nickel and dimed summary

By waiting in a room with posters saying why unions are bad for business, Barbara realizes they don’t trust her enough to hire her yet on face value but wants them too badly not to get the job. Access a free summary of Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich and 20,000 other business, leadership and nonfiction books on getAbstract. In Nickeled and Dimed, Ehrenreich put herself into the world of the poor working citizen, establishing a low-rent living situation and working a low-wage job, and trying to find if she can acquire the necessary funds to live in each area. The author of the book “Nickel and Dimed” details her experiences in each city she visits. Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction. People ask if she can’t tell that she’s not educated, but Barbara is just inexperienced in the workforce. The manager there assures her that it will be easy work and doesn’t take much time out of her day, so she can still look for other jobs during the afternoon hours. Rents are sensitive to market forces, but wages aren’t. The rent goes up shortly after her move and Ehrenreich winds up paying $49.95 a night for a room at Comfort Inn—but that won’t last long either. She realizes that he’s dependent on her, just like the cooks are dependent on the waitresses. Barbara meets her supervisor, Steve. She’s moved to another room with a torn screen and no fan. She applies for a job at Rainbow supermarket where they schedule her different days off every week. She asks why everyone is worried about Ted—he can hire anyone to do this job. She had lunch with her editor from Harper’s magazine, and they were discussing future articles. If someone is sick or overwhelmed by life, the others support them until they feel better again. It’s difficult to see how the cleaners benefit from working for The Maids, since they only earn $6.65 per hour and The Maids charges $25 per person-hour. One of the only forms of rebellion she’s witnessed is theft, which had led to one person being fired after a failed drug test. The house is so big that Barbara compares it to an ocean liner. At Key West, Ehrenreich works as a … In this new fantasy, Barbara is part of a mystic order performing hated tasks cheerfully rather than working for The Maids cleaning service. He spends a lot of time making sure that his employees are taking attendance in meetings. They enjoy their freedom from supervision and make friends easily. But Mrs. W., who is watching her work, wants to make sure nothing was missed so she can be satisfied with the job done. When Barbara arrives at the Clearview, she finds that her room has a backed-up sewage system and is covered in feces. Servers also have to deal with fifty customers at once who come from tour buses. Want to get smarter, faster? Barbara completes a personal 3-minute interview and says she wants to help people with asthma by selling them appliances from Filter Queen (a vacuum cleaner company). She calls about cleaning jobs, warehouse jobs, nursing home jobs and manufacturing positions. The job can be difficult because he needs to keep an eye on the residents while making sure there’s always a new rack ready as soon as one is done washing. This means that it’s impossible for her to go to other job interviews after work because there’s no way she can be in presentable condition at those times. She gets the first two jobs she applies for. She likes Joan, who is a feminist, as well as Gail and Lionel, the servers. MonkeyNotes Study Guides Download Store-Downloadable Study Guides/Book Summary,Book Notes,Notes,Chapter Summary/Synopsis. Barbara had set aside $1,300 for start-up costs, but now she realizes that she won’t have enough money to pay for her deposit and first month’s rent. She also posits that one low-wage job is often not enough to support one person (let alone a family); with inflating housing prices and stagnant wages, this practice increasingly becomes difficult to maintain. On the lunch break, the women eat sandwiches and fruit. The rent is $825 per month, which Barbara thinks isn’t too bad, even though there are drug dealers on the block and the dining room ceiling leaks. The help-wanted ads mentioned a “mothers’ shift” for telemarketing fairs and the radio advertised job fairs as well. Holly is visibly ill (she only eats tiny cracker sandwiches every afternoon in the car) and manages to feed herself, her husband, and an elderly relative on her salary minus rent ($30-50 per week). Then, after setting these rules, Barbara bent them several times by convincing interviewers of certain things during interviews (like speaking basic German or French when applying for waiter positions). Barbara did not want to be intrusive, so she listened. She thinks she’ll become a star in the facility and make up for her father’s more impersonal care until one little old lady throws milk all over her. Barbara never finds out what happened to George. The woman mixes Barbara up with someone else who worked at Wal-Mart who came in a few days ago. Next, Ehrenreich trains to be a maid. Key Takeaways: Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich worked at several low-wage jobs in order to immerse herself in the experience of low-wage workers in the United States. She realizes she will have to take on multiple jobs to make ends meet and notes that economic laws don’t seem to apply in this situation. Applying for these types of jobs are humbling because they force you to offer yourself up as a job candidate in exchange for nothing at all. All that is left is for her to pass a drug test, which she hopes will go well because of something in her past involving marijuana. After training, Ehrenreich begins working as a maid for Ted’s company “The Maids”, which charges $25 per hour per person. Another woman, Marlene says that Wal-Mart would rather keep hiring new people than treat their current ones well—they bring in new people for orientation all the time. The maids cannot drink while they’re inside the house because they would get dehydrated. She’s watched videos of cleaning tips and tricks, but she realizes that the methods shown in those videos are different from what her mother taught her. She does this because she doesn’t have enough money to live on her own. Eventually, she learned that her coworkers seemed to have financial problems. Barbara can’t understand why Melissa worries about wasted labor. She also noted that Portland was eager for employees during an earlier visit, so she decided to move there. A woman gave her a Bible as well as some other pamphlets that were meant to help her live properly according to Christian beliefs. It is clear to Barbara and readers that they’re homeless, although it seems like they just don’t have enough funds to pay for a regular apartment. Barbara doesn’t really like decorating and isn’t a very good decorator. [4], The book's cover features a waitress, Kimmie Jo Christianson, giving a worried look over her shoulder. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, published in 2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a book in which the author goes “undercover” and investigates the lives of the working poor by living and working in similar conditions. She could have been able to pay the rent if she had stayed in her efficiency apartment with $22 left over (though sooner or later she would have needed to spend something on medical and dental care). However, the book also received criticism from conservative students at UNC (University of North Carolina) because they thought that it had Marxist undertones and that it wasn’t well written. Carrie 's review Aug 17, 2008 did not like it. 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