by Barbara Ehrenreich

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review by Doug Bartlett

“MILLIONS OF AMERICANS work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them….” Thus begins her pilgrimage into poverty.

In the classic tradition of Black Like Me (John Howard Griffin), Ehrenreich sheds her Ph.D. along with her upper-middle-class comforts to join the lines of applicants for a minimum-wage job. Could she survive on what she could earn at the bottom? Her three stabs at poverty-level survival took place in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota—sufficiently common locations that would give her a reasonable opportunity for success. Her suspicions were confirmed that without huge compromises and clearly unacceptable sacrifices, a single person cannot live on minimum wage.

But along the way, the experiment provided her with the unique learning experience of immersion into an entirely new culture—one that was exhausting, painful, and often demeaning.

• She learned the humiliation of getting down on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen floor of a palatial home, all the while being watched by the owner who was standing nearby to make sure she didn't miss a spot.
• She experienced rage as she slowly used up her available pocket cash calling agencies and organizations for help, all of which were listed in the yellow pages for dispensing free assistance, but none of which were able to help her, for a variety of unexplainable reasons.
• She learned what it is like to be invisible.
• She proved that the federal government's presumption behind the mid-1990s welfare reform—that a job is the ticket out of poverty—was far from the truth.
• She was perversely elated at being informed by her boss that her wages were higher than the cost of glass cleaner—so don't worry about using too much of it, just get the job done. “It's good to know that something is cheaper than my time, or that in the hierarchy of the company's values I rank above Windex.”

Ehrenreich is a quality writer—make no mistake about that—but what made Nickel and Dimed a New York Times bestseller is its undeniable authenticity: Ehrenreich lived at the bottom and wrote as she experienced it. Her humor, sometimes on the border of acidic, helped keep her sane. On several occasions I couldn't help myself from laughing at her telling of some incongruous experience, even though it almost brought tears at the same time. It probably is helpful that it is such a quick and simple read, easily understood by middle schoolers.

Even though I worked at a Community Action Agency for nine years and thus am more familiar with the theoretical and practical aspects of poverty than many people, I enjoyed Ehrenreich's occasional footnotes, which gave legal or historical parameters for the matter discussed. The short “Evaluation” at the end was also helpful.

Her conclusion that we are developing a “culture of extreme inequality,” that there has been a “cowardly public sector retreat from responsibility” for poverty, and that the much-ballyhooed minimum wage is light-years below a living wage should jolt Christians everywhere. How can those of us comfortably above the poverty line be content to live alongside such a huge underclass without even a moment of thought—here in the prosperous United States of America?

Nickel and Dimed would be a dandy resource for a Sunday school class, a home fellowship, or a group of believers who are looking for ways to share grace with those in need around them. It will be excellent at raising awareness, which was Ehrenreich's purpose. Unfortunately, it is correspondingly weak as a “what-to-do” manifesto.

Addressing the issues of ongoing poverty in America generally takes two forms. First the relieving of the symptoms via food banks, free clothing, gas money to get to the next town, and myriad other helpful actions. The other form is changing the laws and policies that tend to prey on the poor and keep them in poverty. This is much more complex and certainly more challenging to remedy, but should also be on the agenda of concerned Christians.

Persons and groups who appreciate Nickel and Dimed will also appreciate Barbara Ehrenreich's later book, Bait and Switch, in which she again goes undercover to learn the plight of the middle class as they struggle with the “underside of corporate America—the job insecurity, the constant layoffs and downsizings that now occur even in the best of times.”

And for those genuinely interested in learning about the calcifying class stratification in America, I suggest Ruby Payne's now-classic A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which was the foundation work for her numerous and widely-accepted follow-up books.

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