The film “Nickel and Dimed: From the American Ruling Class” shows the life of low-wage workers in Americas society. In this video, Barbara Ehrenreich went about trying to mimic their life style and work ethic firsthand, living as a low-wage worker. I was very impressed at her angle of perspective to consider low-wage workers as the major “philanthropists” of our society. Often times we say that we serve someone or something but that all comes from our own pride and superiority. Eventually, we end up with finding out that we are being served by the ones who we thought of being served by and who we thought we were serving. I have also come to rethink the limitations of the welfare system in America. In the video, Ehrenreich claimed that “people are living in a state of emergency, not even at a sustainable level of suffering in many cases due to a lack of food, inadequate housing, and insufficient childcare”. There were too many factors working against them, especially things like a prolonged time without healthcare and poor education.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a prominent journalist and writer who went undercover as a low wage worker to find out how non-skilled workers are able to maintain the basic standard of life. She worked in a restaurant, retail store, nursing home, and for a housecleaning service to get an in-depth analysis of her question and experienced a poor life that fits her salary level. She wrote about all the other things that accompany minimum-wage work, such as budget crises, stress, housing insecurity, etc. In the process, she pointed out the extreme poverty and unfair treatment of the working poor, and the structural problem of sustaining their poverty. What she recorded and presented allowed people to rethink about the working poor, change their perspectives on their working condition and ignite many protests against unjust working places. Her work has exerted a beneficent influence on working class.
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Barbara Ehrenreich's main research methodology in this study is participant observation. She jumped into the lives of low-wage workers who struggle to make ends meet and did research on whether she could maintain her life at the minimum wage. She came to understand their plight by putting down her successful social status in society and experiencing the lives of the low-wage class. Information she gathered during this research is mostly qualitative, rather than quantitative, the end results she drew was that minimum wages were not enough to help workers maintain a decent standard of living. Barbara Ehrenreich’s research methodology can be considered both sociological and scientific.
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Nickel and Dimed: Ehrenreich’s Impact on Working Class.
(2023, January 31). Edubirdie. Retrieved November 13, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/nickel-and-dimed-barbara-ehrenreichs-sociological-research-and-its-influence-on-poor-working-class/
“Nickel and Dimed: Ehrenreich’s Impact on Working Class.” Edubirdie, 31 Jan. 2023, edubirdie.com/examples/nickel-and-dimed-barbara-ehrenreichs-sociological-research-and-its-influence-on-poor-working-class/
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2023 Jan 31 [cited 2024 Nov 13].
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