Barbara Ehrenreich is  a journalist who conducted her own experiment of trying to live on minimum wage. Throughout the course of the article she had three jobs total: two serving jobs and one as a maid. She worked these jobs for one month and found that living on minimum wage was quite hard.

To live on federal minimum wage would be very difficult. Ehrenreich allowed herself startup money, but generally, people who are living like this for real do not have that luxury. They have nothing and have to work for a while before they can think about renting a place. Often they have to lie with relatives or friends for a while.

For a family with two children, surviving in America earning the federal minimum wage would be extremely difficult. Barbara Ehrenreich’s experiment took place in 1998, over tn years ago. Things have changed since then. The economy is not doing as well as it was then. People feel the need to stay up to date with the current trends and technology and feel trapped by money.

I do think minimum wage should be raised. As we saw from this experiment one person living on this income just barely made it, yet she had help and did not actually have to live like this for real. For a family living like this, especially now, it would be very difficult.

According to Ehrenreich, managers feel that they must closely monitor minimum wage employees because the employees are the middlemen between the customer and the money. This style of management is not fair because the employees are not treated as humans, but as things that are easily replaced.