She went on to toil as a cleaner and a shop assistant at Wal-Mart, where she found she couldn't even afford to buy discounted clothes from the store she worked in.Įhrenreich has a forensically observant yet sympathetic style. She soon discovered that one wage wouldn't cover her bills and took a second job, as an estimated 7.8m others do in the US, getting by on caffeine and ibuprofen. In Key West, Florida, she worked as a waitress and couldn't even afford to live on a caravan site: 'It is a shock to realise that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic to aspire to,' she writes. To find out whether people can actually survive on a wage of $7 an hour, as millions of Americans must, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich spent months doing unskilled labour, telling bosses she was a divorced housewife returning to employment, and renting the cheapest accommodation she could find.

Our celebrity-obsessed press rarely ventures into the parallel universe of the terminally unglamorous, which is why these two books deserve praise for attempting to lay bare the grim banality of a breadline existence through good, old-fashioned investigative reporting. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.'Īlmost 70 years after George Orwell's observations were published in Down and Out in Paris and London, poverty remains a complex, difficult and unattractive subject. You thought it would be terrible it is merely squalid and boring. 'You thought it would be simple it is extraordinarily complicated.

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