Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Or "Wait, You Have A PhD?!?"

Apologies in advance for yet another rant about self-righteous and arrogant authors. I'd love to see the Steph(v)ens face off against ol' Babs here and see who comes out on top. My money's on Babs, and I find some comfort in knowing that she has a month of experience as a cleaning lady to help her keep that trophy nice and shiny.

Nickel and Dimed (subtitled On (Not) Getting By In America) claims to be an undercover expose on what life as a minimum-wage earner is like. I was excited to read it, excited to learn a little bit more about how it all works (or doesn't work), and excited for Ehrenreich's undercover Nancy Drewery to empower and give voice to these low-wage workers. Maybe there would be a dab of larger social context a la Fast Food Nation, some stories about what happens when Wal-Mart workers try to unionize, or the specifics of how the housing market works for the working poor, hey, maybe even provide some insight as to resources where people can find or provide help!

But, alas. No such luck. Instead, we get 300 pages about how Good Old Barbara has a PhD (Even smart people get tired working 80 hour weeks!), is more physically fit than most of her working class contemporaries (Even skinny people get tired working 80 hour weeks!), and - in a fit of complete non sequitur- doesn't believe in God. Yup, you read it right! In a book supposedly devoted to illuminating the failures of minimum wage, Good Old Barbara attends a religious service just for fun one night, and spends page after page essentially ridiculing the experience. Let those pages be a metaphor for the rest of the book: Ehrenreich does not attempt to climb into the skin of the people whose lives she is temporarily living. Instead, she descends into the culture and graciously bestows her wisdom, unasked and uninvited (which - for someone who was so insistent that we understand her atheism - sounds quite a lot like the work of a bad missionary, if you ask me).

She lets us know that she would NEVER use a cleaning service because it is so degrading (except twice, when it was TOTALLY justified), makes sure to slip in any time she helps her co-workers out with food or housing, and spends a significant chunk of the last chapter patting herself on the back for a job well done. If she spent half as much time describing the work conditions, the lives of her co-workers, how the system in our country allows for these kinds of shortcomings and then what we can do about those shortcomings as she spends praising herself and complaining about how tired she was and how she was afraid her laptop would be stolen out of her apartment, Nickel and Dimed might have been worth reading.

Upon finishing the book, I found myself wondering how much money she made off it, and how much of that money she donated to organizations designed to assist the low-wage workers that she claims to so deeply understand.