Evaluation (pages 193-221) – The Not So Arbitrary Matters of Life The acronym “LWW” stands for low wage worker, this acronym is used throughout the text below. During the various stages of her experiment Ehrenreich strove to maintain equilibrium between her professional integrity and what was physically prudent. Whether she was working as at Walmart or as a waiter she always tried to learn the fundamental obligations her job required of her and the tricks that would make it easier. She could have honed the finesse this approach significantly but it worked well enough when she finally obtained a competent level of experience in her job/s. This approach created the basic pattern: get a cheap place to live, obtain a job, power through the …show more content…
steep learning curve, survive a few weeks while maintaining personal and professional integrity. Following this pattern Ehrenreich managed to take her place as a dependable LWW while barely sustaining her well-being. Based upon this brief assessment Ehrenreich was a good LWW since she was dependable and met the requirements of her job without falling into a mental cycle of cynicism or despair. Looking at Ehrenreich's actual employment options she could have taken better paying jobs that would have allowed her a great deal of freedom.
For example: during her stay in Minneapolis she could have worked for Mountain Air or Menards. Both of these jobs would have paid better than Walmart, yet the tasks they demanded of her were daunting and she was unsure she could fulfill them. Her coworkers also had similar experiences. Because of this, they decided to stick with what was familiar and safe to them. Another issue that prevented the LWW's from switching to higher paying jobs was that they had developed a sense of pride for their occupations. When a persona takes pride in their work, no matter how menial it is, they shall try their best and stick with it as long as they can. This could clearly be seen when Ehrenreich was a maid in Maine. Even though her job as a maid was destroying her health and that of her coworkers they had a fierce amount of pride for their jobs and nothing short of severe injury would stop them from getting it done. Conversely, depression and apathy had the same impact as pride on Ehrenreich's coworkers. The jobs the had in the past had simply beaten the fight out of them either physically or mentally. Between the insecurity a new job elicits, the pride they had for their current occupation, or the apathy they held towards life in general many of the LWWs Ehrenreich worked with simply couldn't bring themselves to change their already …show more content…
delicate realities. Another factor that prevents LWWs from seeking out higher paying jobs are the prerequisites that businesses require their potential employees to fulfill.
Some employers require their applicants to take a drug test, personality test, and/or training seminar before they can even start their new job. More often them not higher paying jobs require their employees to undergo all three and ever then they are not guaranteed a full time position with the company. Even so this means that a LWW worker would need to a week off from their jobs to undergo the tests and required trainings/floor time before there are accepted as a full time employee. Furthermore, different employers have pay plans that start one to two weeks after their employees first day on the job. These circumstances would be incredibly frightening for a LWW since they require each and every single one of their paychecks to get by in life. If they did not get paid until the end of their second week on the job they would probably be out of all monetary assets and sorely hurting on their rent. Given these points, there are a multitude of legal practices businesses employ that discourage low wage workers from seeking the best paying jobs they can
find. Moving back to Ehrenreich's life specifically, outside of her employment she missed opportunities that could have made her circumstances easier to manage. When she moved to a new location the first thing she should have done besides looking for a cheap place to live and areas of potential employment was the local food pantries. If she was eligible this would have seriously helped cut down on her monthly food bill. Besides looking into food donations she should also have networked a great deal more than she did. It can be noted that she only stayed a few weeks in each location, yet when you are poor it isn't just what you do that counts it's also who you know. Finding friends in her situation would have been hard but after a few weeks she could have found someone that willingly pointed her in the direction of a better job or even split the rent on a living space. She should have found some time to get out and meet more people, learn more about her local area, and contacted any not for profit groups that offer assistance to the financially challenged. These actions would have added another level of complexity to her life but networking with the locals and support groups could have alleviated many of troubles she faced as her allowances dwindled over the weeks. Sadly, Ehrenreich had virtually no experience as a single person in the poverty setting so she was ignorant of the opportunities she should have taken.
