It was not that Ehrenreich "had a job in Minnesota". She chose the twin cities for her experiment. Here's the passage where she describes the deep thinking of her selection process:
I had thought for months of going to Sacramento or somewhere else in California's Central Valley not far from Berkeley, where I'd spent the spring. But warnings about the heat and the allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do. Don't ask me why Minnesota came to mind, maybe I just had a yearning for deciduous trees. It's a relatively liberal state, I knew that, and more merciful than many to its welfare poor. A half and hour or so of Web research revealed an agreeably tight labor market, with entry-level jobs advertised at $8 an hour or more and studio apartments for $400 or less. If some enterprising journalist wants to test the low-wage way of lif if darkest Idaho or Louisiana, more power to her. Call me gutless, but what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable correspondence between income and rent, a few mild adventures, a soft landing.
At least she did 30 minutes of web research!
(If you read the chapter, you also see Ehrenreich chooses Wal-Mart at $7/hour over another retail job she was offered that paid at least $8.50 and perhaps $10/hour. It's page after page of her shooting herself in the foot so she has something to complain about.)
Also, the critique by Lamon does not suggest Phoenix but rather "the Sun Belt", which includes many of the cheapest places to live in the United States.
I had thought for months of going to Sacramento or somewhere else in California's Central Valley not far from Berkeley, where I'd spent the spring. But warnings about the heat and the allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do. Don't ask me why Minnesota came to mind, maybe I just had a yearning for deciduous trees. It's a relatively liberal state, I knew that, and more merciful than many to its welfare poor. A half and hour or so of Web research revealed an agreeably tight labor market, with entry-level jobs advertised at $8 an hour or more and studio apartments for $400 or less. If some enterprising journalist wants to test the low-wage way of lif if darkest Idaho or Louisiana, more power to her. Call me gutless, but what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable correspondence between income and rent, a few mild adventures, a soft landing.
At least she did 30 minutes of web research!
(If you read the chapter, you also see Ehrenreich chooses Wal-Mart at $7/hour over another retail job she was offered that paid at least $8.50 and perhaps $10/hour. It's page after page of her shooting herself in the foot so she has something to complain about.)
Also, the critique by Lamon does not suggest Phoenix but rather "the Sun Belt", which includes many of the cheapest places to live in the United States.