Nickel and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1429926643

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted 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. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.


Never Done

Never Done

Author: Erin Hill

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-10-05

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0813574897

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized. Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from the employees’ wives who hand-colored the Edison Company’s films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM’s backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid “women’s work,” or “feminized labor,” Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity. Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood, Never Done reveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid. For more information: http://erinhill.squarespace.com


Work Won't Love You Back

Work Won't Love You Back

Author: Sarah Jaffe

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2021-01-26

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1568589387

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives. You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love. In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries—from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete—Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.


Maid

Maid

Author: Stephanie Land

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0316505102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide (Barack Obama)," this New York Times bestselling memoir is the inspiration for the Netflix limited series, hailed by Rolling Stone as "a great one." At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper middle class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets. Driven to carve out a better life for her family, she cleaned by day and took online classes by night, writing relentlessly as she worked toward earning a college degree. She wrote of the true stories that weren't being told: of living on food stamps and WIC coupons, of government programs that barely provided housing, of aloof government employees who shamed her for receiving what little assistance she did. Above all else, she wrote about pursuing the myth of the American Dream from the poverty line, all the while slashing through deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor. Maid is Stephanie's story, but it's not hers alone. It is an inspiring testament to the courage, determination, and ultimate strength of the human spirit. "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work." -PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, Obama's Summer Reading List


Unpaid Work and the Economy

Unpaid Work and the Economy

Author: R. Antonopoulos

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-12-18

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0230250556

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book presents research findings from across the global South that substantively improves our understanding of time-use, poverty and gender equalities, to shed light on why unpaid work is indispensable to economic analysis and effective policy making.


Women's Work is Never Done

Women's Work is Never Done

Author: Sylvia Bashevkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1134726694

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 2002. Social critics, policy makers, and the public in general frequently overlook the crucial status of women as the main recipients of welfare and as providers of paid and unpaid care. The eight original essays in this collection remedy this situation. By comparing welfare policy in advanced industrial countries and the welfare experiences of different populations of women--black or white, young and old--with that of the male experience, Sylvia Bashevkin and her contributors challenge the Moynihan report; the conservative fatherhood movement; and neoliberal philosophy, politics and practice. Women's Work is Never Done adds a new dimension to the important public discussion of women's status as citizens, disparities in welfare reform, and poverty in a globalized world.


Never Done

Never Done

Author: Susan Strasser

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2000-09

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0805066179

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The author traces the transformation of American housework from the eighteen century chores to the present with attention to the impact of the industrial revolution, domestic service, women's entry into the workforce and the influences of commercial processes and advertising.


Getting Even

Getting Even

Author: Evelyn Murphy

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2005-10-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0743274679

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Are you (or a woman you love) being cheated out of 33 percent of your earnings? If you're a woman, over your working lifetime you will lose between $700,000 and $2 million -- simply because of your sex. Is that fair? No. Can it be stopped? Absolutely. The wage gap is a steady drain on the daily lives of women and our families. Rarely do we step back and add up what's missing -- better medical treatment, child care, housing, food, or retirement savings that women could have afforded if they were paid as well as men. Getting Even exposes the discrepancy between what women and men make -- and how it affects us all. It reveals that the wage gap is not going away on its own. And it explains how to close the wage gap -- and, finally, get women even. In this intelligently argued and startling book, Evelyn Murphy, Ph.D., humanizes the numbers through real-life stories and a wealth of data that has never before been examined. She shows how the wage gap pinches the daily lives of families throughout the country, at every economic level and in every industry. And she explains why, even though women have more opportunities than their mothers did, the wage gap persists: The American workplace still harbors an astonishing amount of discrimination, including blatant as well as complex hidden barriers, unspoken assumptions, unexamined attitudes, and habitual ways of behaving. But Murphy also brings good news: The wage gap can be closed. Having served as an economist, politician, public official, and corporate officer, she has a 360-degree view of the problem -- and of the solution. In a book that will explode into public debate, Murphy issues the indictment, rouses us to action -- and tells us exactly how to get even.