NICKEL AND DIMED by Barbara Ehrenreich

Links for the East Side Readers' discussion.

We'll be discussing a non-fiction work, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America . The idea arose from our Minaret discussion on changing one's socio-economic group.  Here's an excerpt  and the Reader's Guide.  

Related links: from the U.S. Department of Labor:

How are vacation pay, sick pay, holiday pay computed and when are they due?

Subminimum Wage, Drug Testing, OSHA-Worker Rights Under The OSH Act

Employment, Hours, & Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (State & Metro Area) HomePage

Reviews:

• Making Ends Meet - New York Times Review (05/01)
• Prole Like Me
• Steve Early's review in The Nation
• Salon.com Books | Scraping by (Laura Miller's review)
• Salon.com | How the other 1 percent lives (Ariana Huffington's attempt at satirizing Ehrenreich)

• All Amazon Reader Reviews (121 with 1-star, 322 with 5-stars, 935 altogether)  and....
• BrothersJudd.com : 2 conservative N.H. brothers review the book and hate it... but also share a nice (if somewhat dated) collection of Ehrenreich links.  (They also gave a grade of F to these books, many of which I like A LOT, so..... there you go.)

Related essays by Ehrenreich:

• Warning: This Is a Rights-Free Workplace
• The Antichrist of North Carolina – One Response to N&D
• Barbara Ehrenreich's ZNet HomePage
• Behind the Book- May 2001:

Other authors on similar subjects:

• Blue-Collar Journal: A College President's Sabbatical: Books: John Royston Coleman
• The Book of Jobs -- Hmmm, Ben Cheever did this too, with a humorous rather than sociological twist.
• Can't Win for Losing: Working Poor - Shipler's well-received book is more of a serious study.
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell-- Orwell's European expression of poverty in his first book, published in 1933.  READ it online here or here (public domain).
• Here is a list of articles by Barbara Ehrenreich (old site, but good prep for next month). 
• Related funny reading: local author Elaine Viets' Dead End Job series.