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Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist with a PhD in biology who went under cover to work with the low wage workers of the blue collar work force as a waitress, cleaning woman, nursing home assistant, and Wal-Mart employee, in researching Nickel and Dimed: By Not Getting By in America, her best-selling investigation into the lives of the thirty percent of the US work force who work for eight dollars an hour or less~ in particular the four million women who were shoved back into the workplace by the welfare reform. In the spirit of science, she decided on certain rules and parameters for her undercover work. First she could not fall back on any skills derived from her education. Second she had to take the highest paying job that was offered to her and try to do her best to hold it. And finally she had to take the cheapest accommodations she could find. Although she tried to stick to these rules, all of them were broken or bent at some point. In Key West, where she began the project in the late spring of 1998, she once promoted herself to an interviewer for a waitressing job by telling her she could greet European tourists with the appropriate Bonjour or Guten Tag, but that was the only case in which she drew on any remnant of her actual education. In Minneapolis, her final destination, where she lived in the early summer of 2000, she broke another rule for failing to take the best-paying job that was offered. Instead of taking a ten dollar an hour job at Menards plumbing she took a seven dollar an hour job at Wal-Mart, on account of hours. In the introduction Ehrenreich acknowledges certain advantages she had over other low-wage workers. She had a car, had only herself to support, had benefited from a lifetime of good medical and dental care, and had a few hundred dollars as emergency cash. She is also white and a native English-speaker. She did not use her other advantages such as her level of education or her professional experience. Despite the assumption behind welfare reform that any job beats not working (this could also be known as the Horatio Alger myth- the belief that due to limitless possibilities anyone can get ahead if they try hard enough), Ehrenreich found that in three different cities- Key West, Portland, and Minneapolis- she could not get by with just one job. She was forced to take the route of her co-workers and work seven days a week at two jobs.
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