Most Americans believe that all those who are poor and homeless are jobless people, surviving on only a small amount received through government aid. We learn that this is not true through an essay from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In this essay Barbara will experience the life of the growing American low-wage worker for the first time. These low-wage jobs pay hourly from the mandatory minimum of $5.15 to the simple but respectable wage of $10. With this salary you may not look particularly poor, however, taking into account the necessary expenses for housing, food, childcare childhood and transport, one can slip into poverty. With an increasing number of low-wage workers coming from communities like those of welfare recipients, job opportunities are becoming scarce forcing people to emigrate for the best wages, leaving a more stressful lifestyle with many more hardships to endure. Acting as inexperienced as she can, Barbara must look for a job that qualifies as low-wage work, while also taking into account her living expenses. He struggles to find what he wants due to the many fake hiring ads that companies place to reassure that positions always have candidates, not knowing when an employee will move on to a better paying job. After many interviews she is forced to work as a waitress at the hotel's attached restaurant called Hearthside, where her so-called new life begins. He does this job for two weeks and the best thing that came out of it was a middle-aged woman named Gail. After the suicide of her incarcerated boyfriend, Gail becomes the ideal, long-term, low-wage worker struggling to find a place to live. Learn many things from Gail's kindness and hospitality. "Put on whatever you want." “She… is the focus of the paper… herself, or pursuing a specific career, and has no work experience of note. In conclusion, Barbara Ehrenreich's studies successfully inform the reader of many things that the unfortunate endure, I never knew. The thought that grown adults do the same sometimes less than a person my age shocks me. Before reading this essay I had a precise definition of the homeless or poverty stricken Americans , who used to call a cardboard box home, stealing money from the workforce for alcohol or crack. Besides, those who didn't earn enough could always find a better job that paid more, thus declaring them no longer poor, right? I find this essay very informative about the difficulties of finding and keeping a job with no education or prior experience, to live in vast and growing low-wage America..