Ehrenreich's publisher gave her the assignment to take a series of minimum wage jobs in different cities. Her goal was to answer the question: "How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?" These were her ground rules: Go to a city and look for a job without using any skills from her education (Ph.D. in biology) or her previous work (author and essayist). Take the highest-paying job she could get and live in the cheapest housing she could find. Between 1998 to 2000 she worked as a waitress in Key West, Florida, as a cleaning woman and as a nursing home worker in Portland, Maine (where she had to take two jobs to try to make ends meet), and as a "sales associate" in a Wal-Mart in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Her wages ranged from $5.15 to $7.00 an hour, which translates into $10,700 to $14,560 per year. There were few or no fringe benefits. In only one case was even minimal health insurance available and she would have had to pay for part of that our of her $7.00 an hour wages.
The book is very readable. Ehrenreich relates her experiences with lots of local color and humor. But the account is sobering. Hidden behind media headlines shouting "prosperity" is the whisper of the millions of people who are not prosperous and who, despite their dreams, have virtually no chance of breaking free from the grind of working too long for too little. We meet some of them, Ehrenreich's co-workers, in Nickel and Dimed.
Ehrenreich's account becomes even more sobering when you consider that her experience was not really a "worst-case" scenario. After all, she had a car. She paid for her series of "Rent-A-Wreck" vehicles using her credit card. When she got sick, rather than jeopardize her health for the sake of a story, she called her own doctor and used pre-existing personal health insurance to get the medicine she needed. These are safety nets that true minimum wage earners normally do not have. This makes you realize how precarious life is in the universe of "unskilled" labor: when your car breaks down, how will you get the money to repair it? If you are sick, how do you pay for health care and medicine and how do you make up for the lost wages?
Ehrenreich cites one study showing that almost 30% of our workforce was paid $8 an hour or less in 1998. Think of who you encounter in your life - the women and men who clean your office, serve your food, and ring up your purchases at the gas station, grocery store, Wal-Mart or Super-K. They are all around us. This book will affect how you think about them and (hopefully) how you treat them. As another reviewer puts it, Ehrenreich's goal is to try to "create a less divided society". Read this book. See if it affects how you treat those "unskilled" workers you encounter. If you have more patience and understanding for them, then you and society will be one step closer to her goal.