"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" Quotes
In "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America," Barbara Ehrenreich investigates the struggles of low-wage workers in the United States by immersing herself in minimum-wage jobs to expose the harsh realities of trying to make ends meet.
nonfiction | 240 pages | Published in NaN
Quotes
The idea was to spend a month in each setting, working full-time, and living as close to the minimum-wage level as possible.
What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.
The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled.
If you're constantly worried about money, it affects your entire life.
You can't really live on a minimum wage. You can survive, barely, but you can't live.
There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs.
The 'working poor' is a term I heard a lot, but what does it really mean? It means you work hard but your wages are too low to live on.
The poor have to be creative to survive, and creativity takes time and energy.
The fact that I'm doing this on purpose makes it seem like a game, or a dare, but for millions of Americans, this is a reality.
Somebody has to do the work that keeps civilization functioning, and you can’t argue that only the lazy or stupid are sentenced to this life.