For example, She notes that “ One of the women explains to me that teams do not necessary return to the same houses week after week, nor do you have any guarantee of being on the same team from one day to the next.” What this quote means is it explains the way the company tries to prevent the groups from making social contact. I can relate to Ehrenreich’s argument because while I was working at Jewel as a bagger. I had similar routines and experienced some of the ways that the system tried to work my body more than my mind. For example, while working there I was ordered to do many tasks to keep me busy and from interacting and making friendships with fellow employees. If this was allowed then we would be able to talk about how unfair our job is and how we are treated. The author tries to argue that her job keeps her mind busy and she won't be able to have time to think or react., in other words, this blue collar job is
Like most people whom conduct experiments, Ehrenreich must first establish credibility of her knowledge of this subject. She does this in her introduction in numerous ways. Ehrenreich comes out saying that she has a Ph.D in biology but has a fancy for writing. She starts off with her exposure to low wage paying jobs by using her sister and her husband a companion for over a decade. Her sister, who use to work for the phone company as a sales representative, a factory work and receptionist who described it her experiences as “the hopelessness of being a wage slave”. Her husband use to work for $4.50 an hour in a warehouse before he was fortunate enough to land a good paying job with the union workers the Teamsters.
She decides if she could earn $7 an hour, then she could afford $500 rent. She found a place to rent 45 minutes away from work. In order to deal with the financial responsibilities, Ehrenreich took to the streets in search for another unskilled job since she did not want to use her car as a place of residence. She continues her experiment in a new environment which took her to Maine since the area is mostly a Caucasian community. When she realized that Portland was just another $6-$7 an hour town, she picked up two jobs to be practical. She began her quest for lodging at Motel 6. After several disappointments searching for a place to lie; she found a cottage for $120 a week and determined to poor cannot compete with the rich in the housing market. Ehrenreich moved to Minnesota to finish her experiment, where she hoped there would be a satisfying harmony between rent and wages. She locates an apartment from a friend lasting a short period until she finds a place to stay on her own. She found housing to be a struggle as there seems to be a shortage of houses; as a result she transitioned herself into a hotel. Her stay at the hotel proved to surpass her estimated expenses despite the fact this was her only safe
The biggest appeal that Ehrenreich makes is after she ends up walking out of the housekeeping job/waitress job because she cannot handle it anymore." I have failed I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time in many years, that the tear ducts are still there and still capable of doing their job." (Ehrenreich, 48) This is the biggest appeal because Ehrenreich is quitting on the whole project. She is basically telling the readers that it is impossible for her, a "well-off", woman to live the life of a low wage worker.
Ehrenreich adopted the sociologist's tool of an ethnography for her research. She became a covert participant observer while at the jobs she worked. As such, she did not expose herself as a journalist to her coworkers until the conclusion of each job. She did this in order to not experience the Hawthorne Effect; the effect that happens when people knowingly are observed and therefore change their normal habits to please the observer. While the book was an interesting read and her personal experiences enlightening to many of the low wage worker's dilemmas and alienating jobs, her pitfalls in research outweigh her strengths.
In today’s society you either have to work hard to live a good life, or just inherit a lump sum of cash, which is probably never going to happen. So instead a person has to work a usual nine to five just to put food on the table for their families, and in many cases that is not even enough. In the article, “Why We Work” by Andrew Curry, Curry examines the complexities of work and touches on the reasons why many workers feel unsatisfied with their jobs. Barbara Ehrenreich writes an essay called, “Serving in Florida” which is about the overlooked life of being a server and the struggles of working off low minimum wages. Curry’s standpoint on jobs is that workers are not satisfied, the job takes control of their whole life, and workers spend
Why should we be the ones to pay for someone to sit around at home? The answer is one simple word, welfare. There are many reasons why people mooch on welfare, rather than going out and working. The only jobs these people are qualified for are minimum wage jobs. As Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, worked at minimum wage paying jobs and reported the hardships that people had to go through on a day-to-day basis. A critic responded by saying, “This is simply the case of an academic who is forced to get a real job…” Ehrenriech’s reasoning for joining the working-class is to report why people who mite be on welfare, continue to stay on welfare. Her reports show there are many hardships that go along with minimum waged jobs, in the areas of drug abuse, fatigue, the idea of invisibility, education and the American Dream.
