Comparing The American Dream In Nickel And Dimed
The Low-Wage Worker wanting the American Dream
By Jennifer Hodge
October 8, 2013
In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich takes some time out of her normal life and tries to experience life working as a low-wage worker. Ehrenreich begins with the goal, “to see whether she could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” (Ehrenreich 6) Ehrenreich salary is always low, and a few times along the way she has to ask for help. At the end of her journey, she has discovered that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.” (Ehrenreich 193)
Ehrenreich realizes that “whatever her accomplishments in the rest of her life, in the low-wage work world she was a person of average ability – capable of learning the job and also …show more content…
Polyestra states, “Fewer than one percent of Americans break out of the class they are born into.” (Tea 67) She goes on to tell about her parents and their dream of class jumping, and how they devote their lives to it. To her parents, the working class neighborhood, where they lived, was only temporary. Her parents wanted better. Even her grandparents wanted better. It was embedded into each generation that you could move higher up in class, with just the right job, the right education, and the right privileges. Her family struggled with this for years. The only purpose of the “children” was to become rich. When her father landed a job that provided more money, her parents felt that they had fulfilled their dream, the American Dream. Polyestra states:
“Their dream for us hadn’t died. Higher education, to my parents, was still a way for their children to jump class… no matter how hard they tried to turn us into just-add-water Kennedys, all of this posturing failed, and so did college. The bottom line was that we were lower class, and there was no way we could be any different.” (Tea
By Jennifer Hodge
October 8, 2013
In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich takes some time out of her normal life and tries to experience life working as a low-wage worker. Ehrenreich begins with the goal, “to see whether she could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” (Ehrenreich 6) Ehrenreich salary is always low, and a few times along the way she has to ask for help. At the end of her journey, she has discovered that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.” (Ehrenreich 193)
Ehrenreich realizes that “whatever her accomplishments in the rest of her life, in the low-wage work world she was a person of average ability – capable of learning the job and also …show more content…
Polyestra states, “Fewer than one percent of Americans break out of the class they are born into.” (Tea 67) She goes on to tell about her parents and their dream of class jumping, and how they devote their lives to it. To her parents, the working class neighborhood, where they lived, was only temporary. Her parents wanted better. Even her grandparents wanted better. It was embedded into each generation that you could move higher up in class, with just the right job, the right education, and the right privileges. Her family struggled with this for years. The only purpose of the “children” was to become rich. When her father landed a job that provided more money, her parents felt that they had fulfilled their dream, the American Dream. Polyestra states:
“Their dream for us hadn’t died. Higher education, to my parents, was still a way for their children to jump class… no matter how hard they tried to turn us into just-add-water Kennedys, all of this posturing failed, and so did college. The bottom line was that we were lower class, and there was no way we could be any different.” (Tea