by Jinny Vitale

Created on: February 21, 2010   Last Updated: May 31, 2010

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed, the author and her editor pondered the question of how a woman would make a living at $6 or $7 and hour due to being pushed into the labor market with no assistance as a result of welfare reform. This question led Ehrenreich to begin a three month experiment as a low-paid, unskilled, labor worker. Ehrenreich spent one month each in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota hunting for cheap housing and the highest paying unskilled job she could find. In each place Ehrenreich was faced with the difficult, if not near impossible, task of surviving on only what she could earn from these jobs each week. Through Ehrenreich’s journalistic venture into a world quite unlike the one she was used to, it becomes evident that the women that she and her editor contemplated over cannot possibly fare well in such living conditions.

To begin, it is necessary to note that while Ehrenreich was researching the conditions under which people must survive in low paying jobs, she had some significant advantages over her co-workers. Ehrenreich started out with a car and a self-allotted stipend of $1300, without which it would have been difficult to find an apartment or get from one interview and/or job to another in all three states. Yet many of the people Ehrenreich came in contact with did not have an emergency fund to use for an apartment, and they either paid dearly for their car or did not have one, forced instead to rely on expensive and sometimes unreliable public transportation. In addition, Ehrenreich was an older woman with no children or husband to support during this experiment, which subsequently took a great burden off her shoulders because she had only to feed, clothe, and find housing for herself. Her co-workers, however, were not so lucky in this regard.

There are numerous problems and constraints that low skilled women face in the labor market. One is the low pay they receive in comparison to men in the same low skilled jobs, with little or no chance for advancement or pay raises. On the rare occasion that one stays in a low paying job for more than a year and is given a raise, it normally does not exceed more than .50¢ per hour. In a waitressing job that Ehrenreich took when in Florida, the pay per hour was only $2.13 due to the expectation of tips, and that is put forth by the Fair Labor Standards Act. In accordance with this law, any wages for the day that do not equal $5.15 per hour must be compensated for by

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