Depressing, but a good glimpse into the world of minimum wage employment. If you ever thought we shouldn't up the minimum wage, read this book. Of course, housing still remains an issue...

This book was like a breath of bracing, fresh air. Parts of it really took me back to jobs that I have had, but parts of it were completely new, introducing me to aspects of "getting by" I never before encountered. Although Ehrenreich occasionally confesses, in the book, to feeling like an impostor (since she actually had exponentially more money than most of the co-workers she encounters during her year of working for minimum wage), this book feels more real, more lived, and more hard-hitting than most exposés I've read.

I was really slow in getting through the first three chapters where the author talks about her experience working in minimum wage jobs and the organization of the book was poor. The real message in this book is in the last chapter. The author tries to explain why it's not just possible to work your way out of poverty when you hold low wage jobs. The right set of social nets just aren't there to pull them up. The rules of the economic man (where you can demand higher wages) just don't operate when you work minimum wages because (1) information about wages don't disseminate so you have no bargaining power (2) mentally these workers have rules imposed on them where their essential sense of self respect goes down and they really don't think they have a bargaining power and (3) job mobility requires they rethink some aspects of their personal life (longer commute may end up costing more gas or the day care center may not on the way to the new employer) and most of the times they end up on the same job. So with wages at the lower end never grew to enable these people to have a comfortable hand. With stagnant wages and rent taking up a bigger share of household expenditure the situation gets worse as these people are pushed out more and more away from rest of the society. When I hear certain terms like "welfare recipients" my mind never painted a picture about flesh and bones usually associated with this. This book really gives a glimpse on what goes on in their lives and the hard choices they make to get by.

I think Barbara Ehrenreich's heart is in the right place. She truly wants to identify with "the working poor" and to change things for the better. However, she is not the right person to do this. It's funny, before I became someone with a degree from a fancy liberal arts school working for $8 an hour at various service jobs, I liked her writing. Now I just see her as backwards thinking, and totally missing the real ingenuity that gets low wage earners through life. I haven't read it and don't agree with his premise either but I think that Adam Shepard, author of [b:Scratch Beginnings|2180885|Scratch Beginnings Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream|Adam Shepard|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Wx3mv0wHL._SL75_.jpg|2186565] had it right when he said that Ehrenreich didn't even try, she just keeps shooting herself in the foot, which is quite frustrating to read and leaves you with a sense of hopelessness.

Thoroughly depressing and enraging. It brought back a lot of unpleasant memories of unemployment and food service and how much of a struggle it is to get by, even though I'm much better off than I have been since I graduated from high school. The fucked-up thing is that wages have not risen at all in the fifteen years since this book was published. We need to do something.