"A Dollar a Day" is a documentary that shows and discusses what it means to live in poverty . The theme or the main idea of "A dollar a day" is how people who do live in poverty get jobs and meet their basic needs, and how the people in this documentary show that even though they are poor, lack education ,healthcare and can’t make ends meet still strive to aquire thier basic needs with perseverance and alot of effort. Many people live in poverty and "A dollar a day" shows how some people who are poor make thier lives better while others aspire to reform the government and get better pay.The film "A Dollar a Day" is a good documentary that shows how people live in poverty .what is the cause of poverty and how we can fix the problem. This documentary shows us how people live in poverty and how they are not so different from us the middle class because we all share the same dream to have a job, a decent house and just live comfortably people like Wayne Petterson and Li-Jieli aspire to live like us.
In "A dollar a Day:Made In China" we meet Wayne Petersen and Li Jieli. Wayne Patterson was an ex- miner who lives in minnesota. In the beggining of the film we see Wayne in Target looking through the different merchandise they are selling and see that most of the products are made in China; Wayne does not want to buy the products because all of the manufacturing jobs are going to China were workers over in China are looking at more job oppourtunites while Wayne and people in his community are loosing thier jobs. Li-Jieli is a young women from China who is forced to work in a factory that makes parts for electronics. Li Jieli had to leave home at 17 years old to improve her and her families living conditions. Li had to give up her edu...
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...des of the world we can still see similarites with the strugggle of living in poverty. They both are trying to support thier family and complete thier own personal goal. But Li and Wayne aren't the only ones struggling Li and Wayne represent a whole mass of people who are living in poverty and are seeking job opportunities and want to have a decent life. A dollar a Day gives us the behind the scenes look on how people who live in poverty persevere to make thier life better. This documentary shows how the trade of goods can lead to job loss in America but job opportuinties in China. I think we can all agree that people who live in poverty and are seeking jobs want the government to reform the job market because the government right now in China and America aren't creating more job opportunities and the government is not doingenought to help people come out of poverty.
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948 and grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when she was sent to the countryside to be “Re-educated” by the Maoist regime. She immigrated to the US in 1984 to
In port cities of China, leaflets distributed by labor brokers said, “Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinamen to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and good clothing of the finest description. Money is in great plenty and to spare in America.”
In this paper by Scott Alan Carson, Carson writes about Chinese Sojourn Labor. Carson writes how institutional arrangements and labor market forces that interacted in the construction of America’s railroad led to the demand for Chinese Laborers. Carson writes more about these relationships and the work given to the Chinese than writing about the more personal details of the workers. For instance, Carson writes that because of land grants given by the government Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads earned more capital by completing more railway tracks. Carson also writes how the Chinese did the jobs no one else wanted to do, and they did them for lesser wages. Therefore, Carson writes specifically about the work of the Chinese and the factors that caused the hiring of Chinese more so than the personal aspects of the workers.
The phrase “history repeats itself is quite evident in this film. Currently, China’s economy is in a massive industrial revolution, similar to the American industrial revolution of the early 19th century. After three years of following the Zhang family, first time director Lixin Fan released The Last Train Home, attempting to raise awareness to the down side of China’s powerful economy. While the film The Last Train Home seems to just depict the lives of factory workers, it is also making a political statement about how western capitalism exploits factory workers to produce cheap goods. The film makes this exploitation evident by depicting the fracturing of the Zhang family and the harsh working conditions they must endure.
The American Dream is attainable by each and every one of us. The American Dream is the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to achieve success through hard work and determination. Every successful person living today had to work hard for their position. They climb the ranks until they got to where they stand today. Everyone could become successful and live the American dream as long as they work very hard starting at a young age into adulthood and study and perform well in school. They must study for school and get a good education. In the book “Nickel and Dimed”, Barbara is struggling to get along because she is surviving off jobs that require little to no education and experience.
