10 years after 'Nickel and Dimed,' author Ehrenreich says things are even worse
(NEWSER) - A decade after her expose on America's working poor, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich has a sobering assessment: "Things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008," she writes in Salon . For one thing, the economy was booming around 2000 when she did her research, and those $7-an-hour jobs she landed were plentiful. Today, even those are hard to come by. So while the media likes to focus on the tales of middle-class folks who have fallen on hard times, "the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s." The poor are even poorer—and that's not even the worst of it. More»
