“Impassioned, fascinating, profoundly significant, and wildly entertaining. promise that you will read this explosive little book cover to cover and pass it on to all your friends and relatives.” - The New York Times The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. More than a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has “turned sociology upside down” ( Mother Jones) with her procurement of rich - and truthful - interviews. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s - households surviving on virtually no income.
Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don’t think it exists Very quickly, she discoverd that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk.
So began a grueling, hair-raising, and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six or seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the workforce. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job-any job-could be the ticket to a better life. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them.
"Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages.
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