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Women struggle for equality in the workplace
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Annete Fuentes, “Life on the Global Assembly Line,” MS 1981
Women struggle for equality in the workplace
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Imagine being employee number 101 out of 1001. Now imagine working on an assembly line in a hot room filled with 1000 other women frantically assembling products for first world countries to use for ten seconds before discarding for a newer version. This job pays enough for you to get by but living in a third world country with low pay isn’t easy. What many people don’t understand is that the cost of production in a third world country is more inexpensive than it is in America. Hiring women to work in horrid conditions decreases employee loss because they are not rambunctious like men. “Life on the Global Assembly Line” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes clearly illustrates the hardships women go through for U.S. corporation production. Corporate powers have resorted to building production plants in third world countries to save money. U.S. corporate powers take advantage of third world …show more content…
corporate powers take advantage of third world countries for their women. These women are subjected to horrid working conditions. The women work long hours with small amounts of sleep, food, and water. Multinational companies like the United States build production plants in third world countries to increase production inexpensively because they don’t have to pay greedy Americans. The women around the world working in production plants are dehumanized. For the rest of their lives they will only know how to work in hard labor. Hard labor doesn’t have to be physically taxing; it can also be mentally taxing. Jobs like bar girls, prostitutes, and hostesses are mentally taxing on these women. Pleasing other men every night for only their pleasure just to make ends meet does not bring positive thoughts to a woman’s mind. Third world women deserve equal rights just like the women in first world countries. Corporate powers will no longer take advantage of these women if one takes a stand against
Since the Industrial Revolution in the United States of America, working conditions for women and minorities have not been given equal pay or top positions in the work place. Women being degraded by the men in charge, and minorities constantly at odds with one another so they will not form a Union. Such things keep those with low-status in the job in line, and not feel they are equal to the ones in charge. People from other countries are in search for a better life elsewhere, and take the risk of going to the United States illegally to seek out the American Dream. The articles Working at Bazooms by Meika Loe and At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die by Charlie LeDuff deal with the working conditions for women and minorities. Workers in both articles have to deal with having terrible working conditions, harassment in the workplace, low-status within the job, and the constant fear of job loss.
In the reading I chose, "Some Lessons from The Assembly Line", by Andrew Braaksma, is about a college student who in the summer time works for a factory all day long. To me, this reading is about a man maybe in his 20 's gaining great work experience during his summer breaks while also saving money. He also uses his work experiences in his college assignments, his knowledge from learning real life experiences at work. My opinion about this reading is that it is very informative. He is learning lessons and learning how to apply them to his school work. For Andrew, working in a factory seems like the best option, he saves money while at the same time, gaining very valuable experiences. He loves his school, and when he returns, he is so relieved to be back. He has been in a factory all summer while other classmates take it easy with small part time jobs. The articles theme of "Some Lessons from The Assembly Line" is to help inform people about how important education can be because he compares college life and work life, how he learns new experiences at work, and how much he appreciates being able to attend school.
Women now hold their place in the workforce and we have our eight hour day. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the people who strongly believed that women needed opportunities for labor, and women have gotten those rights. On the contrary, women still get paid less than men. According to CNN Money, “men still make more than women in most professions -- considerably more in some occupations than others, according to a new study by the job search site Glassdoor”. Although we like to comfort ourselves with the idea that we have gotten our rightfully earned rights, we had not been given bathroom breaks until 1998. Furthermore, employees are still afraid to have a voice in the workforce. Employers establish rules that basically let laborers know that they are inferior. In Ehrenreich 's case, she witnessed being told that her bag was subject to being looked through at any time, and she saw how degrading drug tests were. Ehrenreich argues that“the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being ‘reamed out’ by managers- are part of what keeps wages low”(Ehrenreich 211) which is agreeable seeing as the low wage workers decline to fight for better conditions due to fear. Additionally, Barbara figures out that minimum jobs do not equal minimum labor, which has always been the case. I agree with that fact due to
Corporations seek out countries with cheap labor forces to lower their production costs. Consequently, they will engage in practices, such as banning labor unions and selecting a passive labor force, which frequently consists of young women, to ensure their policies on low wages are met with little or no resistance. Ultimately, in order to attract investments of multinational corporations, governments in third world nations must compete against each other to exploit their own labor force to supply the cheapest products. Furthermore, instead of sharing the profits with the workers, corporations spend most of the money saved from the labors on advertising and celebrity spokespeople.
In terms of the media, men are both seen and heard much more than women are. Women’s biological events are typically not studied into vast detail. Furthermore, women of color are severely unnoticed in psychology research (30). An area in which women go especially unnoticed is domestic work. There are numerous women who immigrate from the Caribbean, Latin America, and other developing countries, to North America. Upon entering North America, these women work in areas where they provide domestic work, such as child care, until they can earn a green card. Matlin (2012) reports further, “They may be expected to work every day—with no time off and no health insurance—for a fraction of the minimum-wage salary. Many of the women report that their employers insult them, do not let them leave the house, and treat them much like modern-day slaves” (226). While this situation sounds like something that would occur in a third world country, it is occurring right in our own backyards. In addition to domestic work, numerous women and their families become involved with garment work. Many women go unnoticed working in sweatshops, where there are numerous labor laws regarding wages and working conditions violated daily. These sweatshops occur all over the world, from North America to Latin America. Matlin recalls a story from one of her students, saying, “Several months later, Ling’s mother began to work on a garment, without asking for the supervisor’s permission. The supervisor then punched Ling’s mother in the chest, and the family called the police to report the assault. The manager then fired the entire family” (226). It is shocking that women go unnoticed and unreported in these unethical and disturbing conditions. In addition to this, women often go unnoticed in health care. Throughout history, women have often been
On September 5, 1995, Hillary Clinton delivered an influential speech at The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Clinton expresses general concern over escalating violence toward women, in other word’s gendercide. “Gendercide refers to the systematic elimination of a specific gender group, normally female. It’s most common in India, China, and other regions in Southeast Asia” (GirlsKind Foundation). Crimes, such as bride trafficking, infanticide, abandonment, and dowry related murder; often take place within private households, going unnoticed and not even acknowledged. “Tragically, women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated. Even now, in the late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an instrument of armed conflict Women and children make up a large majority of the world’s refugees” (Clinton 3). By addressing her speech in Beijing, where gendercide is prevalent, Hillary expressed her objective effectively not just the United Nations, but to audiences across the world. Clinton effectively delivered her speech by portraying her purpose for women to achieve equality and better opportunities, with ethical appeals, emotional appeals, and logical appeals.
