Living on the Minimum.

Barbara Ehrenreich checked into a hotel in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, paying $245 for one week and knowing she would only make $280, before taxes, as a clerk at the local Wal-Mart. She was shown to a tiny room that smelled of fresh paint and mouse droppings. It didn't have a fan or an air conditioner. But the real problem was the window. It had a paper-thin curtain and no screen.

Two weeks later, when the hotel's owner demanded she pay $55 for every additional night, Ehrenreich began searching for somewhere else to live. She called apartments and motels. She found nothing affordable.

In her book "Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich describes in vivid detail the struggles she encountered when she took a leave from her upper-middle class existence to work for minimum wage as a store clerk, maid and waitress.

Her experience, she writes, refuted the argument of welfare reform proponents that a job was "the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one."

Ehrenreich, a writer for Harper's magazine, chose the Twin Cities, Portland, Maine, and Key West, Ha., for her experiment. Each of these predominately white areas allowed Ehrenreich, a white, native English speaker, to blend in among the working poor as she couldn't have in cities like New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, where most of the working class are people of color.

Housing was the biggest obstacle for Ehrenreich and her co-workers. She describes women who lived in vans or tiny apartments crowded with strangers, or who stayed with boyfriends who beat them. She points out that these makeshift housing arrangements are financial drains.

"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 up a huge lentil stew that can be frozen for the week ahead."

Minimum-wage workers also struggled to feed themselves, Ehrenreich found. For many of her fellow maids in Portland, lunch consisted of a bag of Doritos or Goldfish crackers and cigarettes that were returned, half-smoked, to the pack. Ehrenreich once found one of her co-workers hunched over a counter. The young woman was pregnant, nauseous and surrounded by harsh cleaning chemicals, but she hadn't eaten and couldn't afford to stop working, Ehrenreich writes.

In her last stint, at a Wal-Mart in the Twin Cities area, Ehrenreich and a co-worker sat in a break room and watched news coverage of striking hotel workers. The co-worker smiled and waved her fist at the television. Ehrenreich gestured to say, "Here! Us! We could do that too!" The co-worker responded, "Damn right!" They didn't, but Ehrenreich believes "we could have done something, she and I, if I could have afforded to work at Wal-Mart a little longer."

"Nickel and Dimed" is published by Henry Holt and Co. in New York City.