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Harrison Chan

AP English

Ms. Nicholson

10 January 2010

In Comparison, the Nickel and Dimed versus The Jungle

While members of today’s impoverished society face many of the same challenges that

the poverty stricken populace of the early 1900s, their lives are immeasurably better than those

of their predecessors. The “experiment” conducted by author Barbara Ehrenreich, while

providing a looking glass into the world of the lower classes, barely scratched the surface of the

truly menacing hardships faced by the characters of The Jungle. Instead, the novel dissected the

hardships of modern America, illustrating them in light that seems trivial when compared to the

ailments and injuries that plagued the immigrants of The Jungle. However, themes of human

avarice and cruelty have carried on through the ages to inhabit the personalities of characters of

the past and present.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s goal in writing Nickel and Dimed was to attempt to infiltrate

herself into the American minimum wage society and experience the life of a minimum wage

worker. Ehrenreich sought to recreate the conditions faced by the minimum wage populace and

try to live a “normal” life. She experienced firsthand the aches and pains associated with working

in a low wage workplace, the trials and tribulations of making rent on less than 8 dollars an hour.

At times during her experience, particularly later in the chronology, she became more deeply

involved and interested, letting her emotions dance through her “scientific” separation of

personal life from her “experiment” life. In her last stop, at the Walmart in Minneapolis,

Minnesota, she begins to sow the seeds of rebellion with the tabooed five-letter word. Union.

Upon seeing the hotel workers strike for higher wages when they were already paid more than
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most Walmart “sales associates”, she used the news to encourage her fellow employees to revolt

and strike out against the injustice of corporate tyranny.

In 1906, technology had not reached the stage of development that it would a century

later; along with the technology, medical care of the time was far less able. Citizens were

regularly stricken with fevers, infections, and chronic ailments. The more important injuries that

distinguish the difference and difficulties between The Jungle and Nickel and Dimed, however,

are the lives and limbs lost. Not a day went by, that an employee of Durham’s or Brown’s was

not struck down by the grueling work. Bodies were mauled on a daily basis, whether from the

cut of a splitter’s cleaver or from the mass of a full-grown bull dropping off the hoist. In other

places, men and women lost toes and parts of their feet from the strong acids they worked in.

Still other factories poisoned their employees with toxic fumes and dusts every day. Nearly a

century later, at the beginning of the next millennia, regulations and safety has improved vastly.

While workers still suffer regular pains and aches, they are neither as ghastly nor as imminently

life-threatening as those of 100 years ago. The ailments that strike most of today’s workers seem

trivial when compared to the loss of life and limb faced by the lowest working class of 1906. The

employees of today’s lowest working class are stricken, instead, with chronic aches and pains

that last a long time, but are, ordinarily, less debilitating than the strong fevers, dismemberment,

and disease that struck workers in the past.

Through the ages, human nature has changed little. While humans went through various

“enlightenments” and “revolutions” of thinking, man is inherently selfish. As evidenced by both

Sinclair’s and Ehrenreich’s work, humans, particularly humans with power or authority, are

regularly guilty of severe avarice. They use every loophole and evasive technique available to

them to avoid paying out more money to their employees. Large corporations especially, use

deceptive techniques to “reel in” new workers, the same today as in the past. The corporations
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advertise high wages or say that one can earn “up to” a certain amount. However, once engaged

in employment, the employees find themselves receiving a significantly smaller amount than

they had at first believed they would receive. Ehrenreich infers that on multiple occasions,

Walmart has failed to pay their employees appropriately for overtime hours, while according to

federal law, “time and a half” must be paid for any hours over the normal 40 per week. At the

Menards where she inquired, she found that she could have wound up working an eleven hour

shift at minimum wage, when her pay should have been “time and a half” after the first eight

hours of the shift. Similar deceptive practices were used in The Jungle and applied to Marija,

when her pay was shorted for the number of cans she had painted.

Progression in the development of technology and medicine has improved the lives of

even the lowest caste of workers in America, although their circumstances might not be as

desirable as they might like. Though Ehrenreich makes an admirable try at duplicating the life of

a minimum wage worker upon herself, she fails to fully embrace and understand the lifestyle.

The hardships she often complains of amount to little when compared to the death and disease

that struck down thousands every season in the early 1900s. Her message, though, remains clear,

illustrating the continuing deceptive ways of man and the inherent avarice of society.