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
Culture is a big influencer in how women are perceived in the workplace; generally the cultural stereotype of a woman belonging in the home causes women’s work to be devalued. As previously mentioned in Cuba these gender stereotypes are incredibly prevalent and can explain why women are paid less for the same work. Across the world this mindset prevails, in Korea a study done on laborers showed that even with no difference in education between the sexes, there was still a devaluation of women’s work. “This study indicate that the theories of culturally given gender stereotypes and labor market risk/cost are more likely to explain the remaining gender difference in labor earnings and other employment conditions.” (Lee, Cho, Lee, 2001,
Linda Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, visited Vietnam and Indonesia in the summer of 2000 to obtain first-hand research on the impact of foreign-owned export factories (sweatshops) on the local economies. Lim found that in general, sweatshops pay above-average wages and conditions are no worse than the general alternatives: subsistence farming, domestic services, casual manual labor, prostitution, or unemployment. In the case of Vietnam in 1999, the minimum annual salary was 134 U.S. dollars while Nike workers in that country earned 670 U.S. dollars, the case is also the similar in Indonesia. Many times people in these countries are very surprised when they hear that American's boycott buying clothes that they make in the sweatshops. The simplest way to help many of these poor people that have to work in the sweatshops to support themselves and their families, would be to buy more products produced in the very sweatshops they detest.
Despite the drastic changes made toward the improvement of equal rights there a still many problems that have been overlooked, or simply ignored. According to Mario Osave, (2010) “Thirty years after the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), many girls and women still do not have equal opportunities to realize rights recognized by law. In many countries, women are not entitled to own property or inherit land. Social exclusion, “honor” killings, female genital mutilation, trafficking, restricted mobility and early marriage among others, deny the right to health to women and girls and increase illness and death throughout the life-course.” (Shah 1)
...ntries women are restricted in where they can and cannot work. Most commonly, they seem to be restricted from jobs in which physically taxing tasks are the norm. This is no doubt due to the stereotype that women are fragile and weak and must be protected (a stereotype that can hold true, but that is not always true). This also seems to be consistent across culture. However, despite the fact that these restrictions were enacted to protect women, they place heavy limitations on women’s opportunities. Furthermore, these are not the only injustices many women across the world face. However, the only way to fight these injustices is to increase women’s participation in politics, as discussed in the UN report from 2008. It is absolutely vital that women be able to actively participate in politics without letting gender discrimination and stereotypes get in the way.
Feminists are constantly trying to decrease the wage gap through activism. Women are more educated now than they have ever been, but even women who are university graduates are earning less than men. Frenette and Coulombe reached the conclusion that this was often due to their degrees being in gendered fields of study, such as the arts and humanities (as cited in Gaszo, 2010, p. 224). Women also tend to work in fields associated with lower pay, which includes service and sales work (Gaszo, 2010). In the garment industry, women, especially immigrants and women who work at home, are routinely taken advantage of by companies such as Wal-Mart and paid far too little (Ng, 2006).
...action with others… especially men. This supplies final substantiation of the authors' argument, that women continue to be oppressed by their male-dominated societies. It is a bold undertaking for women to ally and promote a world movement to abandon sexist traditions. Although I have never lived in a third world or non-Westernized country, I have studied the conditions women suffer as "inferior" to men. In National Geographic and various courses I have taken, these terrible conditions are depicted in full color. Gender inequality is a terrible trait of our global society, and unfortunately, a trait that might not be ready to change. In America we see gender bias towards women in voters' unwillingness to elect more females into high office, and while this is not nearly as severe as the rest of the world, it indicates the lingering practice of gender inequality.
It can be concluded that women are treated in terms of stereotyped impressions of being the lowest class and greater evidence can be found that there are large disparities between the women and the men 's class. It can be seen that women are more likely to play casual roles as they are most likely to take seasonal and part time work so that they can work according to their needs. They are hampered from progressing upward into the organizations as they face problems like lack of health insurance, sexual harassments, lower wage rates, gender biases and attitudes of negative behavior. However, this wouldn’t have hampered the participation of the women in the work force and they continue to increase their efforts which is highly evident in the occupational and job ratios of females in the industry.
“There are 74.6 million women in the civilian labor force. Almost 47 percent of U.S. workers are women.” (DeWolf 2017) Today, there are more woman in leadership roles in business than ever before. A leadership role in business ranges from a store manager, branch manager, to CEO’s of large companies. Through the modern and correct view on Feminism more business’ and individuals are proud and happy with the results woman are producing in the workplace. With women in the workplace comes the right for equal pay, which is now coming to fruition more than ever, further pushing the equal rights of women. A prime example of equal pay for equal work is the stance Google recently taken on closing the gap between salaries for men and