Re: Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

This book is about the experience of a journalist who tries surviving for a few months by working several minimum wage jobs, like waitressing, housekeeping, and working at Wal-Mart, and her thoughts on some of the things that are messed up about the way businesses work. Her story confirms what I already suspected. That it sucks to be poor. It is pretty alarming, though, to read about the life conditions of some of her co-workers. I wonder if there were as many people this poor even long time ago, like before there were big corporations, and everyone was farmers. Yeah, I guess there were... because I remember in school learning about how there were landowners and then there were sharecroppers, and how the sharecroppers got screwed. It got me thinking about what my life would be like if I had to work those kind of jobs. Where you have to work really hard jobs, where you work up a real sweat because you're working so hard, like a horse, and you're paid so little you can barely afford to house and feed yourself. Like what would it be like to be a farmer. I do think though that there has to be a sort of gratifying feeling about doing physical labor for one's livelihood. Like, if you were successful, you'd really feel like you built something up. But then I'm sure that people who do manual labor because they have to probably think they'd feel more satisfied making more money while sitting on butt in an air-conditioned office. Maybe at some point in my life, I should do some really hard manual labor for a period of time. Just to know what it's like. You know, it can be like, character building or something. Form some tough callouses on my soft woman hands. I read an article today about farmers, and some of the innovative ways they find to keep their farm running. In the article, there is a young couple, pretty close to my age, starting out their lives as farmers. Both went to college. They made about $40,000 combined over a year for all their work. It's pretty mind-blowing why they would choose to do this... become farmers, I mean, but also admirable in a way. Anyway. Read the book... it's pretty interesting.