With some 12 million women being pushed into the labour market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at six to seven USD an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do; she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job and tried to make ends meet.

As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl", trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at USD 675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaner and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as, "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behaviour for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.

So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the people who brought us welfare reform?" No, even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week and still almost ends up in a shelter.

As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humour and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are cheap in comparison to the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless.

With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed

(1) Starting out is always hard and it takes more money until you are settled in a certain routine - by switching jobs too often she does not acknowlege that.

(2) I was a single mom with three jobs and went to college - looking back I have no idea how I did it. I did not get state benefits because I was working, but I managed to pull myself out of the swamp and I am "middle class" now, even though I was really poor (and eating spaghettis out of a tin if I had to)

(3) Her approach of life-style is too much middle class. You can get used to everything, really, also to living in a car. Once, to save money (before I had a baby) I lived in a former bathroom, barely big enough to put in my bed. I did not feel deprived after a while - you just get used to things.

(4) I think the poor use different tactics and approaches than she does. At least I was for sometime sharing a bedroom when I was in college and the rent was unbelievable high. I always picked restaurant jobs if I had the chance because usually you get one to two meals a day, so that saves money, too. I bought a lot of stuff second hand. If I was running short of money, I'd sell some CDs or stuff. I always got by - on very little money.

But it was interesting!


confusing the issue   January 29, 2005
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

First, I must say that, for all its faults, this is a book worth reading. It needed to be written, and I applaud the author for doing what she did-an attempt to support herself on minim wage jobs for a year. She shares many telling details of life among the desperately poor, including the highly questionable practices of such employers as Merry Maids and Wal-mart. She makes astute observations regarding human behavior and quality of life in this under-studied group of Americans.

I do, however, have some serious gripes with Ehrenreich's book. Mainly, I feel that she weakened her own arguments by her inability to stick to her subject. Ehrenreich takes frequent detours onto topics that are not really related to being poor.

Ehrenreich is, in fact, experiencing at least two kinds of culture shock in the course of her experiment. The first culture shock, which she recognizes and intends to write about, is going from her upper middle class income to at or near poverty level. The second, equally significant culture shock, of which she seems only dimly aware, is going from a self-employed journalist to a wage-earner.

In order to achieve maximum impact with her book, Ehrenreich needs to stick to the topics specific to poverty, because this is what she purports to be writing about. However, she continually branches off into complaints involving issues that are true of _many_ wage-earners at all economic levels. These two states-poverty and wage earner-are _not_ the same. Ehrenreich, however, doesn't seem to make the distinction.

For instance, she spends considerable time griping about "chemically Nazi America." She feels that drugs should be legalized and is very angry that she must undergo drug testing. This would, perhaps, make a suitable topic for another book, but it is _not_ an experience specific to minimum wage workers. Drug testing is very common among many classes of wage earners in America-a fact that she briefly acknowledges, but then goes right on to speak about at length. Ehrenreich is angered particularly because she has been using marijuana and must undergo a self-imposed cleansing before she can pass the test. This, again, is not an issue specific to minimum wage earners. She is confusing her issue and giving her opponents ammunition-something I find distressing, because I do sympathize with her purported topic.

Another item Ehrenreich finds infuriating is that she's not allowed to curse at work. Ehrenreich does not seem to realize that, as a journalist, she is in a very linguistically privileged class of workers. Even most self-employed people can not afford to use lots of four-letter words in the course of their business day if they wish to maintain their clientele, and most wage earners at any level will find foul language frowned up at work. Journalists have a linguistic freedom that goes well beyond most other Americans at work. This is not closely related to the plight of minimum wage workers.

Aside from her periodic forays into matters non-poverty-related, the other serious flaw in the book is that it makes no attempt to address the most serious argument against raising minim wage-how will you keep all other costs of living from not simply escalating as well? Without at least attempting to answer this question, I feel that the book's conclusion lacks conviction and punch. This is too bad, because the topic is important, and the observations in the book are worth reading-so long readers are willing to sift the material with a critical eye.