Horrigan: Ten years of 'Nickel and Dimed'

Horrigan: Ten years of 'Nickel and Dimed'



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In the 10 years since Metropolitan Books published Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," a lot of things have happened to the working poor in America, most of them bad.

Oh sure, there was some good news. The minimum wage was increased in 2007, rising in increments from $5.15 then to $7.25 now. This was offset by rising costs in everything else that people need to live, particularly health care and gasoline.

"Working poor" is defined narrowly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as "persons who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force during the year (working or looking for work), but whose incomes fell below the official poverty level."

If you go out to the unofficial just-scraping-by "low-income" threshold of 200 percent of poverty level ($44,700 for a family of four), you'll find nearly one in three American families living there.

So the working poor of 2001 actually have a lot more company these days, which would be good news except it means more people competing for the same or fewer number of jobs, which holds down wages and makes everybody's problems worse.

"Nickel and Dimed" was a surprise best-seller in 2001, coming as a revelation to a lot of people who'd never been poor. Here was a woman with a Ph.D. in cellular biology who'd become a journalist, essayist and social activist. At the age of 58, she decided to go to work for three months in a variety of service jobs just to see what it was like.

She worked as a hotel maid, a waitress, a nursing home aide, a house cleaner and a Wal-Mart "associate." She worked in three different cities, trying to find housing and enough to eat. She wasn't trying to raise kids or save money. She just wanted to get by.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/kevin-horrigan/article_405c8b88-6420-5d05-b725-30fc5edf43ec.html#ixzz1WWEIomlR