Weekly Non-Fiction Reading List 1.1.24
I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. I had the week off but spent a bunch of time with my son and girlfriend, so we only have one book on the list. Fortunately, it’s a phenomenal book by Barbara Ehrenreich, who sadly passed away in 2022. This is one of my new favorites, so you’ll definitely want to check it out.
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Barbara Ehrenreich is probably one of my top 5 favorite authors. Maybe even top 3. I’ve read some of her books and loved them all, but she wasn’t on my list. Then, I read this book and realized that she was insanely consistent with her incredible writing. This is a book about the working poor, and it’s insane because she wrote this in the late 90s, and the issue has only become worse.
For those of you who are unaware, the working poor are people who work full-time but are still living in poverty. Most Americans agree that if you work a full-time job, you shouldn’t be in poverty. Regardless of the job, you shouldn’t have to need government assistance, worry about food, housing, or the basic needs to live well.
Barbara Ehrenreich made the decision to go undercover and see if she could live off of entry level wages, and the entire book, I was having flashbacks. In this book, she realizes just how tough it is to make such little money and how much of your time and energy is not only consumed by your job but just figuring out how to survive. There are absolutely crazy stories in here about what her coworkers were going through as well like living out of their cars in the work parking lot and management not really caring about how little these people are paid.
I could write on this subject all day, but I’ll end with this. Barbara perfectly diagnoses the problem when closing the book. This is all a psychological game for employers and management. These jobs and how people are managed are designed to psychologically make people feel like they deserve it. There are tactics in place to overly monitor and control these people and make them believe that they have no power. When they believe they don’t have power, they don’t fight for change and even worse, they don’t think they can leave for a better job.
You should definitely read this book. As for me, I’m about to start another book from Ehrenreich.
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