9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Location and details TBA!
Please RSVP to Maureen Lerch
Nickel and Dimed by
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
In the book one of the maids would only eat a bag of Doritos to get through a day of hard labor. Many of our students have to make difficult choices about what to spend their money on, and sometimes do not have enough to eat or make food choices that may affect their ability to think, work, or participate in a meaningful way in class. How could we help these students?
Students who are going to school while working in blue collar jobs often come to class with aches and pains or lacking sleep if they are doing shift work. (Also, some self-medicate to cope.) How could we help these students?
Many of our students are working in very low-paying jobs and some need to piece together several jobs to make ends meet. Their schedules are unpredictable and their paychecks are unpredictable. They could lose their jobs just by needing to show up for a class. How could we help these students?
Some of our students don’t have a reliable home situation. They may be facing eviction. They may live with multiple (unreliable) roommates, couch surf, or even not know where they will be sleeping at night. How could we help these students?
Many of our part-time faculty and staff experience the piecemeal nature of crafting a living wage by working multiple locations and multiple jobs. How can our policies or practices be altered to help them work at fewer places to make a decent living?