life and the "Barb" of her Wal-Mart assignment: "Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is the original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real." She notes that Barb is like a slightly less-civilized version of herself, "meaner and slyer … and not quite as smart as I hoped."

If there is any ongoing conflict between characters, then, it is the tense standoff between Barb and Barbara. Ehrenreich's experiences are so compelling to herself and her readers that we often do not notice—or at least, we do not find it odd—how she does not hear her co-workers as much as she simply describes her own woes. Thus, what makes Nickel and Dimed an engaging read also reduces the urgency of these issues. If this were an account of a truly lower-class person working a permanent minimum-wage job, the story would be different, perhaps even inaccessible to middle-class readers who resist the unvarnished truth about the working poor. Members of the actual working class are disposable in Ehrenreich's narrative: the episodic traveling account means all characters besides Ehrenreich are dropped at the end of a chapter, paving the way for a new cast in the next city. The only one whose personal history earns an extended telling is Carolina in Minnesota, who is not a co-worker but a relative of a friend in Ehrenreich's real life. None of Ehrenreich's work compatriots are described beyond a couple of personality traits and statistic-affirming situations.

For the middle-class readers who have long been her audience, Ehrenreich provides a buffer. She is a spy in the house of drudge, an outsider who manages to work her way in. To sympathize with her during this "scientific experiment"—which in itself is another distancing effect: How many working-class people would describe their lives as ongoing experiments in matching wages to expenses?—is to know that all the hardships will soon enough fade for our heroine, disappearing down "the rabbit hole." Ehrenreich is Alice in low-wage Wonderland, and waking from this dream is as simple as returning to her real life. Like Alice, her adventures through the lower class are odd, amusing, and at times grotesque. This brings to mind Scott Sherman's observation in the Columbia Journalism Review:

A striking feature of immersion narratives like London's People of the Abyss and Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier is the extent to which compassion and sympathy co-exist uneasily with revulsion and disapproval…. Passages of this sort tell us something about the immutability of class boundaries; but they also stand as examples of reportorial honesty and, in Orwell's case, narrative sophistication.

Ehrenreich often feels outrage at the indignities she must experience, which she sees as the indignities suffered by all workers in her chosen situation. However, this outrage is matched with an unmistakable exasperation about the lack of resistance her co-workers show against their working situations. Ehrenreich never claims that her co-workers deserved the poor treatment they received, but she often comments at how much of it they tolerate—more than she can, as is proven time and again.

That said, she at least tries to understand the lower-class characters she encounters, to rationalize—if not excuse—their lack of progressive fervor. While she encounters many unlikable co-workers and customers in her account, Ehrenreich often explains the bad behavior or finds a reason to like the person; that is, if the person is lower class. Ehrenreich is considerably less forgiving with the upper- and middle-class homes she cleans for The Maids, exposing the hypocrisy and lack of good taste of various clients. One might wonder why a staunchly working-class hero does not emerge in her narrative—or at least a sympathetic middle-class character besides the princess-in-disguise that is herself.

Consider Ted, the franchise owner of The Maids. Of all the middle-class characters in the novel, he is the least offensive, if still nowhere near heroic. When told there is no key to get into a client's house, his reported response—"Don't do this to me!"—is selfish but not aggressive or mean-spirited. In this book, the lack of malice in any kind of manager is striking. After Holly injures herself on the job, Ehrenreich convinces her to call Ted from the next house. She then insists on speaking to Ted and what follows is an angry tirade by Ehrenreich:

I can't remember the exact words, but I tell him he can't keep putting money above his employees' health and I don't want to hear about "working through it," because this girl is in really bad shape. But he just goes on about "calm down," and meanwhile Holly is hopping around the bathroom, wiping up pubic hairs.

The scene Ehrenreich paints is both amusing and troubling, an excellent example of her gifts as a writer but also of the problems brought about by her aggressively partisan class consciousness. Holly the lower-class worker persists at her job, no matter how humiliating it is or how silly she appears. As the mediator, Ehrenreich vents her anger at the middle-class employer. And Ted, this representative of the middle class, rewards her. She is afraid she will be fired but her co-workers assure her she will not and, indeed, she is not. Instead, he concedes some ground, as Holly is forced to take off the next day—an action Holly considers unjust and which she blames on Ehrenreich's meddling. When Ted later pays extra attention to Ehrenreich, picking her up for a special assignment and giving her a raise, she believes she is being recruited as a stool pigeon. Ted fishes for the names of problem employees, hoping that Erhenreich will supply them now that he has given her a raise: "This must be my cue to name a few names, because this is how Ted operates, my co-workers claim—through snitches and by setting up one woman against another."

