of this country (Key West, Florida) in her everyday life!
She herself enjoys all the benefits of the upper middle class lifestyle, and more power to her for earning them, yet, she rails relentlessly about others in this position and blames them for the plight of the working poor. When she works as a maid for a cleaning service, she comments about how insulted she is by one of the home-owners choice of books! Huh? She is angered that another home-owner has the audacity to own a set of copper pots and other home furnishings and decor that she finds disdainful as if these people are somehow at fault for being successful and having purchasing power, and heaven forbid, opinions and tastes that she does not share. She makes it clear that she herself does not regularly employee domestic help as that would just be, well, disdainful, yet, she admits to having done so on certain justifiable occasions. Really Barbara, you can't have it both ways!!
When an immigrant dishwasher at a restaurant where she works is caught red-handed stealing from the storehouse, she immediately identifies with the thief and becomes defensive of him. So stealing is OK if you're working for minimum wage? Would she have been so protective of the thief if he'd stolen say HER laptop or HER car or HER food? I wonder.
And did anyone notice that on two different occasions, regarding two of her jobs, the author brought up the widely held (and grossly misguided) concept that employers "hold back" the new employees first week of pay? As a human resources professional, I've battled this misconception amongst both white and blue collar employees for years and find it unfathomable that a person with a Ph.D. does not get it that the time she works this week is not actually paid for until the following pay period, usually the next week. There is no "holding back" of any pay, merely a lapse in time in which payroll processing takes place and a check printed. I found it incredible that this author did not grasp the logistics of this simple concept, and instead, clung to the ignorant idea that an employer would actually "hold back" pay until some such future date at their self-declared discretion, a practice that would be in fact, illegal.
Where is the balance in this so-called reporting? It's all and only about one side of the picture. And where are the suggestions? solutions? ideas for a better system? The concept of this book has great potential, but sadly, it falls flat and short of meeting it.
 Disappointing with few insights August 28, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
The only reason I gave two stars to this book is because at least Ehrenreich tried to write about an important topic. But her execution falls well below the mark, and the book turns out to be more about a journalist pretending to be a low-income worker than about the lives of the low-income workers she's supposedly studying. It is, by turns, whiny, preachy, self-righteous, facile, and annoying -- much more often than it's insightful, which it is maybe a handful of times (if that) throughout the book. (The footnotes were actually among the most informative parts.) At times she even seems to be making fun of the workers with whom she briefly shared her life. And the "experiment" is flawed from the start, as the author herself more or less acknowledges, in that someone who knows that she can return to her real life any time is very different from someone who works for $7 an hour and has no choice. One also has to question the ethics of a decision to take a job that someone else really needs. Finally, as the book progresses, the author makes some bumbling attempts at humor that just aren't funny -- it feels like the writing of someone who thinks she's being clever but the jokes are flat or obvious, or someone who utters banalities as if they were profound insights. (Please, leave satire to the satirists.) One line in the book stood out for me as a reflection of everything that is wrong with it, and it was hard for me to keep reading after that. In the chapter on her experience in Maine, Ehrenreich asks the reader, "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-days-plus a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" Well, DUH. As my partner pointed out, that sounds like the kind of idiotic "wisdom" that might show up on Carrie Bradshaw's computer in "Sex in the City."
So Ehrenreich gets some points for effort and for "humping away" at these jobs for as long as she did, I suppose, but as far as offering any real insights into or solutions for the lives of the working poor, this book leaves much to be desired. In the end, it's a book about Barbara Ehrenreich.
EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS RELATIVE August 28, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
Well, what Ms. Ehrenreich doesn't know is that there is MUCH MUCH worse to come!! In just a few years when the greatest depression in US history (13 years long) is visited upon us, surviving on the minimum wage will seem like the good old days. Sadly, people will be glad to work under the conditions she's explored. Everything is relative. Don't think it's going to happen? Read Arnold's The Great Bust Ahead ([...]). The Great Bust Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American and UK History is Just Several Short Years Away. This is your Concise Reference Guide to Understanding Why and How Best to Survive It.
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