Barbara Ehrenreich's Serving In Florida

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America is a critically acclaimed investigative biography of a reporter going undercover to see how individuals manage to live on minimum wage across America. More specifically, Barbara was curious about how were “the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour” (1)? Ehrenreich developed a plan and some rules for her undercover research for finding jobs, housing, and living expenses. The research for this book covered a span of three states, Florida, Maine, and Minnesota, between spring of 1998 and summer of 2000.

The author of this article, Barbara Ehrenreich, dives into her article by discussing her plan to enter the low-wage workforce. She adjusts by trying to go on a $500-a-month “plan”. She went into this with 2 rules. First one being that she cannot use any skills she learned from education or usual work. The second one was that she had to take the best paid job that is offered to her and do her best to hold onto that job.

“Some who had been successful found themselves unemployed with no benefits (Stephens and Wikstrom 164). Another issue was the fact that while some people were able to maintain their lifestyle up to that point, the minimum wage which was at that time, $5.15 per hour had not been increased between 1997 and 2005. This did not help the low-income families as during this period “…consumer prices have increased between 19 and 20 percent, meaning purchasing power of the dollar received by minimum wage workers has declines significantly” (164). One final issue that helped to turn the success of the Work to Welfare program was the fact that increases in regressive tax and sales tax, as well as state and federal government fees “fell heavily on those at the bottom of the income scale.”

In the selection, “Serving in Florida”, Barbara Ehrenreich described her experience of working at the low-wage American workplace and the worker’s struggles with minimum wage. When she depicts the work as an outsider, she states “customers arrive in human waves, sometimes disgorged fifty at a time from their tour buses, peckish and whiny.” (Ehrenreich 395) It demonstrates the hardships of the workers when dealing with customers. Even though the customers are complaining for no reasons and being obnoxious, the workers have to deal with them with respect.

Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America, is the factual narrative of Barbara Ehrenreich’s venture to completely immerse herself in the life of a minimum wage worker. Through her experiment Ehrenreich set out to prove that the average worker can’t “make it on $6 or $7 an hour (1)” in this country; and with her hands on research, she defends while simultaneously proving that the reason so many people are stuck in the lower end of the economy is not because they are lazy or unskilled, but because the jobs they can acquire rarely pay enough to surpass the annual poverty levels. Ehrenreich's use of statistics, examples and the general tone she phrases her rhetorical questions with enlightens her audience of just how hard it is to get by

With the connections to the rhetorical appeals, she is able to present examples that people who has worked as a low waged worker can relate to. Through her experience and what she has observed from her coworkers, Ehrenreich revealed the struggles of the work environment and the living situation that resulted from the low waged

We have a systematic problem that includes not supplying livable wages. In the documentary 'One Crisis Away' chapter four, 'Living On $10 An Hour, While Trying to Pay the Bills', as well as in Reading 50 in our text book "The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality" shows how people struggle financially even when being paid over the minimum wage. People are then forced to work two jobs in order to pay bills and take care of their children. However, there is a kicker, if one would make too much money, for example, in Reading 51 or one of the examples from the panel discussion in 'One Crisis Away' then they could lose any government assistance they might be able to utilize to help take care of themselves medically or in terms of food stamps. This, to me, seems to be an effort to keep people down, instead of helping them

Because the cost of living has welkin rocketed, it has become virtually infeasible to raise a family on a minimum wage job. A person living on his or her own cannot survive on minimum wage job either. Their living expense would just be exorbitant. The earnings of minimum wage workers are crucial to their families salubrity. Evidence from 2013 and 2014 minimum wage increase shows that an average minimum wage worker brings home more than a moiety of his or her family 's weekly earnings.

We find no evidence that minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 affected overall state poverty rates. ”(Leigh, A. (2007) Proposals to increase the minimum wage are politically popular because they are widely seen as an effective way to help the working poor. In spite of it, state and federal minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 had no effect on reducing the poverty rates. “Minimum wage increases have thus far provided little more than symbolic support to the working poor.”

Imagine working in a minimum wage job in California. Imagine working at a minimum wage job and not being able to sustain your family. Minimum Wage job is a common misconception. This is often referred to adolescent or college students working at the part time, so they can pay for their student loans or their personal needs. But reality is another one the people who are work in a minimum wage job are mostly over the age of 35, who are only working so they can support them or their family in many cases.

A person working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour earns $15,080 in a year, which is 20% higher than the 2015 federal poverty level of $12,331 for a one-person household under 65 years of age, but 8% below the 2015 federal poverty level of $16,337 for a single-parent family with a child under 18 years of age (procon.org pro#2). If you put the minimum wage at $9.00, people will be able to live comfortably without unemployment rates going up. However, raising the minimum wage

In Monroe County, Florida, where Key West resides, the living wage is considered to be $13.10; in Portland, Maine, the living wage is $11.16, and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it is $11.01. The highest wage that Barbara was ever offered was $10.00 an hour as a plumber while everywhere else she made either minimum wage or lower with tips. She was barely able to scrape by, and based off the livin wage estimates, would have been lucky if she could have afforded an apartment during her stay in any of the cities in which she had attempted to reside. Whether her wages were simply lower because of her gender was not established, but even if she were making these wages as a male, she would more than likely have to room with someone in order to afford an apartment, something that she said she would not do at the outset of the case study. However, Shepard, should have been able to survive in Charleston if he could maintain a decent tip after all of his moving appointments.

Evidence of Problem Existence: Most of us can't get by on minimum wage pay and leaves people struggling at home. Chris Isidore stated on a article listed on CNN that "About 20% of American adults who have jobs are earning only $10.65 an hour or less, according to Osterman's analysis. Even at 40 hours a week, that amounts to less than $22,314, the poverty level for a family of

The goal of the United States should be to get rid of poverty. That will never happen with such a low minimum wage. If we want people not to rely on public assistance, they must be able to earn enough to feed their

I know from personal experience that it is a rough life without being able to get educated and find a high paying job. The minimum wage is not high enough for people to make a living off of if needed. For example, Colleen, one of Ehrenreich’s coworkers at the hotel in Maine says, “I don’t mind, really, because I guess I’m a simple person, and I don’t want what they