Nickel and Dimed
Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't just want us to feel sorry for the kind of low-wage, no-benefit worker that she profiles in her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. It's not that she would mind your feeling compassion or pity for them, but rather that she is interested in making a larger point: Those low-wage workers - in restaurants and Walmarts and Home Depots and Kohls - across the nation are actually supporting the rest of us in the kind of middle-class life that we have This will probably be a shocking statement to many because few of us want to think that we owe our own prosperity (even if it happens to be a very modest level of prosperity) to the exploitation of someone else. But Ehrenreich knows that everyone living in the United States who isn't himself or herself at the very bottom of the economic ladder is depending upon the underpaid work of others . This is a topic that she has explored before in looking at the dynamic between American consumers and foreign workers. When Americans buy cheap T-shirts at Target or cheap brake pads at Napa, they are taking advantage of the fact that someone on the othe
She wants to make us feel complicit, and she does. And because we listen to her we see the world around us differently and most particularly we actually see all of the minimum wage workers that we encounter each day as people, and people who are helping us live a better life than they themselves have. Many workers are able to improve their lot (if only incrementally) and to some extent the work provided by American corporations in places like Bangladesh and Mexico provides women (because they are wage-earners) with more political and cultural power than they would have otherwise. We like a person who can say: "If you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically facist American, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker" (p. We can say to ourselves that, after all, $3 a day in Bangladesh is a lot of money, and so we're actually supporting Third World workers and allowing them to obtain a level of affluence that they could otherwise never obtain. While we may talk about the virtues of $3 in Dhaka, we all know that minimum wage - or $2. It's easier for readers to forget or dismiss the treatment of foreign workers because they are so conveniently, well, foreign. The fact that she is able to cloak her anger in humor throughout the book also makes her argument more compelling. r side of the world is someone working in conditions that could bring prison terms to factory managers in the United States for wages that would also get an American employer thrown in jail.
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