by Maylin Ramos

Created on: May 31, 2011

The author of this book and writer of Harper's Magazine, Ehrenreich, was given a year-long's worth assignment in the theme of poverty. "How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?" (pg1)

She was to go undercover out into the uneducated market, meaning she had to work for minimum wage and see if she can make it in order to later on better educate others on the theme of poverty with this book. By no means was she allowed to use her background as a writer or any college degree she previously earned. She also had to take the highest paying job offered and tried her best to hold on to it, and keep the cheapest accommodations she found with an acceptable amount of privacy and safety.

After searching through want ads and applying at local hotels and supermarkets, she interviews at her next stop: Winn Dixie. Unfortunately, their interviews are done on-line and feature a 20 minute multiple choice questionnaire, providing no space for an interviewer to notice a personality. She aced the Winn Dixie interview, but declines the offer when she gets hired somewhere else that pays a little more. As part of her first assignment, she worked as a waitress at a little family owned barbeque restaurant called “The Heartside” in the Key West area in Florida for about two weeks at a wage of $2.43 an hour plus tips. She then works at several other locations as a hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide in Maine, and as a Wal-Mart associate in Minnesota. As the book progresses, she explains in detail her encounters with customers and how she found herself emotionally attached to some of her co-workers.

Part two of the book is titled “Scrubbing in Maine”. Here she states that “on Cape Cod, rising rents for apartments and houses are driving the working class into motels, where a room might go for $880 a month.” She then applies at “Merry Maids” and is offered $200 to $250 a week for an average of forty hours’ worth of work. She realizes that one job simply will not be enough due to the law of supply and demand; jobs are so cheap that people are encouraged to take on as many as possible. Luckily, she picks up another job at a nursing home only on the weekends. It is so intriguing how, throughout the entire book, Ehrenreich takes an account of all her expenses; including what she eats and where, gas prices, and the cost of anything else needed to be purchased and places that into correlation with how much she earns. The results are realistically depressing. She is constantly broke, with barely enough money to eat; however, stated at the beginning of the book, Ehrenreich mentioned that she was not willing to starve so she will “cheat” by using her credit card to eat when out of money. Imagine what life entails for the lower classes that do not have that luxury? Overall, this is an excellentand absolutely amazing book that should be recommended to everyone everywhere from all ages and class; a real eye opener to America’s economic reality.

“It inspired and A&E documentary called Wage Slaves and was transformed into a fast, funny play that has been performed in major theaters as well as many smaller venues throughout the country.”(pg 224; the Afterword)

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