Analysis Of Minimum Wage In Nickel And Dimed By Barbara Ehrenreich

The solution to the minimum-wage problem that haunts American workers in the 21st century is to strive for lower everyday expenses rather than for a higher minimum wage. The renowned author Barbara Ehrenreich, in her informational novel Nickel and Dimed, tells the story of how she performed a social experiment by working several minimum wage jobs, while living a lifestyle of a low-wage worker. In her novel, Ehrenreich concludes that minimum wage workers “in good health” can “barely support [themselves]” (199). Even though Ehrenreich earned “$1039 in one month,” at the end of the month she only had “$22 left over” as she had to spend “$517” on food and gas, and “$500” to pay her rent (197). As evident, Ehrenreich’s wage is not the cause of her

Lowering rents would decrease the amount of cheap housing available as landlords would not be willing to have people living in their homes at a lower rent. Evidently, the most obvious solutions - lowering rents and increasing the minimum wage - would just worsen the situation. Consequently, a different approach would be to lower the workers’ everyday expenses. The government could subsidize free public transportation, which will enable minimum-wage workers to cut their expenses on gas as they will be able to utilize the government-provided buses and trains to and fro from work. Although large urban cities such as New York City already have cheap public transportation, small towns lack these facilities and government help in this field would definitely decrease expenses for workers. However, this solution raises the question: how will the government fund the free buses and trains? In her novel, Ehrenreich mentions that “the poor people do not stand a chance” against the rich as the wealthy are numerous due to their high “executive salaries”