The book “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich is about her experience as an undercover low wage worker. Barbara moves to three different towns and lives as if she has no money and no experience. She learns that being a low wage worker is hard work and unjust. Barbara Ehrenreich goal in writing this book was to make others aware of the level of poverty in the United States, she used her personal experiences and knowledge to uncover what actually living on minimum wage is like.
Barbara starts out near her home town in Florida. She applies for many jobs and searches for affordable housing, she soon learns that any decent housing cost way more for rent then she can afford with a seven dollar an hour pay check. When she applies for jobs she says that she has no experience or high level education but in actuality she has a PHD in Biology. She does this so that she can truly understand how interviewing for a job would be if she was a low wage worker. She is a well educated woman in the middle class but pretends to be a homemaker joining the workforce. Barbara uses her background and also the fact that she is trying to live in their shoes to show her Ethos. She has trouble finding a job, just because the store says they are hiring does not mean they necessarily are they could just want to have many applications on file to compensate for the high overturn rate. People move in and out of jobs because they need more money and more opportunities this proves her point that there is a real problem with the minimum wage.
In Key West she points out the flaws in the workforce for low wage workers. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary there are a host of special cost” (27). She soon learns that at the jobs that are considered unskilled labor you are actually required to have many skills. They take tremendous physical and mental strength and that is coming from a very well educated women. She realizes that it is actually so much...