Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find ...
How to live on so little? As a reporter, she did her research by working as a minimum wage worker. As expected, she couldn't afford a lot of things that she used to, because based on her undercover income, she really can't have nice things. But people still smoke. The constant luxury that both r...
This is the story of Barbara's adventures in working low paid jobs in three different places in the US. She presented herself as an ex-homemaker who was looking for a job and she found herself struggling with the balance of work, rent and food. She found herself struggling with the balance and wit...
#1 You can't possible know how it feels to "not get by" when you know at all times that you can always - always - produce your credit card (full of credit of course) from your wallet and just call it a night and go back to your real life doing whatever it is that you want to do because you can.#2 "N...
This book was enjoyable and the topic was interesting. I just think I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it when it first came out. Today things would be even harder for people who have to find a way to survive making minimum wage.
Despite the fact that I've been very lucky in a lot of ways, I could write about my experiences as a waitress, a barista, and an overnight worker in a large corporation like Wal-Mart, and it would sound like I plagiarized every bit of Ehrenreich's book. This is perhaps why I am so frustrated when I...
I am going to be generous and give this book two stars. It's more along the lines of 1.5. My opinion may be due to the fact I had to read parts of this book not once, but twice for my classes. I did not like it. I would even go as far to say that in the ten years since this book's publication, it ha...
The author spends approx 3 months trying to survive while working minimum wage jobs. She spends time in Florida, Minnesota, and Maine working and trying to find suitable housing. What she learned will come as no surprise. It is not possible to have housing, food, transportation, and child care by w...
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