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Summary Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

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Wayne W. Dyer, an American philosopher once said, “Love what you do; Do what you love”. By thinking in these words and looking for all these people who are working simple or low-income jobs, I asked myself two questions. Do all these people really love what they are doing? Or are they working these kinds of jobs just to survive? Barbara Ehrenreich, an American author answers these questions in her book, Nickel and Dimed by showing her “experiment” as she called as a worker with low income and explains how the laborers’ lives look like. That can be explained by Hannah Arendt ideas “Labor, Work, Action” from her book “The Human Condition”. Although Ehrenreich never mentions Arendt in her book, she demonstrates Arendt’s ideas about Labor is necessity …show more content…

she says, “In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion...The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach” (Ehrenreich12). Ehrenreich explains how it was hard for her to find a house and what kind of house she can afford after she decided to live a worker life. She explains that although the house that she found doesn’t have fans, air conditions, screens or television and it is just a basic house to live in, she couldn’t afford it by the low income wedge. As a laborer, she doesn’t have the right for looking on more than her basic needs that can make her just survive and even if she looks for something more it will be hard for her to afford it. By the same token, Ehrenreich gives another example how labor relates to human basic needs. She explains how being a waiter with minimum wedge shows no sign of being financially viable lives. She mentions some examples from her coworkers’ lives by saying, “Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun …show more content…

Arendt defines “privacy” when she says, “The four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard”(Arendt 212). Arendt clarifies the meaning of privacy by showing that there are some things and emotions in the person’s life that must be hidden from everyone. She refers to it as “darker ground” the must be hidden inside the person himself in a deep dark place from everyone. No one has the right to see or hear it. The only one who has the full authority on it is the person himself. Ehrenreich shows that labor job restricts the privacy of the workers by sharing her experience with her managers and coworkers. She mentions how her manager tries to control her and her coworkers by saying “No chatting for you, girl. No fancy service ethic allowed for the serfs” (Ehrenreich 35). She needs to explain how her manager put crazy laws on the workers because she assumes that the customers will misbehave with the workers, without giving the right to the workers to choose their own decision to who they want to talk and who they don’t want to. She shows how managers treat the workers as if they are robots or machines that have to do the orders without having the freedom to choose what they really need.

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