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The cover of Nickel and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich, 2001

A journalist works as a waitress, maid, nursing home aide and retail clerk to test whether low wages cover rent and food, and finds wages too low, rents too high.

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5 parts, about 19 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • A journalist takes low wage jobs in three states to test whether the pay can cover rent and food
  • Shows the hidden costs of being poor, from weekly motel rooms to no deposit for an apartment
  • Reported from inside the work itself, with coworkers, bosses, drug tests and personality surveys up close

Who it is for

  • Readers who never had to live on hourly pay
  • Policy students weighing wages against housing costs
  • Managers who set pay and rules for frontline staff

What the summary covers

  1. Getting Ready2 min
  2. Serving in Florida4 min
  3. Scrubbing in Maine5 min
  4. Selling in Minnesota5 min
  5. Evaluation3 min

Recommended by

  • Diane SawyerBroadcast journalist and former ABC News anchor
    Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.

About the author

  • Barbara EhrenreichAmerican author and political activist who died in 2022
    • Born in 1941 in Butte, Montana, then a blue collar mining town, to a father who was a miner.
    • Went to Reed College, then to graduate school at Rockefeller University, moving from theoretical physics to molecular biology and then cell biology.
    • Earned a Ph.D. at Rockefeller University.
    • After her first child was born in 1970 she joined the women's health movement, and with Deirdre English co wrote the pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses.
    • Left a teaching job at the State University of New York at Old Westbury to write full time.
    • Split her work between journalism on injustice and inequality, history minded books, and activism on health care, peace, women's rights and economic justice.
    • Founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project in 2012 to support journalism on poverty and inequality by a new generation of journalists.
    • Won the 2018 Erasmus Prize, which cited her as a pioneer of participatory journalism.

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