She also details several individuals in management roles who served mainly to interfere with worker productivity, to force employees to undertake pointless tasks, and to make the entire low-wage work experience even more miserable. Constant and repeated movement creates a risk of repetitive stress injury pain must often be worked through to hold a job in a market with constant turnover and the days are filled with degrading and uninteresting tasks (e.g. in cell biology, she found that manual labor required highly demanding feats of stamina, focus, memory, quick thinking, and fast learning. Social and economic issues Įhrenreich investigates many of the difficulties low wage workers face, including the hidden costs involved in such necessities as shelter (the poor often have to spend much more on daily hotel costs than they would pay to rent an apartment if they could afford the security deposit and first-and-last month fees) and food (e.g., the poor have to buy food that is both more expensive and less healthy than they would if they had access to refrigeration and appliances needed to cook).įoremost, Ehrenreich attacks the notion that low-wage jobs require only unskilled labor. In 2019, the book was ranked 13th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Ehrenreich later wrote a companion book, Bait and Switch, (published September 2005), about her attempt to find a white-collar job.
It was expanded from an article she wrote from a January 1999 issue of Harper's magazine.
The book was first published in 2001 by Metropolitan Books. The events related in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich.
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