Even allowing herself a “start up” amount of $1,300 (for rent, deposit, food, etc.) for her first few weeks as a minimum wage earner, she was soon forced to take a second job. She earned an average of $7 an hour, which would be equal to about $9 an hour in 2011. When she was researching and writing the first edition of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich took jobs as a waitress, a hotel maid, a maid with a house cleaning service, an aide nursing home, and a retail clerk at Wal-Mart. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list-a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

The results of her investigation, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, has recently been published in a tenth anniversary edition with a new afterword by Ehrenreich, in which she wonders if the current economic hardships America is facing will finally break our society’s cycle of poverty and punishment.īlockquoteThe official level of poverty increasing-to over 14 percent in 2010-some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. She began as a waitress in a family restaurant in Florida, for $2.43 an hour plus tips. In 1998, writer Barbara Ehrenreich embarked upon a journey through a series of unskilled jobs to discover how the working poor of America existed on such meager wages.

And dimed