There are frequent footnotes in the novel, many of them containing statistics about low-wage lifestyles. One claims that “In 1997, a living wage for a single parent supporting a single child in the Twin Cities metro area was $11.77 an hour” (Ehrenreich 127). Throughout the novel, Ehrenreich never gets paid this much in any of her jobs. In fact, she is amazed when a potential wage for a job is “not $8.50 but an incredible $10 an hour” (Ehrenreich 142). Even living on her own Ehrenreich could hardly pay for the basic necessities to live, it would have been impossible to do so with a child to care for as well. Another statistic stats that “Nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full- or part- time jobs” (Ehrenreich 26). This fact shows the flaws in the low-wage workforce. After all, minimum wage is meant to be designed to be able to support people with necessities such as shelter and food, yet 20% of those without homes cannot afford shelter with these wages. Through these statistic, ehrenreich is able to establish that it is nearly impossible to live a decent lifestyle with just low-wage job
Braaksma says "As frustrating as the work can be, the most stressful thing about blue-collar life is knowing your job could disappear overnight. Issues like downsizing and overseas relocation had always seemed distant to me until my co-workers at one factory told me that the unit I was working in would be shut down within six months and moved to Mexico, where people would work for 60 cents an hour"(Braaksma, 2005).The regret Braaksma felt knowing he would be heading back to college and classrooms while others spend their working years in the factory and he only spends his summer break there. Workers made good wages yet was encouraged by many of his coworkers to continue with his studies so he can do better for himself
Ehrenreich feeds the residents at the nursing home then washes the dishes. She meets Pete and Linda which are two very sincere people that show her around. Ehrenreich soon finds out that the maid service she takes on has a lot of rules, has strenuous work and has a limited time frame to do so many rooms. She meets several other maids who don’t look well and definitely have no money. Ehrenreich works harder to pick up Holly’s workload because she is in such bad health and pregnant but unable to miss work because she has no money. Holly ends up tripping and has to call Ted, the owner. Before Ted said anything about shaking it off, Ehrenreich gets on the phone and tells him she doesn’t care what he says that Holly needed to go to the doctor and he didn’t need to push her around. After the conformation with Ted, Ehrenreich and Marge have a deep conversation about Ehrenreich getting fired for the way she talked to Ted. Marge tells Ehrenreich that she would not get fired because she passed the test and without meaning to insult Marge, Ehrenreich screams that anyone could have passed the
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
Employees who earn subminimum wages usually are employed to work in sheltered workshops. Sheltered workshops are typically set up in the back room of a business. Employee duties in sheltered workshops frequently consist of performing simple repetitive tasks, such as sorting and hanging up donated clothing items. Sheltered workshops were initially intended to provide people with disabilities the vocational training needed to work in a competitive job setting. However, today people working in sheltered workshops are usually stuck here for years—still just earing pennies per hour. Subminimum wages are determined by how fast the employee with a disability can perform a task compared to a person without a disability. For example, the employee may be timed to see how many article of clothing he or she can hang in one minute with a limite...
Barbara Ehrenreich proves to be informed on certain issues like how to correctly handle the money that she was bringing in and paychecks. While she was working as a waitress, she would bring in tips but when she decides that she needs to try different job, Ehrenreich is no longer receiving those tips and comes up with the solution of having to work two jobs by the time she’s in Minnesota. “Now to find a job. I know from my Key West experiences to apply for as many jobs as possible, since a help-wanted ad may not mean that any help is wanted just now.”(Ehrenreich, 57). Looking at this example you can see that Ehrenreich has well informed herself as she continues with her investigation by knowing what to do when it comes to looking for a job
The general essence of the article is that the old ways of work and the work ethic of the older generations have broken apart. In place of stable routine and predictable career paths, employees are now expected to be fluid in their jobs, and open to change on very short notice. Workers of today's generation can no longer expect long term work, or the trust and loyalty that were given to the employees of the older generation. In some ways, the writer argues that this change between the generations is positive, as they can make for a more dynamic economy. However, they are also the cause of the article's title, "The Corrosion of Character". The work ethics of the employees are no longer valued. They are taken as face value, and there is no trust and loyalty. These changes are destructive to the worker's sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self and the trust they hold in others within the workplace.
Whether it be a sponge with human characteristic or a dysfunctional family named the Kardashians they are inconsistencies in the idea that television could represent anything close to “real life”. In Ehrenreich's view of reality I believe real life to be the full human experience. The human experience comprises of the smallest most boring actions of our day. This may include going to the restroom, using the toilet, or a reflection of the ailments of the day to day. Ehrenreich is correct that television doesn’t reflect however television doesn't need to as its main purpose is to entertain the viewer.