with her husband, who had served in the army during World War II, part of the wave of Chinese who were finally considered more American because of their patriotism. They had also come to Detroit for job opportunities, and lived and worked in a basement laundry operation. Chin’s mother distinctly recalls being harassed by neighborhood kids and people at a baseball game; she and her husband were also physically assaulted because their Chineseness marked them as perpetual foreigners. She could not have children so they adopted a boy from China, Vincent. He had integrated pretty well, establishing himself as an engineer who was popular, made friends easily, and was always laughing and
Gans wrote an essay on the uses of poverty (Gans, 1971). He came to the conclusion that our society needs the poor to function. Gans gave thirteen different reasons as to why we need the poor, and what their functions are. The first is that we need poverty to make sure that the “dirty work” gets done. By dirty work, he means jobs that are dangerous, underpaid, menial, temporary, undignified, and physically dirty. Both the Neumann family and the Stanley family had to take up jobs that fit in with Gans’ first point. They took up jobs that barely gave them any money and they were physically dirty, such as basement waterproofing by Claude Stanley. The second function is that the poor subsidize economic activities to benefit the affluent by working at low wages. It apparently makes life for their employers easier because they have to pay them less. The two families in the documentary were paid very low wages. They knew exactly how it felt. The third function is that the poor create jobs for the rest of society to serve or protect those in poverty. Welfare, food stamps, and homeless shelters are examples of services that help to protect the poor. Without the poor, those jobs would not be necessary. Both families could have used help from those services to get them through their rough patch of poverty. The fourth function is that the poor prolong the economic usefulness of items like day old bread and old fruit and vegetable. They buy the stuff that others do not want to buy. Secondhand clothes and deteriorating building are also included. The Stanley family went to thrift shops to buy their clothes. They couldn’t afford to buy the clothes from regular stores. The fifth function is that the poor are a deviant subculture that help uphold the legitimacy of societal norms. Gans says that the rest of the society can use the poor to be punished for being lazy, promiscuous, and dishonest. They are most likely to be caught for it. Some
Many times it is easy for people to hide certain aspects of their lives. However, poverty is not one of them. When a person is poor, it is humiliating for themselves, their families, and is very difficult to overcome. Although poverty is not always a choice, it is a preventable problem in today’s society that can be fixed. If people have the ability to recognize that this is a problem that affects people everywhere and are willing to do something about it, the percentage of poverty-stricken persons would be down to almost nothing.
shows an African-American family struggling to get out of the poverty line, which is stopping them
“More than 1.14 billion people estimated in 2011 to be living below the international poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day” (Prabhakar 1). Poverty is an issue that impacts people all over the world, even in our own backyard of Greeley Colorado we can see the effects of poverty effecting people. Poverty is explained by the Webster dictionary as the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions, or in the other words the state of being poor. Many people correlate the definition of poverty to being an international only issue that effects people in country’s that are not rich in greater resources or are lacking the development in becoming a wealthier nation. What one should know about poverty is that
Poverty has affected the lives of many people around the world and with the definition being covered it proves that the government has to change for the different situations that people can get themselves plus the different inequality that is displayed throughout the social classes and social norms. Also the myths that were covered proves how the world views people that are in poverty which is not true and lastly what was covered was the significance of how poverty is affecting society and what implications are taking place. Poverty may never be solved but the way the world looks at it could be
Next, Herbert J. Gans’ essay, “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All”, is extremely important in the analysis of the frontline documentary. Gans has a bit of a different approach on poverty and the poor. For example, he says, “Today, poverty is more maligned than the political machine ever was; yet it, too, is a persistent social phenomenon.” Basically, he argues that the poor are a very important part in society. He goes on to explain different functions of poverty. First, he states that the existence of poverty ensures that society’s dirty work will be done. Society in some ways forces the poor to do these jobs because they almost always don’t have the choice, and they make them do these at low wages. This was one of the hard things
Throughout Society, many families have seen struggle and lived through poverty. The economy is not always thriving which takes a toll on people who suffer through unemployment or low wage jobs. The Frontline documentary, “Two American Families”, is the perfect example of struggle in the United States. It shows the lives of two struggling families and their efforts to survive. Two essays, “The Sociological Imagination” by C. Wright Mills, and “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All” by Herbert J. Hans, support the analysis of the video strongly. They express many ideas that relate to the world and struggle throughout society. Also, there are many sociological terms that depict the events that occurred in the documentary.
This film was written and produced in the middle of the Great Depression, and the depiction of the poverty and unemployment is very evident throughout the entire film.
Foxconn has factories in Asia, Europe, Mexico and South America why is it that only China’s Foxoconn was in highlight and not any other country? While the Chinese factories happened to be the largest factories in China, these factories are also facilitated with dormitories and other infrastructure to host the workers and provide workers to go back at end of the 12 hour shift to relax and reenergize for the next shift. A quarter of the employees live in these so called dormitories. My Case study will analyze how the various news sources revealed the global sweatshop to the world and the reactions by the companies who were using Foxconn to manufacture electronic goods. The Chinese newspaper displayed Foxconn employees having social and psychological reasons leading to suicides whereas US news showed it as human rights violation. Both of them did not acknowledge the social justice and world economy aspects and steps that were taken by the electronics giants to rectify the problems that were being faced in Wuhan, China.