Chapter Two: Scrubbing in Maine - Nickle and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed
Chapter two: Scrubbing in Maine

In this chapter Barbara gets a job as a maid and a job as a dietary counselor at a nursing home.

Throughout this chapter Barbara reveals the harsh treatments of the Maid’s corporation and the

dissatisfactory way the maids are supposed to clean. If you get sick on the job at for the Maids or if you get sick in general you are supposed to just work through it. If you take off because you are sick you do not receive pay for the day you missed. There is this personality test you have to take if you want to work for Maids. The test as Barbara explains is “Bullshit! Anyone can pass the test!” While cleaning houses the maids are expected to follow strict rules. There is hardly any water used to clean the kitchen, and the bathroom. Basically the maids job is to make the house appear clean, not actually clean the house. This process is unfair to the customers, but it saves time and money for the Maids. It seems that all of the Maids employees are treated unfairly and worked to the bone. The maids also have to wear green and yellow uniforms, they stick out like sore thumbs compared to everyone else. It is clear that if you are a maid you are looked down upon. One maid imparticularly Holly, who doesn’t appear to eat, and could be pregnant; is a team leader who works all the time and gets in trouble with her husband when she doesn’t go to work. It is clear that Holly does not have health insurance. Even when she sprains her ankle holly will not leave work or go to an emergency room. Ted the manager discourages missing work and tries and turn maids against each other by having other maids “snitch” on each other. Ted agrees to let Holly go home after she injures her ankle; but it is unclear if he will pay her for leaving; he should since she was injured on the job. Another maid who is very old and has worked a long time at Maids is paid less than every other maid because she can not vacuum. This is an unfair discrimination against physical ability made by Ted. Barbara questions why these maids stay and work for Ted when there are plenty of other jobs available, the maids just do not have time to find another job, they are stuck. Barbara comes out and tells several fellow co-workers at Maids that she is “really a writer and she is going to write about this place.”

Barbara also works at Woodcrest a nursing home. Here she practically waitresses, she takes orders, helps make food, and does the dishes. She also cleans up after the people when they are done eating. Usually there are a few people that are there to help her. One day Barbara is forced to work with one cook, a broken dishwasher, and just herself as waitress. Luckily it was not that bad because some of the nursing home employees helped Barbara get her job done. Something Barbara has to watch out for is to make sure that diabetic patients do not receive any sugar. Something peculiar about the day Barbara worked by herself was that, that night when she went home she actually began to think that her fellow co-workers were in a conspiracy against her. Pete because she was avoiding “smoke dates” with him, and the others she did not know why they would act against her. In reality Barbara’s job at the nursing home was better than her job at Maids. Barbara lives in a hotel called Blue Haven. Barbara has to get help because she can not afford to buy groceries. She calls around and eventually get help and get food vouchers to buy groceries. It is really hard for minimum wage workers to get the help they need because they do not have the time to find the help they need. Barbara’s living conditions are very cramped, but manageable; especially when compared to other peoples living conditions, or other hotels. Barbara is also injured from working at Maids, her back begins to ache, and her knees from scrubbing, or cleaning floors on her hands and knees. She is also injured from vacuuming. When Barbara quits the Maids she just stops by one of her fellow co-workers house (Lori), and lets her have the “satisfaction of returning her Maids uniform to Ted and explaining her departure however she wanted. When Barbara quits work at Woodcrest, she just calls in sick and never shows up for work again.
One thing that I found interesting was that there was a lack of reported domestic workers. It was like all the people hiring privat domestic workers and all the domestic workers did not want anyone to know about them. On page 99 of Nickel and Dimed Barbara states the following information: "This invisibility persits at the macroscopic level. The Census Bureau reports that there wer 550,000 domestic workers in 1998 up 10 percent since 1996,but this may be a considerable underestimate.

