Inquiry #4 Nickel and Dimed

In the excerpt from Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenriech, Barbara informs us of what it is like to live the life of the working class poor after taking two years off from her own affluent life to be employed as a minimum wage worker. She also effectively points out how it is easy for people of higher income classes to not appreciate the amount and difficulty of the work that minimum wage employees endure. However, I do not agree with her suggestion that the minimum wage needs to be raised so people can sustain themselves solely on a minimum wage job. Raising the minimum wage will force employers to do one of two things, neither of which is very good for the overall economy. One, the employer will have to lay off employees to become more efficient in the production of the product. In this case unemployment rises, and the people that were once working for minimum wage now have no source of income. The second option is that the owner raises the cost of the product to compensate for the increased cost of the labor. In this case, inflation rises and the worker is back in the same spot he or she was to begin with, because although the worker is making more money, the buying power of money has decreased. The question that we should be asking is how do we make these people’s hard work more appreciated? And how do we afford these people that are working so hard the opportunity to learn more job skills to better their earning potential? These are hard questions to answer because I do not think you can ever to get someone to truly appreciate what these people go through in their day to day lives without experiencing it themselves. And even if courses or job trainings are offered to the working poor for free, how do they make the time go? However, the only sure way to earn a sustainable income is to differentiate oneself from the rest of the workforce.