This is an interesting and unfortunately always timely book. The concept of this book is that longform research journalist and commentator Barbara Ehrenreich goes “undercover” in some leading service industries in order to look into the issues with minimum wage, housing, and other personal economic issues facing a lot of lower income workers in the USA. She chooses three areas of the country (Florida, Minnesota, and Maine) and three industries (waiting, cleaning, and retail) to look into these issues.
She finds, to no one’s surprise, that the math is nearly impossible and deeply razor thin for anyone to get by on these kinds of jobs with any kind of remote security at all.
But this is the obvious conclusion. For me this book is righteous in its goals and conclusions, but also deeply flawed in its methodology and impact. The issues with wage stagnation, minimum wage, and other related issues are both kind of obvious and readily apparent, but a book like this doesn’t really show that. It instead creates anecdotal data (which could weaken the over all case of the discussion in general) and the anecdotal evidence doesn’t really create the clear argument for system wide change.
I also think that her role her should involve more systemic and systematic reporting on the data. It’s styled as a kind of Nellie Bly/Hull House kind of book and that’s good to produce that kind of book, but what does it do to fix the issue? Or more so, how does individualized (and fabricated — contrived) circumstances adequately address the entire issues with late (and present) capitalism?
So my issue isn’t that it’s bad or even all that flawed; it’s just inherently limited.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551105952&sr=8-1&keywords=nickel+and+dimed)