Ehrenreich's assumptions are odd, as she is the one who complains about Holly's situation, even "threatening a work stoppage." A kinder interpretation of the situation is that Ted admires her willingness to look out for her co-workers, but does not want grief directed his way. What may be a veiled bribe for Ehrenreich to stop being so abrasive is instead seen as a more malicious ploy, based primarily on "what my co-workers claim." In effect, Ehrenreich plays into the class tensions, the underlying conflict between worker and employer—more so than the other maids, who profess to admire Ted and seek his approval—instead of trying to mediate the two sides.

Considering the resentment Holly ends up feeling for Ehrenreich, perhaps there is some truth in Ted's statement that "you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped." Ehrenreich explains in the "Analysis" chapter why the lower class accept low pay, poor working conditions, and legalized violation of civil rights. However, she never addresses how to help those who do not want to be helped. Instead, she fantasizes about a working-class revolt, a day when minimum-wage earners "are bound to tire of getting so little in return and … demand to be paid what they're worth … and we will all be better off for it in the end."

Is Ehrenreich imagining a people's revolution in classic Marxist fashion (Marxism is the political idea that socialism will lead to a classless society), where the proletariat overthrow the ruling class? Or something less grandiose, a general strike that will force legislation that better serves the needs of all workers? If she is considering the less radical revolt, how will this come about? And why assume that everyone will be better off?

As Sherman discovers in his interview with Ehrenreich in the Columbia Journalism Review, she places little faith in her book causing any real changes in policy; perhaps her time in the servant-class has made her more sharply aware of the realpolitik (politics based on the practical rather than on morals or standards) of the poor. Nickel and Dimed opened a dialogue that does not gloss over the difficulties of class tensions—which in itself is a brave, important act. Having experienced the patchier side of the fence, though, Ehrenreich is now grateful to remain on the greener side, to embrace a middle-class perspective even as she works for her progressive beliefs.

Source: Ray Mescallado, Critical Essay on Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

In the following essay, Sherman analyzes Ehrenreich's complex and often contradictory attitude toward the people she writes about.

A striking feature of immersion narratives like London's People of the Abyss and Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier is the extent to which compassion and sympathy co-exist uneasily with revulsion and disapproval. Jack London possessed a deep empathy for the slum dwellers of turn-of-the-century England, but he still allowed himself to describe them as "stupid and heavy, without imagination." Orwell, recalling his stay in a squalid lodging house in the industrial north of England, confessed: "On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me." Passages of this sort tell us something about the immutability of class boundaries; but they also stand as examples of reportorial honesty and, in Orwell's case, narrative sophistication.

Nickel and Dimed, too, is streaked with contradictory sentiments. Ehrenreich, for instance, writes with considerable feeling about Gail, a "wiry middle-aged waitress" who can't afford a security deposit for an apartment, so she sleeps in her car. "When I moved out of the trailer park," Ehrenreich writes, in the closing lines of her waitressing chapter, "I gave the key to number 46 to Gail and arranged for my deposit to be transferred to her."

But in many other places, Ehrenreich's compassion degenerates into spite. An Alzheimer's patient who threw milk on Ehrenreich is "a tiny, scabrous old lady with wild white hair who looks like she's been folded into her wheelchair and squished." A woman whose home is cleaned by Ehrenreich's crew is "an alumna of an important women's college, now occupying herself by monitoring her investments and the baby's bowel movements." At Wal-Mart the sight of an obese woman fills Ehrenreich with disgust. "Those of us," she writes, "who work in ladies' are for obvious reasons a pretty lean lot … and we live with the fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths."

More illuminating, perhaps, is the anger Ehrenreich directs at some of her co-workers, especially the other maids in Maine, who are bereft of class consciousness and self-esteem. Indeed, the docility and fatalism of the working poor is a primary theme of the book: "For the most part," she writes, "my co-workers seem content to occupy their little niche on the sheer cliff face of class inequality." Even when injured on the job, they prefer to talk about recipes instead of retribution. There is a harrowing moment when "Holly," a maid on her crew, falls into a hole and hurts her ankle; Ehrenreich insists that she get an X-ray immediately—and even calls for a "work stoppage"—but all Holly can do is whimper and go back to cleaning bathrooms on her injured ankle.

