Hand to Mouth was written by Linda Tirado and was published by G.P. Putman’s Sons in 2014. In this book, Tirado talks about her experiences as a poor working woman in today’s society. She used this book to show people why poor people act the way they act and make the choices they make. Chapter one talks about Tirado’s experiences working in her twenties as a bartender and a waitress. She was minimum wage and she mentioned that, “I’ve held down up to three: tending bar, waiting tables, and working as a voter registration canvasser. It nearly killed me, and I still didn’t break twenty grand that year.” (p. 6). My opinion on this is that it must be discouraging for her to work so hard and not get much out of it. However I also think that the reason she has to work so hard at minimum wage jobs is because she did not get a college degree and most jobs that pays well requires a college degree. In chapter two, Tirado says, “you have no legal right to take breaks in America” (p. 18). She was working like many other minimum wage jobs, in harsh and dangerous conditions because her employer did not care about her safety. I would feel worn out and concerned for my safety if I had to constantly worry about grease burns or heat strokes or whatever the case might This is a double standard that annoys Tirado. An example of this is, “It turns out that that whether sleeping on a public bench is a crime or not depends entirely on whether you have enough money to look like you have a place to sleep.” (p.149). I do not think this is right because rich people do have a place to stay and poor people might not have a place to sleep. I feel like we should not make it harder on the poor people by punishing them when we should be helping them find a warm and safe place to
In Chapter One she makes a start in Key West. In this chapter she learns a lot about low-wage-job applications. Each application she fills out has many multi choice questions and later on a urine test. She ends up waiting many days hearing nothing back and then applying for a job waitressing. She's hired and is paid $2.43 and hour plus tips.
Life for young Elva Treviño Hart was less than ideal and in her autobiography, Barefoot Heart she vividly explains the back-breaking work, financial hardships, and emotional struggles a migrant worker faces. Influenced by the struggles of day-to-day life, migrant work, school life, and society, Elva was shown over and over again what life would be like if she did not make an effort to change her predestined life. All too commonly people like Elva Treviño who are born into poverty will remain living in such conditions for the rest of their lives; however, growing up in poor conditions will have a great positive influence the life decisions someone like Elva makes.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickle and Dimed” she explored a life as having a low wage earning by working several jobs in numerous of different places as she tempted to live off the wage she earned. Even though she had a doctorate in science she is known as a journalist and as well as muckraker. In the novel she states her journey on how she pondered how someone unskilled, uneducated, and untrained workers can survive with the minimum wage incomes. Barbara gave us real life experiences of her personal life as she had witnessed firsthand as her loved ones struggled living minimum wage jobs to provide enough utilities for her family.
McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and cleaning services: all of these have one thing in common-they are all minimum wage jobs. Their pay is low and work load high, and because of this living as a low wageworker is never easy. One must handle many hardships in order to make a few meager dollars, with which most cannot sufficiently live. 'The 'living wage' in the United States is between $9-10.18; sounds great to a college student, but in the real world this kind of money just isn't going to cut it,' (Ramisch). Minimum wage standards for American workers rest at $5.15 per hour, and in such slighted fields, very few make much more than that, perhaps $6-7, but even that is a rarity. The material life of a low-income employee includes bare necessities and next to zero luxuries. These workers often live paycheck to paycheck and never have a moment to fully enjoy life because they are constantly working, supporting themselves, and/or their families. Barbara Ehrenreich tries capturing this unacknowledged side of low wageworkers in her book, Nickel and Dimed, when she goes undercover as a fellow employee. Her real life accounts are noted as accurate and shocking as she brings the severity of poverty to the forefront for many Americans (Ehrenreich 3). She portrays the lives of millions in one simple novel, and it is through this piece of literature that so many relate and feel less estranged in the overall scheme of things. This relation is especially true for three young women, Brandyll Powers, Whitney James, and Charity Pouge all of whom are forced to live on their scanty incomes in today's society. These interviewees discuss their daily struggles of living on minimum wage and how they are active representations of Ehrenreich?s novel.
