Malikic 1 Elvir Malikic Professor Sperry English 1101 Fall 2010 25 October 2010 Nickel and Dimed In a country

that donates approximately 1 billion dollars a year to aid Africas poverty stricken countries, according to my Human Rights professor Carey, it would perhaps be more beneficial if the U.S. government implemented a reform act to better benefit the working class poor and the homeless population in our own nation with that money. Furthermore, thousands of people are entering or re-entering the work force each month as low wage earners due to welfare reform, divorce, previous job loss, and more. Presently in the United States, millions of working families are earning wages that are not sufficient enough to meet their minimum and basic needs for survival. As a consequent and the margin of error on the governments part for not giving the poor more support, these families suffer remarkable hardships, the movie Nickel and Dimed portrays. The movie, originally a New York Times Bestseller written by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a story about an investigative writer who fully submerges herself into the life of a working class American who is nickel and diming to make ends meet. Ehrenreich investigates living in America on minimum wage and tries to match her earnings to her expenses. She starts by living in Florida, and working as a waitress at Jerrys Restaurant while living in a trailer park with termite problems. BJ is the name of the manager that is very difficult and mean towards Ehrenreich. This job proves to be very labor intensive and physically demanding on her body, since she is on her feet for 12-hour shifts. In her mission to explore this topic that she has chosen to investigate, she wants to be regional and not only target

Malikic 2 one side of the country, so that is why she decides to take a similar job in Maine and later in Minnesota - for a month each. Ehrenreich makes sure to go after the highest-paid ''unskilled'' jobs she could find, for example, she gets a job as a diner waitress, house cleaner, and Wal-Mart ''associate.'' Her second mission was in Maine, where she worked as a maid for a housekeeping service during the week and as a dietary aide in a nursing home on the weekends. Ted was the manager of the housekeeping service in Maine that Ehrenreich joins. Ted attempts to get Ehrenreich to tell him about any employees who have been complaining about their jobs. She finds out here that it is also a labor intensive job, even more since she is working two jobs at the same time, and only then being able to have just enough money to survive, nothing for savings or anything besides the necessities. Her third and final mission is in Minnesota as a Wal-Mart sales associate. She was hired by Howard, the general manager who placed her in the ladies clothing department where she was taking clothing from the dressing rooms and put them back on the racks. This job as well did not pay enough for the hard work and long hours, and she yet again found herself living in horrible, rundown motels that didnt even have deadbolts on the doors. And the management was rigid and inflexible. The main point that the director is trying to argue through the course of the movie is the invisibility of the poor and raising our nations attention to this matter. Most of the upper class people are not paying attention and not bringing a state of action surrounding this current social problem. Ehrenreich shows that one minimum-wage paying job is not enough - you need at least two if you intend to survive and have any meaning of life. The movie furthermore portrays how the bottom third lives, and is an exposure of the dead-end-job economy. It is ironic that in a capitalistic economy, we get such a dramatic deviance in how the upper class lives compared to

Malikic 3 the hard working poor. The structure of the movie was divided very well, in a clear format, with episodic scenes and realistic directing; it depicted the story very well. Furthermore, I intend to critique the strengths and the weaknesses of the movie in the next section. As Ehrenreich found, working two jobs was the only way to support herself on minimum wage. I think that the movie would have been even more realistic had she taken into consideration just how difficult her circumstances would have been even more with children or an aged parent or a disabled family member to support. These are the circumstances millions of our working poor are face everyday. Another weakness that could have strengthened the argument of the movie, was if she had written and acted more of the feelings and emotions, whether she felt lonely, lost, guilty for going incognito and developing friendships under false pretenses, or even angry at taking on this assignment. I think that if she has connected emotionally with the viewer, the movie would have reached even higher peaks. On the contrary, the strengths of the movie were plentiful. Ehrenreich fully and mercifully submerged herself into the role of the working poor for the cause of journalism and public awareness. She didnt just go during the work hours and work as a house cleaner or Wal-Mart associate and then come home to her house that she has in her real work in Key West. Rather she completely took on the role of a person living under these conditions and lived in the trailers, rundown motels, had a zero balance on her bank account, wore clothes that were from Good Will, all the exact same problems that people stricken by poverty or being poor deal with. The movie truly examines the grave realities many American workers routinely face just trying to earn a living; she lives many of these obstacles, which further credits the movie. An additional strength is that she reports her findings by observing and participating, and by having first hand experience. The style of the direction of the movie was documentary with many elements of empirical

Malikic 4 experiments. A strength in the movie is that she was at once, both the experiment and the scientist. She is a waitress, all the while making sociological notations in her head. For example when she was so broke she has to track down free food from a social service agency or when she broke out into the unbearable rash, either from her living conditions or from chemicals used in her work as a housecleaner that is when the movie really grabbed my attention, that at even that low she didnt break down and go back home to her house in Key West. She was dedicated to the assignment and did not allow anything to get in the way of her reporting. Another strength of the movie was that she found that she cared about her coworkers and about doing a good job and that she was considered a good worker, this further demonstrates how much she was immersed in the reporting and the cause of the assignment. Ehrenreich explained poverty and addressed the question of - why one group is more likely to be poor than the other by stating inequality, and having not time for further education because they are always working. Ehrenreich writes that she knows that the poor are not responsible for this trap and it is amazingly difficult for them to change this cycle since the invest most of their time working, if only to survive. In the movie, one of the themes was about how the rest of the country feels about giving higher social welfare and support for those that are barely making financial ends meet. For example, the liberals claim that social problems arise from the operation of society, including a pattern of social inequality that prevents categories of people from having equal opportunity. On the other hand, the conservatives regard this issue as they are poor because they are lazy and the government is not responsible to provide financial support; further claiming that they should pick themselves up by their bootstraps and propel forward. However, Ehrenreich beliefs about the cause and solution to social problems align with the liberal perspectives. She hints that there should be massive and radical changes to social institutions to

Malikic 5 help the underprivileged more. For example, most poor people are working at least two jobs which leaves odd times to pursue aide from government offices, many of which close their doors at 5 p.m. Comparing between liberals and Ehrenreich, regarding the common myth about poor people are lazy and refuse to work both agree that this is not true, because she works two jobs and is still not making ends meet. Ehrenreich narrated the story of her experience through a liberal political perspective; the social inequality that prevented the working poor from having a normal balanced life is the utter essence of the movie. The movie was directed in a realistic sense, representing the ugly side of capitalism. It is controversial, shocking, depictive, realistic, and provocative. The most memorable part about the movie and one that I will not soon forget is the idea that hard work as an employee is not the only solution to poverty. As Ehrenreich's experiences illustrate, a support system that includes health care, affordable housing and basic food needs is an utter necessity to the survival and providing working families the aid and help their employment does not should be the governments high priority. Also, more people in this developed/first world country are living in poverty and can hardly survive than represented in the media and in the middle and first class understanding of the people that live around them, the underprivileged, that have to get by on scraps, nickels and dimes.

Malikic 6 Works Cited Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Dir. Richard Brick. Perf. Barbara Enhrenreich, Steve Dondley. Baseline Studio Systems, 2007. DVD