Nickel and Dimed

"This is a classic book and much less academically grounded than some of the others. But I think it’s still really important. It has been inspirational for me in a number of ways. I engage with my colleagues in labor economics a lot. We talk a lot about skilled workers, unskilled workers, and what Ehrenreich does with this book is take on job after job at the bottom end of the economic spectrum and tell the story of her work—and it’s pretty convincing. She works in Walmart; she works as a hotel cleaner; she works in a kind of diner as a waitress. These jobs are not unskilled; they are incredibly hard, and they’re gruelling. And they’re pitifully paid. In some cases her co-workers were living out of their cars, or can’t afford basic necessities and the like. And what’s often forgotten about this book, which is both colourful and tragic, is that she’s doing her fieldwork in the late 1990s, during one of the tightest labor markets we had ever seen—in the United States, at least, when theoretically workers should have been able to negotiate for higher pay because employers should have been so desperate for their labor at the time. But, in fact, what she finds is that all the power in the world resides with the employers and that workers, even during the best of times, economically speaking, were unable to negotiate much of anything. And I think, for me, it just goes to show that pure labor market conditions—the business cycle—won’t automatically result in better conditions for wide swathes of the labor force. She has a PhD in biology, but then translated that into a really brilliant career doing some journalism and some less journalist-style books."