The roar of a stomach growls as a middle aged woman awakes from what feels like a short nap in order to arrive at work on time. With a young child at home, the stress of paying bills and affording life’s necessities builds up in addition to dealing with poor well being. Growing up in America, a child dreams of living in a beautiful home with a family while working for a high paying job to purchase the latests gadgets. Such a life sounds quite wonderful but a dream often never becomes reality, in fact it often leads to disappointment and despair. Life shocks many people, especially later in life when expenses pile up and that dream drifts further out of reach. Life simply continues to be taken away from innocent people while pay raises halt and hard work carries on. The scarce pay can’t make up for the medical bills, debt, and restriction resulting from a low income. Raising pay drastically relieves stress, allowing for life to be lived wholy. Through times of financial turmoil, the human race often depends on a government to improve the lives of citizens in addition to the economy whereas a …show more content…
No such life exists for far too many people. Low wages restrict employees to settle for the minimum when considering food, clothes, and a home. The idea of reaching all goals in life bursts at the sound of minimum wage. Minimum wage must be raised for no family can manage to live on $7.25 an hour any longer. Citizens continue to struggle and yet no valuable solution has been put into action. The government repeatedly bails out tax money to support those in need, a generous but insufficient deed that achieves no end goal. Raising minimum wage grants citizens the ability to uphold a family, simultaneously impacting the economy for the better. Every person alive today and those to come deserve the gift of life with limited economic stress. Empower the people. Respect the life
Firstly, the rhetor appeals to the reader’s sense of patriotism by discussing a system (in the restaurant industry) that disallows the pursuit of the American Dream. The rhetor writes about how people are forced to live with low wages and being in poverty when they shouldn’t. They put in a very large amount of work in their jobs and get little reward for what they do. This changes the way society works and allows for an enlargement of the amount of people below the poverty line. People (in America) feel entitled to certain rights including economic freedom. The author appeals to the emotions of the American people by subtly suggesting an infringement of freedom. In a larger picture, this problem of income disparity is addressed nationwide, people look to politicians to fix the “evergrowing” income gap between the upper and lower income levels. This becomes highly important when looking at what defines an American, whether it be income or freedom, both are being jeopardized by this
Ehrenreich show that just because people have a decent job doesn’t mean that they are living a happy life. “ You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the middle class . But no.” Many of the narrators coworkers are living a rough life as they are trying to better themselves, but they can’t due to the “Money-less” economy that the middle class entails. That six to ten dollars an hour doesn’t cut it in the high cost of living nowadays. The amount of time that people spend out of the day working is slowly increasing to where some people never get to see their family. My father is home for four days out of every month, which is not a very long time, so we spend as much time with him as possible before he sends back off to the mine to work his life away to support his family. The amount of time that americans spend working doesn’t comply with how much they are getting paid.The minimum wage for the state of wyoming currently is $5.15 per hour. Not making much money can have a large impact on people’s attitudes towards
...ther being, that lower income people are in fact hard workers and are stuck in their social economic class. Finally, this paper discusses how it relates to our PS 204 class, and how one can link the ideas in this class with those from the book. Issues like equality which are mentioned in the book, and others like voter participation, which was a question raised by this author, are major issues in our country today. These issues need to be addressed so that individuals like Gail and Holly don t have to worry if they are injured on the job, because they know they will be taken care of. Confucius says it best, “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” (quote site). Our country has the ability to help these individuals, the question is, what are YOU going to do about it?
...elp the working middle class from falling into poverty or to help the working poor rise out of poverty. Furthermore the working poor themselves lack the knowledge and power to demand reform. David Shipler says it best when he writes, “Relief will come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family —and the commitment of both society and individual.” (Shipler 5786-5788) It is time for America to open its eyes and see the invisible working poor.
The gap in wealth between the rich and the poor continues to grow larger, as productivity increases but wages remain the same. There were changes in the tax structure that gave the wealthy tax breaks, such as only taxing for social security within the first $113,700 of income in a year. For CEOs this tax was paid off almost immediately. Free trade treaties broke barriers to trade and resulted in outsourcing and lower wages for workers. In “Job on the Line” by William Adler, a worker named Mollie James lost her job when the factory moved to Mexico. “The job in which Mollie James once took great pride, the job that both fostered and repaid her loyalty by enabling her to rise above humble beginnings and provide for her family – that job does not now pay Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on” (489). When Balbina started working she was only making 65 cents an hour. Another huge issue lies in the minimum wage. In 2007, the minimum wage was only 51% of the living wage in America. How can a person live 51% of a life? Especially when cuts were being made in anti-poverty and welfare programs that were intended to get people on their feet. Now, it seems that the system keeps people down, as they try to earn more but their benefits are taken away faster than they can earn. Even when workers tried to get together to help themselves they were thrown
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
Although the wage is being increased frequently, the cost of other necessities also increase at a faster rate that is not being accounted for. The author explains that this society is shaped around hiding poverty from the public, also referred to as “money taboo”. An example, Ehrenreich explains, is the lack of low-wage search help from the media. Many employees often don’t share wages from their jobs in fear of a sense of outcast. Thus, many well-paying jobs go under the radar. Minimum wage employers, such as Walmart, eat up the ignorance of the working class. Such companies resist increasing the wage by promoting flashy “benefits” for workers instead. Ehrenreich explains that in a world where the rich overshadow the poor, low-cost housing can easily be overbid by the rich. As seen in her time in Minnesota, Ehrenreich could not find low-cost housing affordable on her Walmart wage. Even the borderline affordable motels lacked safety and cleanliness. In the Evaluation, Ehrenreich sums up the social and economic problems that seem to be apparent throughout the book. She also effectively highlights the issues of the legitimate lower-class workers she encounters. Ehrenreich incorporates prior knowledge of her specialty into
Welfare reform caused many families surviving with the help of the government to go out and look for jobs despite their need for childcare that they could not afford. Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist with a PhD, decided to find out how life would be like living on minimum wage labor. During her journey, we see that labor has not changed majorly because laborers are not paid fairly and they are declined their rightfully owned rights. Although women are allowed in the workplace, an eight hour work day is established, and we have a minimum wage, many are still struggling to make it because the system simply does not work unless you are running the show.
