Nickel and Dimes was a great investigation in the look of minimum wage jobs and how people survive in the economy we live in.
In the readings, Ehrenreich while working at Wal-Mart tries to get attention to the workers to join a union to argue their wages. She notices that the workers don’t really care and figured if they push the envelope there could be some underlying consequences. Another finding she observed was how the assistant manger dealt with his employees and held boring and insignificant meeting. For a job that was boring and monotonous making an argument didn’t seem at all worth it. The manager was hard to work for so Enrenreich and another employee, Melissa, would find fun things to do while working to make the day go by faster and more enjoyable. When she quit her job, Melissa also quit. She had a connection and made Melissa look beyond and move ahead. She does recognize that if she stayed at Wal-Mart she would have fared well and eventually promoted in the company along with pay increase.
Enrenreich finds that after working for 3 months at several different low paying jobs and different locations in the United States, she observed that they work hard and was not treated fairly. She felt some employees needed to be hard to prove a point and some just didn’t want to argue because of losing their job.
In the end her findings was that low wage workers have few options, little education, and transportation problems, due to any of these people feel they cannot