The Rif Raff Book Club's August reading was Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich's adventure into the land of the lower working class was an interesting read. She has an Erma Bombeckesque quality to her writing style - peppering it with wry humor while still making a very important and moving point about the minimum wage earner. I especially liked her Wal-Martian references and I think anyone who has ever worked a minimum wage job would related to the array of quirky and odd characters that she met along the way. She clearly has done her research as evident by the numerous resources in the footnotes. In a way, it's social content recalled Saul Alinsky's Let Them Call Me Rebel, which was a selection from earlier this year. Could we have a possible social injustice theme going for Riff Raff this year? Finally, I applaud her resilience and stick-to-itness, I would not have lasted past the first toilet bowel. It was a refreshing diversion from our usual fair.

There were a few insights to the low wage employee that I found interesting.You never know who is really poor by their appearance. The author was among many people who lived out of their car or a motel room and as a customer you never really know who that is. Some of the cleaning stories were an eye opener. The fact that the maids never used warm water or that they used the same bucket of water for the entire house was odd. Liked the authors plain language in reference to cleaning others "shit". The Wal-Mart job touched on a few things in that corporate culture that I would want to explore more in depth. (Sam Waltons book for next years list maybe?) I feel the author gave a human side to the jobs that many low wage workers must take. When you do the math, it is really surprising how little 6-8 dollars an hour will buy. I would like to discuss the reader group questions at the end of the book if anyone is interested.