Barbara Ehrenreich - Nickel and Dimed (2001)

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In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap — as measured by the pay — that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.

Barbara Ehrenreich
I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette," she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.

Barbara Ehrenreich
It's not just the work that has to be learned in each situation. Each job presents a self-contained social world, with its own personalities, hierarchy, customs, and standards.

Barbara Ehrenreich
When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

Barbara Ehrenreich
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich
If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Barbara Ehrenreich
No job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.'

Barbara Ehrenreich
The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

Barbara Ehrenreich
What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.

Barbara Ehrenreich
At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day.

Barbara Ehrenreich