Nickel and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed, a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a about a middle aged woman, who is a writer, trying an experiment to see how minimum wage workers live on the verge of poverty. The experiment started when the author of the book went out for lunch with her boss. They were talking about the themes she usually writes about, and they drifted into talking about poverty. When Barbara asked the question, “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” Then Barbara said someone should do some “old fashioned journalism”, as a result her boss said that she would do the “old fashioned journalism”. However Barbara set rules for herself and she had certain advantages going in to the experiment. Her rules were to find the cheapest accommodations, the cheapest place to live (without giving up personal privacy and safety), she would not use any prior writing skills, or education to her advantage to get a job, and she would take the highest paying job available. The advantages she had were that she had a bank account, access to an ATM card and credit card, health insurance, access to a car, she speaks English, is White, (not stated but she also had nicer clothes) and she gave herself money to start out with. The goal of the experiment is to see if Barbara can live on minimum wage and pay rent on her living space, afford food and the other basic necessities of life.

In the first chapter of the book she starts out in Key West, Florida, where she applies for many housekeeping jobs, for hotels that are not hiring, the hotels steer her into waitressing because she is White and speaks English; most of the housekeeping employees are African Americans, or Hispanics. Barbara finds out that the best way to find a job is to be in the right place at the right time. Her first job is at Hearthside, where she works as a waitress. A typical thing with waitressing is to share your tips with the bus boys and sometimes the dish washers and cooks. She begins to bond with the workers: Gail, Claude, Annette, Billy, Marianne, Andy, Tina, Joan. All of these workers are in tight living conditions, which they cannot get out of, because they cannot afford it. Claude is a Haitian cook; he lives in a very cramped condition where he is forced to be with people he does not know very well. Barbara soon finds out that she cannot afford to pay rent, so she must get another job. She decided to get a job at Jerry’s another restaurants with a hotel chain attached to it. Frustrated with management she quits her job at Hearthside, gets a job at Jerry’s, and then applies for a housekeeping job in the hotel chain attached to Jerry’s. She gets the job. At Jerry’s there is a cook like Claude, his name is George, he is an immigrant, and is also forced to live with people he does not know and he does not get very much sleep. Eventually Barbara gets fed up with working at Jerry’s, so she just leaves. She is set off one night when George is caught “stealing” and is going to fired; and then when she is working one night and all the tables are full and her manager starts to yell at her because; some of the customers ( who were British) would not eat their food. These two things led to Barbara quitting and deciding to move on to a new place. When she left she gave her key to number 46 to Gail, and arranged for her deposit to be transferred to Gail.

Some of the common themes she touches on are the stress put on workers, the health coverage most workers do not have, and the relationships between employees and employers; the relationship between herself and employers and fellow co-workers. She also touches on living conditions of most her co-workers. She also talks about the awful working conditions of the two places where she lives.

Merchants of Cool

1. 'Cool hunting' is the search for what individuals think is cool. This research is taken through surveys, interviews, focus groups and case studies.

2. They want to understand how a teen thinks and what a teen wants in order to create a product a teen would want and be able to seel it effectively based on what the teen thinks.

3. MTV, other programming and marketing decision-makers characterize their relationship with teen culturte that they are simply reflecting it not creating it.

4. Marketing research focuses on getting the information form an individual, market research is not interested in the individuals personal life. Human research focuses on the individuals personal life. Market research's goal is to learn how a teen thinks in order to sell a product. Human reaserch's goal is to create an individual that appeals to all teens, in order to sell what the indidvidual's life is like.

5. The critics of the 'merchants of cool' are providing the most accurate description of the relationship between teen culture and commercialization. The 'merchants of cool' tell the five major companies, News corp., Disney, AOL Timewarner, Viacom, and Unniversal, what is cool or in. Then the five companies put out what they think will sell. Teenagers then watch or listen to what is put out by the five companies; allowing the teens to be socialised by the five companies ideas. In the video Merchant of Cool it is shown how marketing researchers collect information, and then how the information is distributed to the major five companies. And then how the five companies advertis to teens and sell products to teens. Critics of 'merchants of cool'