|a Introduction: Getting ready - Serving in Florida - Scrubbing in Maine - Selling in Minnesota - Evaluation - Reader's guide. |a Nickel and dimed : |b on (not) getting by in America / |c Barbara Ehrenreich. |a BKL |b eng |c BKL |d WRJ |d MUS |d ZQP |d XY4 |d BAKER |d E3V In her new afterword she explains why, ten years on in America this book is more relevant than ever. You will never see anything, from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal, quite the same way again. Read it for the author's perspective and for a rare view of how 'prosperity' looks from the bottom. This work reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity, a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategems for survival. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly 'unskilled,' and that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort.

She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, the author decided to join them. Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages.

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