Summary Of The Minimum Wage War By Barbara Ehrenreich

Why does it seem that the working class is set up for failure? Do these workers lack the experience in their chosen fields? Do these employees lack in their work ethic? Does the government need to give more support? Questions like these arise in the story “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America” by Barbara Ehrenreich and in the article “The Minimum-Wage War” by Rolling Stone. At first glance, these writings may seem unrelated. However, the themes of minimum wage and work ethic go hand-in-hand regarding these texts. These writings express the correlation of working a minimum wage job and having a strong work ethic does not always result in enough money to pay for the cost of living. Consequently, unskilled workers become forced to

From the title “The Minimum-Wage War”, it may seem that Ehrenreich’s recollection of minimum wage work may not be as accurate as someone who faces the true pressures of working two minimum wage jobs a week; However, because she put herself in the same conditions, she created a credible experiment. Ehrenreich’s experiment was derived from the question “could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” She worked in various minimum wage environments, such as restaurants, a hotel, a cleaning service, and a nursing home. By working under the harsh conditions of minimum wage work, Ehrenreich discovered the difficulties of managing living expenses with such a limited budget. Despite the harsh nature of the work, there are still skeptics who feel that raising the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs available to minimum wage workers. John Boehner expressed his views,

Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich showed her displeasure for her work, with many of her workers wanting to revolt against the companies they worked for. As for the Rolling Stone article, they put those similar thoughts into actions, voting for (and passing) politicians supporting the increase. Naturally, because Ehrenreich was not in the same city for a long period of time, she didn’t have the choice to vote for politicians in the area; However, Ehrenreich, while working at Walmart, discussed the idea of a worker’s union to her fellow employees. On the other hand, Rolling Stone’s article only discussed elections won by politicians in support of raising minimum