Do you ever wonder why do we work for a living? Why we spend all of our childhood and years as a young adult training our mind and body for our future workforce? Do we do it for money? For love maybe Or do we do it because we have no other choice? In the first sentence of "Why do we work" By Andrew Curry, the author states as an option that we work because we have to. I strongly disagree with that statement and here 's why. My entire life I have been told that you need to do certain things growing up in order to be successful. We are brainwashed by these words "You need to" constantly and it scares people from taking a different …show more content…
For example I could be offered the opportunity to get the job I always dreamed of but then I decline because the fear of not doing what I needed to do like finish school haunts my brain. The reason why that can be a problem is because even though I know I would do extremely well at my job there is always the fear of something going wrong and then I 'd have no other type of work due to the fact of not finishing school. Another example would be missing a family members wedding because I still needed work to be done. It 's always the precious moments that always get shot down due to the fact that people are constantly told they need to do this or that and they listen and continue to miss every single moment or opportunity in their life that could change them …show more content…
One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year." What I see from this is nothing more than people only working long hours to receive good pay. That doesn’t mean they enjoy what they’re doing and for me I 'd rather be happy working and making decent pay then work stressful long hours and be unhappy just to receive a bigger
In Ain’t No Making It, Jay Macleod explains his theories and findings on social reproduction of inequality. He begins by telling us more about some authors and their theories. This helped me have a better understanding on what this book is really trying to portray. One author I found interesting was Bernstein who focused on language patterns and social reproduction. By bringing up issues like this one that most people usually don’t think about, I was able to look at the problems that the Brothers and Hallway Hangers faced from a whole new perspective. I would not have noticed this throughout the book if these issues were not mentioned right away. I come from a very traditional family that believes that success depends on how much work you
“My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than-average medical care, a high-protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge $400 or $500 a year. If I am now a productive fake member of the working class, it’s because I haven’t been working, in any hard physical sense, long enough to have
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
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
The same article showed other factors that play into the overworked life of an average American, and one of them is the 67% increase in cost of living since 1990(Gilson). Or, the fact that one’s annual salary at minimum wage is merely $15,080. In addition to that, one must have a $30,000 income in order to say that they genuinely have econmic security. So, maybe this is the reason why Americans find themselves having to work longer hours and having to work harder. It is because our economy is relentless, and in order to make a living, things like vacation and days off have to sometimes be put on ho...
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
People work for three major reasons: their ambition, basic needs and passion. Without jobs, individuals cannot reach their goals when they are ambitious to do, or solve problems of their basic needs, nor have so much passion on educating people and assisting the society to progress. Florence Nightingale, the undocumented workers, Miss Bessie and me all have experiences to realize, understand and proof the importance of jobs. In a word, people need jobs because they are vital for individuals no matter what they have any troubles, dreams and enthusiasm.
When I was growing up, I often reflected on what my chances of success would be later on in life. I always wondered if I would have the same opportunity to make as much money as top richest 1 percent of Americans who hold 34 percent of the total national wealth.(Mantsios 284) These were the rich and successful people I had seen in movies or on television that made billions of dollars a year. I was raised in a middle class family and my parents from the beginning did everything in their power they could to provide me with an opportunity for success. My father, who came from a lower class family, dropped out of college after his sophomore year and began working in construction. When my mother became pregnant with me, my dad decided he would launch his own construction business. I have witnessed first hand how hard he works each day to make the living he does, working from dawn till dusk, 6 days a week. My father is good at what he does but in contrast to the top one percent of Americans, his annual salary (along with the other 99 percent’s) is incomparable pocket change to them. Although my father began with nothing and was able to work his way up and out of the class he began in I still wondered why he was not able to make as much, or even half, in a lifetime as some elite Americans make in a month. It seemed crazy to me that the majority of wealth in America is concentrated within a group of a few, elite Americans that make hundreds of times more than what the rest of the country’s citizens do. I began to ponder the questions: Does everyone in America have an equal opportunity to succeed?...If not, then why? Do the other 99 percent not work hard enough?. I whole-heartedly believe that the amount of effort an individual puts int...
