Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Now, instead of low-paying jobs, there are none instead of a relatively small group of people competing for resources, there’s a very large group. Then, Ehrenreich writes, her book was an illustration that despite the relative good times plenty of Americans on minimum wage were still living in run-down motels, eating when and what they could in the run-up to payday, and sleeping in their cars on occasion.

In May 2001, when the book originally appeared, the nation was relatively prosperous, if experiencing the beginnings of deflation in the dot-com bubble and signs of shakiness in the stock market. How have their lives changed? Not for the better. The new edition includes an excellent afterword by Ehrenreich (reprinted in part at TomDispatch), in which she takes stock of the past ten years and revisits some of the workers she met while reporting her book.

Picador is marking the tenth anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich’s modern classic “ Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” in which she chronicled her attempts to make a life on minimum wage in three states, with a special anniversary edition.