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Jennifer Alemoh
Professor Cheryle Gittens- Bailey
ENG 101
20 November 2013

Minimum wage and families

Minimum wage job place workers in a striving circumstance where they have to seek for additional financial help in order to live a moderate live in America. Most families that are struggling with paying their rents or providing for their families are either on minimum wages or unemployed. This shows lack of security for those families or individuals that has expenses that must be covered. The outcome of Barbara Ehrenreich experiment reveals that working at minimum wage jobs does not match her earnings to her expenses. People need more money to make a living in a world of ever rising costs. As the expense in the world is rising, landlords are increasing their rent fees and gasoline prices are always going up. In this research I will address the struggles of individuals living on minimum wage, their inability to fulfill their necessity and their dependence on welfare. Many that fall into the pit hole of lower wage drag to live a comfortable life even with the daily hassle they go through in these jobs. Studies shows that lower wages job require more physical work than a decent paying job. When Ehrenreich was in the search for job position, she stated “Waitressing is similarly something I’d like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone- tired when I was eighteen, and I’m decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now” (Ehrenreich, pg. 175). People that work this kind of jobs are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, in turn, hold them back. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America. A waitress duty is no difference from being a slave. In Ehrenreich’s experiment in “Nickel and Dimed”, she faces the hardship that a lower wage worker endures daily. She came to realize that low wages earners have endless problems to worry about. There were workers that could not

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