From way back to our ancestors, till this day, there are people working in classy offices or getting down and doing dirty work out on the streets. However, people working out on the streets or in filthy areas, but the question is, are they really the most overwhelmed jobs anyone could work for? Well, way back before any of us were born, people experienced worst; when today we have machines and appliances that do nearly everything. In the article “10 of the Most Disgusting Jobs in History,” reveals the which jobs are the worst in history: 1. vomit collector, 2. leech collector, 3. fuller, 4. groom of the stool, 5. violin string maker, 6. rat catcher, 7. match girl, 8. bone grubber, 9. mudlark, and last but not least, 10. tanner. Every job
In “Waste Land” Magna talks about people reacting to the way she smells when she takes the bus home from working at the landfill. She says “it’s better than turning tricks in Copacabana…It’s more dignified. I may stink now, but when I get home I’ll take a shower and I’ll be fine.” Although choices were limited, people like Magna at the landfill are proud of their choice to work at the landfill. They describe it as “honest work.” Before he started his project, Vik described what he thought life at the landfill was like. He said, “This is where everything that is not good goes, inc...
During the 1800’s, the lower class of London was so large, it basically formed its own city. With a large population and improper disposal of wastes the city became covered in excrement and rotting food. Because London became so unsanitary, many worked jobs to try and remove some of the waste and make use with what they could. Many of the lower class citizens preformed these unsafe and unsanitary jobs of removing waste in order to try and make or find enough money to survive. I feel that today it is still seen that people of a lower economic
In today’s society you either have to work hard to live a good life, or just inherit a lump sum of cash, which is probably never going to happen. So instead a person has to work a usual nine to five just to put food on the table for their families, and in many cases that is not even enough. In the article, “Why We Work” by Andrew Curry, Curry examines the complexities of work and touches on the reasons why many workers feel unsatisfied with their jobs. Barbara Ehrenreich writes an essay called, “Serving in Florida” which is about the overlooked life of being a server and the struggles of working off low minimum wages. Curry’s standpoint on jobs is that workers are not satisfied, the job takes control of their whole life, and workers spend
Employment is hard to find and hard to keep and a job isn’t always what one hoped for. Sometimes jobs do not sufficiently support our lifestyles, and all too frequently we’re convinced that our boss’s real job is to make us miserable. However, every now and then there are reprieves such as company holiday parties or bonuses, raises, promotions and even a half hour or hour to eat lunch that allows escape from monotonous workloads. Aside from our complaints, employment today for majority of American’s isn’t totally dreadful, and there always lies opportunity for promotion. American’s did not always experience this reality in their work places though, and not long past are days of abysmal and disgusting work conditions. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was published. His novel drastically transformed the way Americans felt about the unmitigated power corporations wielded in the ‘free’ market economy that was heavily propagandized at the turn of the century. Corporations do not have the same unscrupulous practices today because of actions taken by former President Theodore Roosevelt who felt deeply impacted by Sinclair’s famous novel. Back in early 1900’s in the meatpacking plants of Chicago the incarnation of greed ruled over the working man and dictated his role as a simple cog within an enormous insatiable industrial machine. Executives of the 1900’s meatpacking industry in Chicago, IL, conspired to work men to death, obliterate worker’s unions and lie to American citizens about what they were actually consuming in order to simply acquire more money.
While poor drainage and waste disposal procedures can be seen as a direct result of fever and epidemic; it is important first to look at the dietary practices of the working classes which would greatly contribute to their squalid living conditions.
Sanitary conditions in the West were practically non-existent. In the cities, horse manure covered the streets. Housewives emptied garbage, dishwater, and chamber pots into the middle of the city streets where free-roaming pigs devoured the waste. The pigs left their urine and feces on the streets. It was not easy to wash clothes. Many people had clothes splattered with manure, mud, sweat, and tobacco juice. Privies, or necessary houses were often to close to the homes with a very noticeable odor on hot and/or windy days. If a family had a kitchen, all the members washed at the sink each day, without soap, rubbing the dirt off with a coarse towel. Eventually, many cold bedrooms had a basin, ewer (pitcher), cup, and cupboard chamber pot. Bed bugs and fleas covered many of the travelers’ beds. “Isaac Weld saw filthy beds swarming with bugs.” These insects followed the travelers, crawling on their clothes and skin.
Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
In the section titled "The Worst" in chapter 8, Schlosser writes, "Some of the most dangerous jobs in meatpacking slaughterhouses are performed by late night cleaning crews" (176). Most of these workers earn only one third the wages of regular production employees. The working conditions are horrid. The cleaners use a cleaning agent that is a mixture of water and chlorine, which reduces the visibility of the plants with "a thick, heavy fog" (177). There is nothing worse than not being able to breathe and working hard for ridiculous pay. The late night workers have to clean when the machines in the plants are still running. Workers have to dispose of the leftover junk in the plant consisting of "grease, fat, manure, leftover scraps of meat" (177). To make matters worse, while spraying the cle...
Through the various types of texts I went through, Mike Rose’s article on “Blue-Collar Brilliance” was the one that I felt I could personally relate to. I grew up in a family where manual labor was the key to a good income. Out of my entire family, I was the only one who graduated high school and went to college, therefore I grew up realizing that people didn’t necessarily need a college education to be considered “smart”. My father has been one of the smartest people in my family, I could explain my calculus homework to him and he would be able to quickly grasp at all the equations and concepts, even though he dropped out of high school as a freshmen in Mexico. In the fall of 2015, I had decided to skip a semester of college to find job opportunities outside of the education field. Starting off with high hopes, I quickly came to realize that job opportunities were hard to find. I came to have a lot
The Inhuman working conditions of the Industrial Revolution clearly demonstrates the suffering of the working class. For example, The Ashton Chronicle by John Birley 1849, “Frank once beat me till he frightened himself, he though he has killed me” this describes the brutal beatings from not doing work
By the nineteenth century, staff for a household became a necessity for the middle class families. Most had acquired enough wealth to attain servants for household duties. The number of servants kept on staff, and their conduct and appearance, quickly became a mark of status, especially near the top of the class ladder (Hughes 37 ). The popular belief was at least three servants were essential for the household. The duties and conditions of work varied, from the virtual slavery of a young maid-of-all-work to the specialized skills of the servant in an aristocratic household (“Servants”).
Friedrich Engels discovered the condition of how a working class in England lives in 1844. He described Manchester with an unpleasant nature when he visited the neighborhood. He emphasized that if a person pass the main street, he gets into a filth and disgusting grime (pg2, paragraph 3). He also declares that the courts are very dirty and “inhabitants can pass into and out of the court by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement” (pg 3, paragraph 1). Engels declares that below the Ducie Bridge, “there are several tanneries which fill the whole neighborhood with the stench of animal putrefaction (pg 3, paragraph 1). He also adds “In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blakish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise” (pg 3, paragraph 2). He illustrates “Below the bridge you look upon the pil...
Trimming Christmas trees is a hard job, but it is one of my favorites thus far. The biggest reasons that it is a hard job are the heat, the bees, and the poison ivy. Despite all the hard things that we have to go through it is a fun job. Most of the employees that work there are teenagers like myself. However, there were some men in there 40's that had worked there since they were my age. Even though they were not bosses they felt that they were and really made it hard to work at times. The reason that I like trimming so much is because I am able to talk with my friends all day, and the boss Jim Fleming is a really good boss. The only time I ever saw him get mad was when he was justified to get mad at one of the employees for not working.
Sometimes work can become repetitive and dreary. The article “I was a Warehouse Wage Slave” illustrates this point perfectly. Describing warehouse work as slavery gives it a very negative connotation, as well as giving a visual example. During the article, the author chronicles the work and why it was undesirable. “The place is immense. Cold, cavernous. Silent.” This description makes the warehouse seem lonely, even though thousands of people work there. This type of work would be unsatisfying because of the pressure and constant sorting, grabbing and bending. In the article “Fifteen years on the bottom rung,” the other half tells the story of Juan Peralta. He describes his time as a food cook in New York City, and why he is not pleased with his work. With his job in the kitchen, Peralta felt expendable. He wasn’t satisfied because there was no job security. Alongside this, there were no opportunities to move up in the restaurant, leaving a feeling of hopelessness. In order for jobs cannot be satisfying if they do not fit alongside with what the person's needs