"nickel-and-dimed..." and "pennies an hour and no way up"

I actually was interested in reading these two essays. Because today's economy allows the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. I found it was great to see the struggle that low-wage workers must go through. They basically survive paycheck to paycheck. In "nickel-and-dimed" Barbara Ehrenreich conducted an experiment in which she had to live at the poverty level and go in search of a job. She had difficulties surviving off of $6-7 dollars an hour. In her essay she brought up a good point of how people don't even get to go above the low-wage level and are just stuck there just getting by. "Pennies an hour and no way up" by Hayden and Kernaghan made me feel sick to my stomach because of how little people earn in other countries. We believe that people have trouble living off our poverty level when in reality it is nothing compared to the 12 cents an hour earned by people working in sweatshops in China. In other countries companies make so much of a profit because they are able to employ cheap labor in return for making more money off of an item.