Throughout Ehrenreich 's journey, she becomes increasingly aware of the reality of her situation as a member of the working poor. She realizes that “the 'working poor, '... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society”(Ehrenreich 221). Despite having far less wealth than the average American, low income workers sacrifice their time and health to accept wages that are often fiscally unviable. The working poor must slave away at “jobs that… [are] physically demanding, some of them evan damaging (pg.195)” to benefit the financially adept, who give nothing in return. This process of giving and not receiving is exhibited when Ehrenreich attempts to find aid from welfare programs, but is disappointed when she can only qualify to receive less than a week 's worth of groceries. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor”(Ehrenreich 27) and as a result individuals within this group are left on their own to support themselves and their families with mediocre wages. In addition to having little to no assistance when it comes to nourishment, the poor must also pay for additional costs that financially capable people do not have. An example of these additional costs can be seen when Ehrenreich must constantly pay for fast food because she has no source of refrigeration and also, when she must buy expensive medicine
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s, “Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America,” she emphasizes how difficult it is for the lower class to earn a living. As a middle class worker, she wondered what it was like to work as a lower class. Would she be able to get by? She decided to create a social expe...
Briefly state the main idea of this article: The main idea of this article is that economic inequality has steadily risen in the United States between the richest people and the poorest people. And this inequality affects the people in more ways than buying power; it also affects education, life expectancy, living conditions and possibly happiness. Another idea that he brought up was that the American government tends to give less help to the unemployed than other rich countries.
The United States had recently faced an economic recession that resulted in company bankruptcies, therefore causing unemployment spikes and home foreclosures. In the media, two movie have recently came out with two movies that plotted around recently unemployed middle-class families that are struggling to keep up with their standard of living and facing bankruptcy. In the movie, Mad Money, the main ch...
At one point in her career, Barbara Ehrenreich thought that it would be a good idea to get into the life of a person who works for the minimum wage and tries to live of it. As she went through her quest, Barbara met many people who were in fact, struggling. Unlike her, these people had to work multiple jobs, cut down their eating, live in terrible places, and just suffer all because of the lack of money and the need for as much of it as the could get. Some of these employees had others that they had to support, and some only needed to provide for themselves. Nonetheless, millions of people across the US are forced to work jobs where they are miserable in order to be able to give their families what they need, no matter what they have to give up in order to do so. Some of the people she meets are very similar to the characters in George Saunders’ story Pastoralia in the terms that they too work hard, don’t get the best treatment, and are only working because of their need to provide and sustain themselves and others. Saunders subtly depicts his characters as minimum wage workers, much like those in real life, who are struggling to give their loved ones what they need.
The United States, a place where anyone can “pick themselves up by the bootstraps” and realize the American dream of a comfortable lifestyle. Well, for over 30 million Americans this is no longer possible. Though we live in the richest and most powerful country in the world there are many who are living under or at the precipice of the poverty level, “While the United States has enjoyed unprecedented affluence, low-wage employees have been testing the American doctrine that hard work cures poverty” (The Working Poor, 4). This translates to families of four making around 18,850$ a year. And as soon as they find work or move just slightly above that 18,850$ a year (which is still a meager and deprived way to live) they are cut off from welfare checks and other “benefits”, “they [working poor] lose other supports designed to help them such as food stamps and health insurance, leaving them no better off-and sometimes worse off-than when they were not working” (The Working Poor, 40). The working poor find themselves in a trap of dead-end, minimum wage jobs, and complicated, under funded government programs.
In her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), Barbara Ehrenreich performs a social experiment in which she transplants herself from her comfortable middle-class life and immersing herself in the plight of the “millions of American’s (who) work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages” (Ehrenreich, 2001). Her goal was to explore the consequences of the welfare reform on the approximately four million women who would be subsequently forced into the labor market, expecting to make only $6 to $7 an hour. (2001 p.1) Her experiment eviscerated the idea that the American underclass was lazy, and the lie that American’s could live healthy, productive lives on minimum wage. On the contrary, she proved underclass Americans to be among the hardest working of the classes, and effectively illustrated the nigh impossibility of these people to break free of the cycle of poverty and find a way to improve their situation.