Holly's passive response to her injury—she is, first and foremost, terrified of losing her job—leaves Ehrenreich in a red-hot fury: "All I can see is this grass fire raging in the back of my eyes." At the end of the day, on the car ride home, Ehrenreich can think of nothing but the accident, but Holly, still reeling from the pain, "starts up one of those pornographic late-afternoon food conversations she enjoys so much. 'What are you making for dinner tonight, Marge?… Oh, yeah, with tomato sauce?'" Marge, another maid, is previously described as someone "who normally chatters on obliviously about the events in her life ('It was the biggest spider' or 'So she just puts a little mustard right in with the baked beans …')."

These expressions of anger and frustration are the most honest and unsettling portions of Nickel and Dimed honest because Ehrenreich—whose original PMC essay envisioned a working class that could "alter society in its totality"—despises blue-collar apathy, superstition, and conservatism; and unsettling because they remind us that the works of our most humane chroniclers of the poor—Jonathan Kozol, Katherine Boo, the late Michael Harrington—possess a generosity of spirit that is not always evident in Nickel and Dimed.

Source: Scott Sherman, "Class Warrior: Barbara Ehrenreich's Singular Crusade," in Columbia Journalism Review, Vol. 42, No. 4, November-December 2003, p. 34.

In the following essay, Scott posits that Ehrenreich's book is an important literary and social contribution.

Nickel and Dimed exposes the anti-America of flophouses, multiple house sharing, employees sleeping in cars, and the homeless who work forty hours or more weekly. Those who used to be middle class, despite often working two jobs, now endure a daily scramble to prioritize such needs as food, housing, childcare, and health care. One extra expense—like dental work, work uniforms, medication, school supplies, and the like—can "break the camel's back."

So I can't fault Ehrenreich for having stock options and a pension plan while publicly admonishing the excesses of the wealthy. She ponders whether the exurb queens whose houses she and her newfound comrades clean "have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect?" She queries, "Would they be bothered if they did know or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased—boasting to dinner guests for example that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?"

And regarding the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) patrons she serves during her Key West server stint, she writes: they "look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do (and they don't tip) as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original profession." Another poke at hypocrisy comes when Ehrenreich describes how ennui moves her to investigate a Saturday night "tent revival." This passage plunges into a commentary about Jesus being "out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole" thereby stifling his message of Christian charity.

Mostly, she delivers a profoundly poignant description of people, such as a hopeful Czech dishwasher living with a crowd of other Czech "dishers." He can't sleep until one of them goes to work, leaving a vacant bed.

On that note, I hear the ghost of social reformer past, Jacob A. Riis, a police reporter who wrote of and extensively photographed the poor in his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Riis' words could apply to this century: The gap between the classes in which it surges unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless is widening day by day. No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient can close it … I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts.

By the end of Nickel and Dimed I felt thankful to Barbara Ehrenreich for this important literary contribution and call to action that I hope is answered. I believe this book should be required reading for corporate executives and politicians. A bumpersticker once read, "He who has the most toys at the end wins." Is this to be our legacy?

Source: Joni Scott, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Review)," in Humanist, Vol. 61, No. 5, September 2001, p. 40.

In the following essay, Ogyn offers some possible insight into the author's intent in writing this book.

I think the actual purpose of Ehrenreich's experiment becomes clear when identifying the intended audience. What we have is a successful, affluent writer addressing members of her own class. Her intent is to tell people who have never experienced it something of what it is like to work at jobs that do not pay enough to live on. Even more importantly, her intent is to say that her experience "is the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy's lower depths."

Nickel and Dimed is a needed work—engaging, well-researched and written in a directly personal style. Ehrenreich succeeds beautifully in conveying to her middle-class audience that she is just like them and that since she could not support herself, never mind a family, on the jobs available to her, the problem lies in the system of low-paid work, not in the workers. However, beyond my regret that Ehrenreich was perhaps correct in considering her authoritative, middle-class voice necessary to make this point, I have two problems with this book. One is that, although she writes, "low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright," she comes to the conclusion that Barb, who works for Wal-Mart, is "meaner and slyer" than Barbara the writer, and "more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped." Although poverty can have a brutalizing effect on some people, there are demonstrably grudge-holders among the rich and powerful who are not very smart.

My second problem lies with Ehrenreich's attitudes toward fat people. The book contains numerous disdainful comments and one very disturbing rant—"we live in fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths." It is unfortunate that a political writer of her caliber has not only not examined fat hatred, but has contributed to it.

Source: Kya Ogyn, "Can You Live On It?" in Off Our Backs, Vol. 35, January-February 2005, p. 44.