The subtitle of Nickel and Dimed is
On (Not) Getting By in America. It is important to note how
Ehrenreich chose to put "not" in parentheses, and that choice on her part is directly
related to her primary theme which is that it is virtually impossible to provide basic
needs for one's self by working one minimum wage job. While the reality is that most
minimum wage workers are forced into working more than one job to make ends meet,
Ehnrenreich's philosophy is that if the government sets a "minimum" wage, shouldn't that
wage at least be enough for someone to provide his or her basic
necessities?
For the author, her most significant moral
dilemma seems to be when she works for a housekeeping company as a maid. She finds
herself pondering what makes it okay or moral in America--the land of opportunity--for
one person to have so much that he or she pays another person (who is supposed to be
equal) to scrub one's toilet. She also struggles when one of her coworkers (from
"Scrubbing in Maine") is malnourished and obviously weak yet refuses to get help.
Ehrenreich believes that it is not her coworker's choice to keep plodding painfully
through life but that she has an obligation to do something about her coworker's
plight. She stresses this idea through other examples in the
book.
One thing to be careful of when reading Ehrenreich's
book is that she has an agenda when she sets out on her "experiment"; so you have to
weigh her objectivity cautiously. An interesting counterargument to Ehrenreich's book
and themes is Adam Shepherd's Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for
the American Dream. He, too, has an agenda--to prove Ehrenreich wrong; so it
is good to read both and then to decide which you think is a more realistic portrayal of
life in minimum-wage America.
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