Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich book cover for the Book of the Day sociology book review

Our score

4.1/ 5

Excellent

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EDITION PUBLISHEDAugust 2011

Genres

Non-Fiction Sociology Politics

Themes

The working poorThe dignity of laborCorporate controlThe gap between policy and survival

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Name: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Price: 11.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover in America's low-wage economy, taking jobs as a waitress, a maid, and a big-box clerk to test whether anyone can actually survive on them. The result is a wry, furious, brisk dispatch from the working poor that has lost almost none of its sting.

The Review

Our take

Nickel and Dimed began as a magazine assignment and grew into a small classic of immersion journalism. Ehrenreich, a writer with a PhD and a comfortable life, sets out to learn whether anyone can really survive on the wages paid to waitresses, hotel maids, and discount-store clerks. She moves from city to city, takes the jobs for real, rents the cheapest housing she can find, and tries to make the math work. The spoiler, which she'd be the first to give you, is that it mostly doesn't.

What keeps the book from sliding into stunt journalism is Ehrenreich's honesty about the limits of her own experiment. She has an escape hatch the people beside her don't, a savings account, a return ticket to her real life, and she says so plainly and repeatedly. But within those acknowledged limits she is a sharp, mordant observer, alert to the small daily indignities: the drug tests, the petty surveillance, the managerial scripts, the way sheer exhaustion erodes the very ambition that's supposed to lift a worker out of poverty.

The prose is as much of a draw as the reporting. Ehrenreich is funny in a way that sharpens rather than softens her anger, and her eye for the absurdities of corporate management culture has aged remarkably well. The scenes of mandatory training videos and forced workplace cheer could have been filmed last week, and her account of how housing costs quietly devour a low wage feels, if anything, more urgent now than when she wrote it.

Decades on, some of the specifics have shifted, the gig economy she didn't quite anticipate, the dollar figures that now read as quaint, but the central finding hasn't budged: the people who keep the country running often cannot afford to live in it. The book is short, brisk, and built to provoke argument, which is precisely what it has done for two generations of readers and assigned students. As an accessible front door into a conversation that never went away, it remains hard to beat, and Ehrenreich's voice, skeptical and humane at once, is the reason it endures.

Why you should read

Readers new to writing on low-wage work and inequality
Fans of immersion and undercover journalism
Anyone who likes reporting with a sharp comic edge

What to expect

First-person undercover reporting
Three low-wage jobs in three cities
Mordant humor over dry statistics
A brisk, provocative read

What gives the book its staying power, beyond the reporting, is Ehrenreich's refusal to flatter either her subjects or herself. She admits her own snobberies, her flashes of impatience, the moments she nearly quit. That candor earns the reader's trust, and it lets her land her broader point without preaching: that an economy can run on the labor of people it has decided not to pay enough to live on, and that most of us are trained not to see it. You finish the book noticing the workers you used to walk past, which may be the most a short book of this kind can hope to do.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.1/ 5

Excellent

Listen to Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

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Common questions

What is Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America about?: Nickel and Dimed began as a magazine assignment and grew into a small classic of immersion journalism. Ehrenreich, a writer with a PhD and a comfortable life, sets out to learn whether anyone can really survive on the wages paid to waitresses, hotel maids, and discount-store clerks. She moves from…
Is Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America worth reading?: We scored Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America 4.1 out of 5. Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover in America's low-wage economy, taking jobs as a waitress, a maid, and a big-box clerk to test whether anyone can actually survive on them. The result is a wry, furious, brisk dispatch from the working poor that has lost almost none of its sting.