Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel And Dimed Analysis

Nowadays, twenty-first century has pushed the individuals to live in a period where life could be seen as a binary opposition such as stability and instability, or opportunity and threat, or freedom and restraint. Unfortunately, a rising percentage of the population started to experience a chronic deprivation which sometimes might go as far as below the basic needs for survival of a human being. This kind of group of people are considered to be a new growing social class known as ‘precariat’. The first half of the essay is going to examine the challenges and struggles of the precariat society using Barbara Ehrenreich’s case studies, while the second part will investigate whether those subjects are able to characterize that they are being

Therefore, she ought to execute two jobs for the sake of her survival, one of them is housecleaning and the other one is a dietary aide at a residential facility. Furthermore, those jobs contributed to her in-depth comprehension of the struggles her co-workers go through as being part of this class society. The first insecurity and challenge regarding this class can be found in the inability to have a permanent housing thus the individuals are content with having a temporary place which is entirely dependent on a temporary low-paid jobs as Ehrenreich states about a woman living in a motel, “she, for example, has been living at the Blue Haven for eleven years now.” (Nickel and Dimed 70) Moreover, the financial problem is more excruciating than one could suspect as one of her colleagues “doesn’t have any money to buy lunch”, “she doesn’t have eighty-nine cents.” (Nickel and Dimed 78) The provided evidence is precisely what Standing emphasizes about this insecurity as the basic needs for existence are denied. In addition to their financial situation, the subjects are not obtaining any benefits which is another obstacle for them when they need health assistance. Correspondingly, Ehrenreich witnessed a couple of examples of what the wageworkers are forced to endure. For instance, one of her co-workers

Thus, Guy Standing refer to the people of this class as denizens because their existence is as valuable as only when they are needed to perform the job many people reject doing themselves. Devastatingly, the individuals are living to work and not work to live as they are unable to experience the beauty and the full meaning of life but rather its roughness. They are the invisibles of our society. Therefore, here one can no longer talk about binary oppositions because this class is only facing a “real difficulty if not actual misery.” (Nickel and Dimed