Nickel and Dimed (6)

Title: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Genre: Non-Fiction

Possibly the most disheartening and depressing book I've read in a great while. Ehrenreich's adventures in the world of low wage employment remind me so much of the economic surroundings that most of my paternal family, though not my nuclear family, toil in. Try, try, try to get ahead all you like but without some great stroke of luck or fortune all of your trying won't make much difference at all. Show up on time, do your job, sacrifice yourself for the company and if you're lucky you'll get paid a wage that in most people's reality is a sub-living wage by far. I admit that I don't like "working for the man" and thus I'm biased in this regard but it's incredibly infuriating that we've all been sucked into a cycle of working just to live. And not work that makes the world better in any tangible way, hell not even work that makes one person's life better. It's work that makes a company more profitable, work that makes stockholders richer, work that makes CEOs have insanely exorbitant salaries that bypass the average wage of their employees by factors of tens and hundreds. It's just work. We're not even cranking out widgets. We, as a society, we're just working and seeing so very little for it.