Nickled and Dimed Case

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women who are in the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998, through undercover journalism. This was somewhat of a social experiment to see if she could maintain a lifestyle by working low wage paying jobs the way millions of women do. Throughout the book Ehrenreich uses rhetoric to reach out to the reader. She uses her logic, credibility, and mostly emotion to try to get us to understand why we should care about a social situation.

To write this book, Ehrenreich had to first establish credibility, (ethos) because of the lack of knowledge on the subject. She did have some knowledge though because her "sister, who use to work for the phone company as a sales representative, a factory work and receptionist who described it her experiences as the hopelessness of being a wage slave"(2) and her "husband use to work for $4.50 an hour in a warehouse."(2) To gain a complete knowledge of how low wage Americans lived, she had to "plunge into everyday chaos of nature ... and discover some hidden economies in the world of low wage workers." (3) Even though Ehrenreich had some advantages, she was able to live the life of the low wage American, therefore making her credible to discuss this topic.

Ehrenreich also uses logos many times in the book to aim at the reader's intellect. She uses facts from real people's lives and statistics to show just how hard Americans with low wages have to work to live. Based on these stats you find it impossible to believe that people getting paid that little are able to live in America, and some of them even have to take care of kids. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless in 1998... it took on average nationwide, an hourly wage of 8.99 ... for living wage." (3) Since Americans who work low wage jobs don't make this much, they have to work two or sometimes three jobs to support themselves or their families. Ehrenreich makes us use or logic and interpretation skills here to really see how hard it is for Americans who work low wage jobs.

Throughout the book, Ehrenreich uses pathos the most and it is the most effective. Ehrenreich appeals to our emotions and really makes us feel sympathy towards the Americans with low wage jobs. She constantly tells us about her friends or co-workers lives, like how and where they live, and how hard they have to work. At her first job she compiles a survey of how her co workers live. "Gail is sharing a room in a well known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be impossible alone." (25) Here Ehrenreich makes you feel a lot of sympathy because $250 is not that much money, but she has to share it with someone who