Ehrenreich attempts to find a job through newspaper ads and other ways, she tries to avoid working in certain fields, one of them being waitressing. Ehrenreich learns that it is a very complicated process to get a job at low wage because of the interview process, here they ask you a variety of questions to make sure they have workers who will be proactive for the company, she notes a lot of distrust from low-wage employers. She did not hear back from any of the many jobs she applied for. The reason for this could be that they frequently hire many workers who end up being a waste of time and money. Ehrenreich finds that the only jobs available pay around $6.00 an hour and are fast-food. Ehrenreich hears back from a Hotel where she begins as a waitress, here she gets paid $2.43 an hour plus tips, she shadows the other employees to pick up skills and begins to learn things from them. Ehrenreich quickly becomes frustrated with the job and the management, the workload is very heavy and the pay is very
The narrator in “Famine” by Xu XI was raised by her parents A-Ba and A-Ma in Hong Kong. Her Father made her quit school after her primary school was over which was the through the sixth grade. She was then forced to take care of her aging parents till they died in their mid-nineties. Her father was abusive and very controlling over everything in her life while her mom chose to do nothing about it. She was rarely aloud out with friends or to have much fun at all she never experienced much in life. She wanted to do something she really wanted to learn, but her father said no in order to continue her education to become an English teacher she went on several hunger strikes to rebel her father wants. Food seemed herd to come by in her house particularly, they were forced vegetarians by A-Ba’s decision, they ate very little and the food was also bland. A-Ba and A-ma were not very loving parents, they expected a lot out of their
A substantial number of people in America live outside categories regarded as acceptable by the community. Povertized people seem to elucidate comfort on their treadmill of poverty. Society has merely made it easier to live in poverty rather than
This article, written by Barbara Ehrenreich, describes her month-long experiment with living on only minimum wage in June of 1998, shortly before certain welfare programs were to be cut back. She intended to test the viability of living only on minimum-wage jobs, as well as the claim that “work will lift poor women out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self-esteem, and hence their future value in the labor market.” Ehrenreich at first expects her privileges – such as her intelligence, race, health, and transportation – will allow her to easily find a job and survive off of it. Immediately, her expectations are dashed by the difficulty she faces in finding a job she would prefer. She eventually settles on being a waitress, and for a short period works two jobs at once. After a month of exhausting work, she finds she is unable to withstand the physical, emotional, and economical demands of minimum-wage labor any longer.
The book ‘Nickel and Dimed’ follows the author Barbra Ehrenreich on her on a journalism experiment to see how someone could get by on the minimum wage of $6 or $7. While Barbra is familiar with the poverty issue in American she herself with a Ph.D. and comfortable life was not familiar with feeling the effects of poverty. Before the experiment started Barbra set down some ground rules, first being, she could not search for jobs that require skills from her higher education (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 4). All the jobs she applied for had to be starting level jobs that someone coming out of high school could obtain. Second rule, she had to take the job offering the highest wage, and do her best to hold the position (Ehrenreich, 2011, p. 4). She was to try her hardest at all the jobs and not slack off reading or try to speak out against management
Crime and Class, The poorer you are, the more likely you are to be arrested for a crime. However, this may be better explained by the fact that the crimes of the poor are more visible and they are more likely to fit the criminal profile than by the fact of economic need. In addition, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be a victim of crime. (Kimmel & Aronson,
In today’s society, the question of minimum wage is a large political topic. Many people argue that it is impossible to live on a minimum wage lifestyle. In her novel Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich looks into this issue. In an experiment in which she mimics the life of a single woman, she moves into the low-wage workforce in three different cities in America. Within these cities, she attempts to make a living off of low-wage work and records her experiences, as well as the experiences of the true low-wage workers around her. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich utilizes both vivid imagery and data in order to persuade the audience to agree that the low-wage lifestyle is truly un-livable.
Imagine, you are with friends. You are a rich, white, 16 year old boy in Texas. You smoke weed, get high and drunk. You get into the car with friends even though you already cant drive but you still have your own car. Then while driving in texas you kill three people. When you get to court, the punishment is you get to go got to a huge on parole with Xbox, PSP and flat screens, and much more. Now imagine the same scenario, with the same judge around the same time, but you are black.. You go to jail for ten 10 years only because you are not rich or white Unfair right? Well in the Ethan Couch case, this inequality happened and it happens often,even in fiction stories like in the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In this book, a black
The family and Jurgis are always on a rollercoaster of a lot of money and bankrupt mostly because their jobs pay fluctuates so much. Their pay always relies on the boss so they control it so that means they (the bosses) can basically make the immigrants work as hard as they want them to or threaten to not pay them at all.(Sinclair 163) In this passage, Ona is raped and taken to a brothel because her boss (Conner) threatens to fire her and put her whole family on a blacklist if she does not do what he says. Another reason low pay is bad is because it is one of the reasons so many people died from diseases, they could not afford to pay for medical attention. By the end of the book 7 out of the starting 12 people die from just medical injuries that can be treated with proper care. These examples show how bad low pay was.
María Full of Grace is a film that gives us an intake on just how hard it is to make a living, especially at such a young age. María and her family struggled with making a living, they were constantly fighting over who had to pay the next bill or who had to pay for something they needed. And the amount of money each was making with the job they had. You could tell in the film they really relied on María and the money she was making at the flower shop when she finally told her family she quit her job. This is starting to become a common thing in today’s society. I have been a witness to this on several occasions.
Ensuring that all members of society are taken care of and are treated respectfully is crucial to ensuring the well being of society as a whole. To say that those less fortunate should be left to fend for themselves, or that it is not our responsibility as citizens and responsible members of society to assist those in need of help is simply selfish. How would you feel if you were the one in need of assistance? We the people that make up society must contribute our time, resources and effort to help others who are less privileged and more susceptible to sickness due to their living conditions and the situation that they are stuck in. Ultimately, society stands to benefit when we take care of those members of society that are in need of shelter, food, financial assistance etc. Furthermore, in doing so, we are also keeping our community safe by eliminating the need for those less fortunate to turn to crime as a way to feed themselves and their family. One can only be pushed so far until self-preservation becomes the most important factor to a person, thus pushing those who are hungry to resort to stealing, robbing and other such crimes to survive.