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 …show more content…
Curry agrees that work is a job that takes over a person’s life and claims, “The job penetrates every aspect of life. Americans don’t exercise they work out” (15). In his perspective, a job has created this sense of “working out”, in which not the actual going to the gym to workout is being used, but jobs are the place of working out. In his mind working out at the gym has been replaced with typical long houred jobs. This is the case for many people, including the life of Ehrenreich in which the juggling of two jobs, consists of her whole day. She proclaims: I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of handling two jobs at once, and for two days I almost do it: working the breakfast/lunch shift at Jerry’s from 8:00 till 2:00, arriving at the Hearthside a few minutes late, at 2:10, and attempting to hold out until 10:00. …show more content…
Curry touches on how labors tried to push for workers to work less and declares, “For more than a century, a key struggle for the labor movement was reducing the amount of time workers had to spend on the job” (15). It is an obvious fact that people work very long hours and there has been several pushes to reduce these hours, while at the same time increase hourly pay, but many of these attempts have failed. Ehrenreich goes into detail about how there are no breaks at one of her jobs and writes, “The break room summarizes the whole situation: there is none, because there are no breaks at Jerry’s. For six to eight hours in a row, you never sit except to pee” (21). Ehrenreich is forced to work these hours due to financial issues and is not even allotted any breaks. These long hours would be easier to do if a break was added in between, but the idea of breaks are just imagination. Curry’s argument that workers have too many hours is backed up with the fact that Ehrenreich works numerous hours, while at the same time getting paid with bare minumum wages Working long hours have become a norm of society, though there have been movements to push for the shortage of hours, it is a battle that is slowly being
People slave for a number of hours of work and find themselves with minimum wage salaries and working with people they don’t want to be around with. In her article Serving in Florida, Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover as a low-wage worker for various jobs to expose the working conditions of working class Americans. Throughout her essay, she discusses how the employees are fearful of losing their jobs even though they are forced to work in inhumane conditions such as long hours, with no breaks between shifts. While undercover, Ehrenreich attempts to make an argument on how the upper and middle class can find it difficult to survive under minimum wage jobs and allow readers to figure out what can be done to change the restaurant business.
Marks, L. (2006). The Loss of Leisure in a Culture of Overwork. Spirit of Change Magazine.
Ehrenreich adopted the sociologist's tool of an ethnography for her research. She became a covert participant observer while at the jobs she worked. As such, she did not expose herself as a journalist to her coworkers until the conclusion of each job. She did this in order to not experience the Hawthorne Effect; the effect that happens when people knowingly are observed and therefore change their normal habits to please the observer. While the book was an interesting read and her personal experiences enlightening to many of the low wage worker's dilemmas and alienating jobs, her pitfalls in research outweigh her strengths.
The poem describes workers to be “Killing the overtime ‘cause the dream is your life, / Refusing to take holidays or go home to your spouse, / But for many the overtime comes, ‘cause the work is not done. / Deadlines to be met. So you continue to dream like a war vet, / Having flashbacks to make you shiver and scream” (Jones, stanza 7, lines 2-6). Jones reinforces that overworking for an incentive of money does not give one a sense of gratification, and it also distracts them from the values that should matter more to them than anything else. Both Kohn and Jones have a similar approach to showing the reader the effect that overworking can have on a person, and how it will change their values in life, causing unhappiness. Many students go through school dispirited and do not join various clubs and activities for their own enjoyment. A friend of Kohn’s who was also a high school guidance counsellor had a student with ‘…amazing grade and board scores. It remained only to knock out a dazzling essay on his college applications that would clinch the sale. “Why don’t we start with some books that
Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover as a struggling and minumum wage payed American Waitress. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of “Nickel-And-Dimed” an essay about an average minimum wage worker and how they live their lives on a low wage job. She disguises herself and tries to prove that it is impossible or possible to be financially stable. Barbara meets other minimum wage workers, uses mathematical statics and personal experience to prove that it is very difficult or even impossible to live off a minimum wage paid job and using all of these facts make this article effective and strong.
