Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich, keynote speaker for the upcoming Symposium on Undergraduate Scholarship, is author of one of the most relevant and 
strikingly honest books on poverty to come out of the last decade. Her book Nickel and Dimed changed the way many Americans look at the minimum wage and the struggles that millions of Americans battle with every day.
Nickel and Dimed is a response to the notion that employment is a guarantee to the good life and that a job can put someone on the path to financial responsibility and stability when the reality is not so cut and dry.
What made this book revolutionary is that it is written by a great with a wealth of statistics on the economics of the working poor, but rather it is written from the first-hand experiences of Ehrenreich, who has a Ph. D in cellular immunology.
Despite Ehrenreich’s education she is at the same level as every other low-income employee, in that she is expected to do a job that requires no skill or training, yet takes more effort and is more taxing than many skilled professions.
To write the book and gain the experience, Ehrenreich attempts full immersion into the life of someone who is surviving below the poverty line in three separate locations around the country. She struggles for housing, struggles to tolerate minimum-wage jobs that strain her mentally and physically, and struggles to juggle her finances as she faces the grips of poverty, depression, and even briefly the political dynamic of fast food.
Nickel and Dimed became important to the consciousness of America because it exposes the misconceptions of the lower class that some Americans may have. Especially now with the outspoken criticisms of the structure of wealth in this country it is a common thing to hear people throw accusations at lower class Americans for feeding off the system and not doing their fair share to seek out wealth through employment.
Ehrenreich exposes the reality, which is that most Americans living below the poverty line are working hard to acquire wealth, the only problem is that the only opportunities they have to earn a living are in working low-wage “zero experience needed” jobs.
Ehrenreich describes these people as “the working poor” who barely make enough to be able to afford their home (if they have one) and in some cases have to work second jobs in order to also support their families. This subjection to a life of poverty helps to explain why some people spend their entire lives in impoverished conditions with little hope of career advancement.
One example in the book is a job Ehrenreich acquired at her local Wal-Mart which required no experience nor talent. As with many low-paying jobs, these jobs are created to be simple so that they can be easily filled and employees can be replaced when necessary.
Jobs are kept with low wages and very minimal “skill” to make positions replaceable in case of conflict with a worker. They do this so that if any employee is suspected of thinking to create a union, they can be fired, and a more submissive employee can be hired quickly in their place.
Ehrenreich criticizes this idea that no skill is needed to go into these low-paying jobs, as she finds all of her experiences to be intense and immensely skill-based.
This idea of accessibility to employment, where a person can easily get hired without even a resume, makes strong in the minds of the employees that they are easily replaceable despite the great amount of effort that they have to put into their jobs just to scrape out living on minimum wage.
Nickel and Dimed is an interesting read for anyone despite their political or economic philosophies, and Ehrenreich does an amazing job conveying the human emotion involved with living the lifestyle that she did, and also conveying the plight of the many other low-wage employees that Ehrenreich works with throughout her experiences.
Ehrenreich is also the author of Bait and Switch and Bright Sided. She will be giving the keynote address at the Symposium on Undergraduate Scholarship April 17.
