The Dependent Poor: A Review of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich by Jo Perry
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by In America by Barbara Ehrenreich was published in 2001. It is Ehrenreich’s account of life in low-wage America, seven years after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act became law. This law weakened the social safety net and changed the way low-income people received financial assistance. The level of family assistance was limited. Food stamp eligibility was restricted. Aid to immigrants was reduced. A five-year cap was imposed on federal benefits. Democratic President Bill Clinton’s promise to "…end welfare as we know it" and a Republican pledge to end America’s "culture of poverty" informed the law, which was designed to discourage dependence and to strengthen the American work ethic.
During this period of aid reductions, and at a time when many Americans believed that the poor needed to work more and harder, Ehrenreich spent a year as a low-wage worker. A celebrated journalist with a doctorate in cellular immunology, Ehrenreich established three rules for her experiment:

"Rule one… was that I could not … fall back on any skills derived from my education or usual work… Two, I had to take the highest-paying job that was offered me and do my best to hold it … Three, I had to take the cheapest accommodations I could find..."
Nickel and Dimed is powerful and revealing because Ehrenreich is never a journalist pretending to be a Wal-Mart employee, a nursing home aide, a house-cleaner, or a waitress. Her rules require her to live her new life without irony. She must master new skills, strive for excellence no matter the job, and experience the exhaustion (long shifts without food or bathroom breaks), hunger, and humiliation (drug and personality tests) that are often part of a low-wage worker's experience.
Ehrenreich expects to discover the economics of poverty from her yearlong experiment. What she discovers is much more complicated, surprising and moving. By learning how a maid "becomes the vacuum," or how to perform the side work that food service jobs require ("sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling and restocking"), Ehrenreich realizes that, "no job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.'"
She learns, too, that hard work does not provide economic security. Employers are not required to pay "tipped employees" more than $2.13 in direct wages unless, with tips added, the hourly wage falls below the minimum wage. According to federal standards, a single person is poor if his gross yearly income falls short of $11,170. This would mean earning $5.37 per hour.
And, Ehrenreich, discovers, it's expensive to be poor:

"There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking . . . You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup . . . in a convenience store. If you have no health insurance . . . you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price."
Thus, for low-wage workers often drowning in debt, "one job will never be enough." Yet, in spite of disheartening circumstances, relentless schedules, and the contempt and distrust of employers, Ehrenreich reports that she "never met an actual slacker" on the job. Her fellow low-wage workers took real pride in doing their jobs well.
Ehrenreich returns to her old life convinced that the ideas about the poor and poverty that inspired welfare reform are false, especially the notion that the poor depend on the wealthy. Instead, she asserts, the rich and comfortable depend upon "the underpaid labor of others":

"The ‘working poor . . .' are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else."

What is the author's main purpose for including quotations from Ehrenreich's book?