Ehrenreich states “…the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves — facing market-based rents, for example, on their wages alone. For millions of Americans, that $10 — or even $8 or $6 — hourly wage is all there is.” (Ehrenreich 214) A large portion of us human beings in society today, only care about making money to benefit ourselves rather than those less fortunate. People who have worked their entire lives on low wages may never experience luxuriousness due to the greed of our employers and government. Those graced with a generous amount of money tend to leave others in need of assistance, thusly causing inhuman nature to develop within our communities. Ehrenreich experiences this when she found out that her own self-esteem lowered at the hands of her employers who treated their workers as disposable. These employers as well as their companies, devalue a worker to essentially keep them powerless against them. Many of the job interviews she had gone through avoided any discussion of wages because, the employers wanted to keep the paychecks at a bare minimum. In most situations within our community workplace, a worker is not compensated correctly for his or her labor. Most of the human beings today would do just anything to stay wealthy, even if it means devaluing another. Most of our society spends their lifetimes
Previous generations have a strong belief of keeping work and home life separate; that work is for work and home is for play (Rampell, 2011, para 21). Today’s professionals do not seem to abide by similar beliefs, constantly crossing the borders of one into the other. While many recognize this as an issue that could result in employees being less productive, it has actually resulted in them accepting that their work may run late into the evening or even into the weekend. I agree with this completely in that I grew up being taught that business is business and personal is personal; you leave your home life at the door. But now times have changed, and my weekends are no longer dedicated to my home life, but for work, because I attend classes during the week. Also, in my line of work in the Allied Health industry, it is a requirement to work off hours. Long gone are the days of working nine to five, Monday through Friday; technology and the demand of wanting affairs done and done as soon as possible, has made it so the “work week” is now 24-7. “Jon Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics, said, ‘Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence’” (Rampbell,
People will argue that having a low-paying job and freedom is better than a high-paying job and a 60-hour workweek. However many including myself, don’t share the views of Hal Niedzviecki’s essay’s “Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With”. Having a higher paying and longer hours provides much more income and allows for a lot more financial freedom. This freedom can help bring much more happiness into your life compared to the lower paying workweek. Hal Niedzviecki mentions many benefits to the easy jobs with low-paying workweeks in the following statement
In her book “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries” Kathi Weeks (2011) argues that today we work too hard and that work is quite important that is a requirement to survive. Work has become a privatized system and ultimately is a way of life (p.3). She also claims that the idea that a subject must work to become a worker it is more related to discipline than it is to economic. Humans become social and political subjects within work. Thus, work has become a key site of becoming classed (p.8). Gender identities are also created and reinforced through work.
Mike Rose describes his first-hand experience of blue collar workers in his monograph “Blue Collar Brilliance”. Patiently, he observed the cooks and waitresses whilst he waited for his mother’s shift to end. He noticed how his mother called out abbreviated orders, tag tables and so on. Mike Rose describes how his mother, Rosie, took orders whilst holding cups of coffee and removed plates in motion. Rose observed how her mother and other waiters worked and concluded that blue collar work “demands both body and brain” (Rose 274). He describes that Rosie devised memory strategies and knew whether an order was being delayed. She was assiduous in sequencing and clustering her tasks and solved any technical or human problem simultaneously. Managing
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 book, Ehrenreich documented her experiences working a series of minimum wage jobs as a waitress, a maid and a nursing home dietary assistant. Ehrenreich found that in order to make ends meet and afford a place to live and food to eat, she needed to work two jobs, which left her in a constant state of exhaustion and pain. She also observed of her fellow servers that, “everyone who lacks a working husband or boyfriend seems to have a second job” (2001, p. 48). Many of her co-workers shared the same challenge with affordable living arrangements, some living in a van, with their mother, sharing rooms with strangers or even living in a dry-docked boat (Ehrenreich, 2001). Not only did Ehrenreich find that the wages offered unskilled workers were not enough to meet the basic needs of food and shelter, but that there are a “host of special costs” (2001, p. 27) incurred by the working poor. For example, workers are required to invest their own funds in partial uniform and pay ...
The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins is a non- fiction book that follows the lives of nine high school/ college overachieving students. On the outside they look healthy, happy, and perfect, but upon closer look the reader realizes just how manic their lives and the lives of many other high scholars are. It is no secret that high school and college has become more competitive, but the public doesn’t realize just out of control this world is. “Overachieverism” has become a way of life, a social norm. It is a world-wide phenomenon that has swamped many of the world’s top countries. Students are breaking under the immense amount of pressure that society puts on them. They live in constant fear that they will not live up to society’s, or their own, standards. People have put so much emphasis on students to succeed and to outperform their peers, and all before them, that it is changing them, and is having irreversible effects on them.
Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton PhD tells what good bosses do and learn what not to do by bad bosses. Dr. Sutton breaks the book down into nine chapters that cater from having the right mindset to it is all about you. The book breaks down situations into common sense thinking.
Work is a means of life, it is what keeps society running across the globe . Perspectively speaking work is the sole defender of anarchy. Our lives are based off the ideology of go to school, get a job, and work hard. That sentence alone has been embedded in our brains since most could remember. In the Memoir “first job” , Iliana Roman feels that hard work, and good ethics must be embedded in our youth. If neglected to do so, it can lead to a non functional society. She of all people knows this to be true. Iliana worked her way up from the bottom. She worked long hours, attended school, and raised 3 kids. eventually leading to her owning her own company, and being her own boss.