...ese, the person doesn’t have to work for anything for they were already born into riches therefore their lives up until they are old will continue to be filled with riches. A prime example of Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton is an American heiress due to her great grandfather being the founder of the Hilton Hotels, which are now a bombing corporation. Being born into such a wealthy family, she found it apropos to take up the opportunity to become anything she wanted such as television personality, businesswoman, fashion designer, model, actress, producer, DJ, author and singer. Not everyone is given the opportunity to become successful heiresses such as Paris Hilton. That is what make the idea of “hard work equals success” very dependent upon natural born talent and opportunity which in turn makes this aspect of the American Dream more realistic rather than romantic.
This is a very prideful way to view society. I believe that if a man works hard, he should be rewarded and can accumulate wealth that way. Not given money from the rich who worked hard to get wealth.
This idea about becoming multimillionaires over a short period of time or mere hard work has been wide spread through success stories of people’s achieving opportunity in spite of the disadvantages that everyone else has. It seems that in America people are willing to believe any success story that they hear and because of this it gives many Americans a false image of the real world or life. Many people see champions like in boxing for instance, to be complemented with fame, money, and better life while doing what they enjoy the most, but they fall short to realize that there can be one champion. It success stories like these that Mantsios in “Class in America-2012” says that the media has a terminus influence on the perspective of success stories and suggests that Americans live in a facade going from nothing to extremely wealthy society (391). What this shows is that through the use of media people are becoming blind to the idea it will take much more than hard work to achieve upper class status. Because of this blindness, the rich will keep getting richer while everyone else will spend their lives falsifying hope that one day they too will achieve upper class levels status. In the film Trading Places, Ophelia says, “[reading Louis ' palm] You 've never done a day 's work in your life” (trading places). In the film, Luis lived a privileged life where he did not have to do labor-intensive work for a living in comparison to the upper class Americans. The film clearly demonstrates that the idea is falsified, since it can be concluded that the people in the upper class (the one percent) do not work hard at all and still make tons of money
Producing goods or services are dictated not by employees but by their employers. If profits exist, employers are the ones that benefit more so than the regular worker. “Even when working people experience absolute gains in their standard of living, their position, relative to that of capitalists, deteriorates.” (Rinehart, Pg. 14). The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Hard work wears down the employee leaving them frustrated in their spare time. Workers are estranged from the products they produce. At the end of the day, they get paid for a day’s work but they have no control over the final product that was produced or sold. To them, productivity does not equal satisfaction. The products are left behind for the employer to sell and make a profit. In discussions with many relatives and friends that have worked on an assembly line, they knew they would not be ...
Most puzzling, though, is that people often seem aware at some level that money won’t make them happy. And yet they continue to work away earning money they don’t objectively need.
..., a person who earns $25,000 is happier than a person who makes $125,000 and an employee who makes $500,000 is only slightly happier than someone who makes $55,000. Lastly, there are more important things in life that and make you happy, for example, friends. They don’t come with a price tag, and if they do, you definitely need new friends. Money won’t make you happy since good times can’t be bought. You don’t need a fancy vacation to have a good time; it’s just a matter of who you spend it with. Over the years, humans have blown the value of money way out of proportion. People make it seem like if you’re not filthy rich, then you won’t live a good life but it’s not true. You can lack money and yet still live a perfect, happy life.
But as many societies modernized and grew much larger then working class became more educated, gaining specific job skills and achieving the kind of finical well-being jobs Marx would of never thought possible. As we see in today era in the year of 2016, workers are no longer getting exploited. Workers are now working under the protection of a union and a labor law. In a recent, New York Time article published on September 13, 2016, titled "Americans Inequality Problems: Real Income Gains Are Brief and Hard to Find". American 's income increasion was presented. A recent count by the Census Bureau provided good news for a beleaguered set of working class. A typical American working class income had increased by a heavy 5.2 percent in 2015. The first sky high jump since 2007, the year right before the economy had sank into a hard recession. The average income for the poorest population increased by a 6.6 percent after three back to back consecutive years of decline, the American economy has began to lift, the fellow ruse of the minimum wage across many states and municipalities. But what many American 's ask is what "why now why after so many years after the increase of labor income?" The answer to this question has many factors that can imply but one cause was mainly on distribution.Most agreed that the only way Americans were going to make it ahead would be through a paycheck. But the question still stands