The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. But these things cost money - $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on - and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. For reasons that have more to do with class - and often racial - prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity - a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival.“There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you int to live indoors.

Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job - any job - can be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. Our sharpest and most original social critic goes 'undercover' as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich