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Thomas Sroor 04/05/2013 English 161 Lewis Nickeled and Poor Wal-Mart employs a whopping 1% of the entire workforce in America (Blodget 1). That may not seem like much, until you unmask how many employees that truly is. 1.4 million employees out of the entire 140 million workforce currently have jobs at Wal-Mart (Blodget 1). The average Wal-Mart employee makes about $250 a week for a 28-40 hour work week, which comes out to a miniscule $12,000 a year. Another fact is that the CEO of Wal-Mart, Michael Duke, makes around $16,000 every single hour WalMarts doors are open (Gomstyn 1). Barbra Ehrenreich, the author of Nickeled and Dimed, attempts to establish a sense of understanding the hidden costs of the minimum wage paid to Wal-Mart employees, such as financial, physical, and emotional problems. This also includes similar jobs that pay low and expect hard labor in return. Essentially, Barbra Ehrenreichs claim is that one cannot make a decent living while working for low wages. On the other hand, David Shipler, the author of The Working Poor, has a similar outlook on the situation as he attempts to show how minimally paid employees are somewhat forced to work at a cooperation like Wal-Mart because of the situations they have at hand. David Shipler claims that the workers that make these low wages are in essence working for food. The two accounts from Barbra Ehrenreich and David Shipler are similar as well as different in their own respects. Shipler takes a look at the dilemmas that the workers

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are faced with from many different vantage points, whereas Ehrenreich takes more of a personal stance in getting her point across to the readers. In the chapter, Selling in Minnesota, Ehrenreich takes initiative and actually attempts to be employed by a high profile cooperation like Wal-Mart and Menards (Ehrenreich 70). Shipler, however, swirls his stance around the actual workers that share their personal stories with him. Shipler clusters employees who have low paying jobs and inquires about their monthly routines and choices they made that are keeping them at or below the poverty level (Shipler 70). They both have a similar goal in mind: to get a glimpse of what the working poor go through with the increasingly low wages granted to them by their employers. Ehrenreich gathers her evidence by personally living through a working poor type of situation as well as mingling with co-workers to access information on how they have been coping with the low wage job that Ehrenreich acquires. She lives through this experience by using her wages made from work to pay for rent, bills, and expenses. Barbra Ehrenreich took on three different jobs, all in different cities to experience firsthand what it is like to live off a low wage. Twenty applications later, Ehrenreich finally acquires a job in Florida working as a waitress at Hearthside, a discount hotel chain attached restaurant located in Portland, Maine. After that, she acquires a job as a maid and discovers that she is being immensely underpaid. Typically the maid service she worked for received $25 an hour for the workers but the workers only see $6.65 an hour (Ehrenreich 38). Ehrenreichs next and final job on her conquest was at Wal-Mart as a saleswoman. When she was finished with her trials, she simply realized that one cannot make it on their own as a minimum wage slave.

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David Shipler take a different action on how he gathers his information. Shipler interviews multiple working poor subjects and asks them to share their stories with him. He also grabs statistics from outside sources to pinpoint his arguments core idea that the working are not always financially safe. Shipler dives into the question- how much poverty is ones own fault? He then lists numerous factors that contribute to the workers poverty level. The exact list is, a set of good skills, a good starting wag e, a job with likelihood of promotion, clarity of purpose, courageous self- esteem, a lack of substantial debt, the freedom from illness or addiction, a functional family, a network of upstanding friends, and the right help from private or governmental agencies (Shipler 30). Shipler claims, When an exception breaks this cycle of failure, it is called the fulfillment of the American Dream. This is the rational Shipler uses to determine the blame of why one is in impoverished. My biggest concern considering the validity of both Barbra Ehrenreichs and David Shiplers accounts is that of sample size. Barbra Ehrenreich goes to an inadequate amount of cities to find work, while David Shipler interviews a microscopic amount of workers living with poverty. All in all, I thought that Barbra Ehrenreich had the better observation of the two, simply because she went out there herself to find how hard it is to make it on your own. Shiplers argument was the strongest when he provided the statistics that show how many people are living in poverty. Both arguments are sound and just, but there is more to unmask from these stories. The subjects studied in both Ehrenreich and Shiplers book are poor in America. This is not all bad considering the governmental intervention, the food kitchens, and the inherited wealth our government

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has. Look at it this way, if the poor of our country lived in a place such as China or Hong Kong, they would not be below the poverty level. Its all about location.

Works Cited Blodget, Henry. "Walmart Employs 1% Of America. Should It Be Forced To Pay Its Employees More?" Business Insider. N.p., 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.

Gomstyn, Alice. "Walmart CEO Pay: More in an Hour Than Workers Get All Year?" ABC News. ABC News Network, 02 July 2010. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.

Ehrenreich, Barbra. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2001.

Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Knopf, 2004. Print.