She also heard complaints that programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, dubbed “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families” by some applicants, had requirements that people found difficult to meet (such as applying for forty jobs a week with no car or gas money) and indifferent administrators. Others, though, had had to make unfortunate sacrifices: they’d cut back on medical care (often by dropping prescriptions), taken to scrounging for food (by attending food auctions or hunting), and doubled up on the number of families living in apartments. In some cases, Ehrenreich found, there had been little change: those living on the edge of poverty in 2001 were still living on the edge of poverty. The situation has altered so drastically, she writes, that she could never replicate her experiment today.Įhrenreich reached out to some of the blue-collar workers she’d met (and also interviewed new subjects) in part to correct what she sees as a recent media bias in favor of the middle class (much media coverage has focussed on people who used to be middle class and are newly poor). Now, instead of low-paying jobs, there are none instead of a relatively small group of people competing for resources, there’s a very large group. Then, Ehrenreich writes, her book was an illustration that despite the relative good times plenty of Americans on minimum wage were still living in run-down motels, eating when and what they could in the run-up to payday, and sleeping in their cars on occasion. In May 2001, when the book originally appeared, the nation was relatively prosperous, if experiencing the beginnings of deflation in the dot-com bubble and signs of shakiness in the stock market. How have their lives changed? Not for the better.

The new edition includes an excellent afterword by Ehrenreich (reprinted in part at TomDispatch), in which she takes stock of the past ten years and revisits some of the workers she met while reporting her book. Picador is marking the tenth anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s modern classic “ Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” in which she chronicled her attempts to make a life on minimum wage in three states, with a special anniversary edition.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich