Her first place was a small rented efficiency that went for $500 which was cheaper and nicer than the trailer she looked at, but it was also a forty-five-minute drive to the eventual job she would get. From Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a house cleaner, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart salesperson.In Florida, she went to Key West and tried to get a job working as a hotel worker but that backfired and she instead got a job waiting tables instead of at a hotel chain's restaurant. So soon she is spending about a month in different locations trying to live off of $6 to $7 dollars. She said someone should go undercover and investigate this and he said why don't you. In 1998, writer Barbara Ehrenreich was looking for a new story to write for Harper's and was having lunch with the editor when the conversation turned to the topic of people going off welfare and going into the workforce and having trouble making it. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity-a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk.
To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job-any job-can be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted
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