Book Getting by on minimum

Getting by on mimimum wage

BY APRIL MILLER

Daily Titan Staff

“Nickel and Dimed” gives a heartbreaking look at people struggling to fi nd a piece of the American Dream.

The book opens a window into a life many of us never think about— living day to day not knowing if we will be able to pay the rent at the end of the month or buy meat to go with our dinner.

Getting her hands dirty was the best way author Barbara Ehrenreich thought she could determine if a minimum wage worker could make ends meet. She went undercover worked long hours, invaded people’s lives, took notes and wrote about her life as a minimum paid worker. Her book, “Nickel and Dimed,” takes a behind-thescenes look at employers paying minimum wage and the people they hire.

When interviewing for a job and when asked about her past, she said she was a divorced homemaker trying to fi nd a job.

Given her situation, if she failed to earn enough money to live on, she knew she had a home to go back to and could quit the investigation at any time. However, real minimum wage workers don’t have that luxury. Ehrenreich lived in three states and selected a dif

ferent type of job in each state.

The jobs she found paid about minimum wage: waitress, maid and clerk at Wal-Mart. Her waitress job in Florida paid $2.43 an hour, plus tips, which she found is legal, as long as tips brought her pay up to minimum wage.

Besides serving customers, she controlled the number of butter pats given to customers, assembled salads, swept the fl oor and fi lled sugar, salt and pepper containers.

The maid job in Maine paid $6.65 an hour. To supplement her income, on weekends, she worked as a dietary aide in a nursing home, where she ate meals for free, after the residents had fi nished eating and after she had washed all the dishes.

Wal-Mart offered her $7 an hour. Her job was to stock women’s clothing, get cartloads of rejected clothes from the fi tting rooms and return them to their proper racks. Here, she was not allowed to talk to other employees or she could get in trouble for time theft.

Ehrenreich found that people keep low paying jobs because it is better to know the evils of one job than to step into another job, which could be worse for a little more money. After reading this book, you may be a little kinder and tip a little better.

Disney

princess hits ice, falls fl at

BY LAURA GORDON

Daily Titan Features Editor

I want to know who decided to put Kim Cattrall in a Disney movie straight off the set of “Sex and the City.” No, seriously, who made that decision?

In Disney’s latest fl ick, “Ice Princess,” Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Tina Harwood (Cattrall) work as a skater-coach duo training for an ice skating championship. In the fi lm, Cattrall’s portrayal of a coach is anything but trophy-worthy. Trachtenberg, however, defi - nitely earns the gold for playing a math and science smarty who undertakes ice skating for a scholarship project.

Trachtenberg, who also showed up on the big-screen in “Eurotrip” and worked on the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” proves in the fi lm that she can hold her own as a movie’s main face.

True, Trachtenberg is no stranger to the camera; she did her fi rst movie, “Harriet the Spy,” in 1996. But today, at 19, Trachtenberg steals the screen with her teen beauty and loveable character.

Now if only “Ice Princess” was as good as its star. The movie is not interesting enough to entice Cal State Fullerton students. Disappointingly, the fi lm doesn’t stray past the expected, and the one aspect that would draw college students in – Kim Cattrall – fails to impress. Only in one entertaining scene, when Cattrall’s character argues with Casey’s mom (Joan Cusack), does the audience get to see what Cattrall portrays best: bitchiness with a side of sass.

Joan Cusack nails the upset mom persona, especially after the argument scene with Cattrall when she feels the need to defend her daughter. Flashback to a friend’s bitter mom in high school. That scene took me back to the old days and made me laugh out loud.

Moviegoers who want to leave the theater feeling warm and fuzzy should see “Ice Princess,” but people seeking a movie that offers more than that should save their cash or go rent another Disney movie (“Ladder 49” anyone?).

Step by step, Trachtenberg is moving up in Hollywood, but if Cattrall continues to take on these types of fi lms, maybe she really should have considered that “Sex and the City” movie after all.