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In “Serving in Florida” by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author discusses the living condition in a lower class society. Ehrenreich described her experiences as a waiter and housekeepers. Throughout the article she vividly expressed her thought and her situation by using tone, voice, word choice and imagery to show the struggles that she went through while trying to live on minimum wage. At the beginning of story, she describes how difficult it was to find balance between two jobs. Although the author quit one of her jobbed, she was very quickly to start looking for another job at Jerry’s. When she was on her shift, one of the employees states “Well, it’s good to see you again,” (269) and “Hardly anyone comes back after the first day.” (269). Although, her coworker talks to her in sarcastic way, we can see from the quote that the author use tone vividly expressed her feeling and she felt proud and powerful. However, in my opinion this quote is going to be elaborating another plot as the story continues. As the story progresses, Ehrenreich was able to meet two people at Jerry’s that became very close to her, Gail who was a waitress and she lived in her van. She also formed a very good friendship with a young man named George; he was the dishwasher at Jerry’s. George was from the Czech Republic and as story goes further, he was convicted of stealing and the truth was never discovered. As text states “I wish I could say I stood up to Vic and insisted that George be given a translate and allowed to defend himself…” (275). I felt the author believed that George did not stole anything from the dry storage room, but on other side, she does not have the courage to tell her manager; she is afraid that she might get fired. Therefore, she kee... ... middle of paper ... ...e persuasive and understandable. The most important lesson I learned in this article was to appreciate those people who provide services to us. They are work at poor conditions and are forced to work as a nonstop machine to fight for their daily living. According to work perspective, for majority of the time we do not stand out for others despite their innocence, “So why didn’t I intervene”? (275). we would just remain silent in order to keep our jobs. In this essay, Ehrenreich recounts how she felt guilty for not standing up for George when he was accused of stealing goods. This feeling of inability is common in low-income people, not well-educated workers limits their opportunities to find better jobs. Work Cited Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Serving in Florida.” Rereading America. 9 th edition. Ed. Gary Colombo. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2013. Print. (267-280)
...Even with the pitfalls in Ehrenreich's research, she managed to shine a light on the everyday plight of the low wage worker. She achieved employment at several different low wage service jobs and she also achieved friendliness with the coworkers there. Unfortunately, she could not achieve her goal of making enough money to pay the following month's rent at her accommodations, as she dictated to be her sign of success at the beginning of the project. Without this success, she can truly say that the plight of the low wage worker and the women leaving welfare is an extremely difficult one with great hardship and lack of fulfillment as these participants of the lower class work day to day to keep their chins up and make do with what, even if little, they have.
hooks recalls from personal experience the lessons she learned when she was growing up in a poor family. She says that in her household, no one was ashamed of living in poverty; instead, it was a “breeding ground of moral integrity” (hooks 433). hooks remembers her parents and grandparents teaching her about the value and the worth of a person. She grew up knowing that a person’s value was worth more than their material possessions (433). In addition, her grandparents informed her that no matter how many degrees a person may have, it did not prove their intelligence nor integrity (433).
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
A big disadvantage that the lower class has compared to the wealthy is a lack of quality education. While serving as a waitress, Ehrenriech learned about many different people. Some of these co-workers were immigrants who had recently come to this country. “I learn that he [George] is not paid by Jerry’s but the ‘agent’ who shipped him over--$5 an hour, with the agent getting the dollar or so difference between that and what Jerry’s pays dishwashers”(38). Their contracts lacked any benefits, and they were paid below minimum wage. People, like George, cannot read their contracts before they sign because they don’t understand the language. The critic would argue, “…They are baffled at the idea of fighting the class struggle of which…Ehrenriech appears to be the only person complaining about the situation…” In Georg...
In her unforgettable memoir, Barbara Ehrenreich sets out to explore the lives of the working poor under the proposed welfare reforms in her hometown, Key West, Florida. Temporarily discarding her middle class status, she resides in a small cheap cabin located in a swampy background that is forty-five minutes from work, dines at fast food restaurants, and searches all over the city for a job. This heart-wrenching yet infuriating account of hers reveals the struggles that the low-income workers have to face just to survive. In the except from Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich uses many rhetorical strategies to illustrate the conditions of the low wage workers including personal anecdotes of humiliation at interviews, lists of restrictions due to limited
Ehrenreich notices how troublesome a minimum wage workers life is by her pretending to be a minimum wage worker as well. A strength of Ehrenreich's argument is that she was able to show examples of how some of her coworkers lived poorly. An example that she gives is, “Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate,a male friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts,but the rent would be impossible alone.” (25). Some of her coworkers had to go through tedious situations as can't get out of them because they can't afford to live on their own. This shows a strength in Ehrenreich's argument because it give more credibility. Another strength in her argument is she went to go experience low wage work first-hand. She said, “Maybe when I got into the project, I would discover some hidden economies in the world of the low-wage worker” (3). Ehrenreich realized that the only way that she was going to get the answer was by doing the job for herself even though she didn't want to at first. By her experiencing this first-hand she is able to strengthen the argument because she will be able to effectively convey her message. If someone else were to conduct the experiment then there would have probably been a lot more holes throughout the
However, she never really experienced the actual life of living in poverty as the majority of people living in poverty experience. Barbara, an educated white women had just that on other people living in poverty, because of the color of her skin and education level that is more often than not restricted from people living in poverty. She was able and more qualified for jobs than other people living amongst the status she was playing. She also was able to more readily seek better benefits than people living in poverty. When she first start her journey in Florida she had a car, a car that in most cases people living in poverty do not have. She was also able to use the internet to find local jobs and available housing in the area that many people living in poverty are restricted from. Another great benefit she had was the luxury of affording a drug detox cleansing her of drugs deemed bad. Many people living in poverty do not have much extra cash laying around much less fifty dollars to afford a detox for prescription drugs. She also had the luxury to afford her prescription drugs, another option that many people living in poverty do not have. Another element that made Barbara’s experience not that genuine was the fact that she was not providing for anybody other than herself. Twenty-two percent of kids under the age of 18 are living below the poverty line (http://npc.umich.edu/poverty/#5) , Barbara did not have to provide for pets or kids which would of changed her experience altogether of living in poverty. Not to belittle Barbara’s experience, but many factors of what life is like living in poverty were not taken into consideration during her
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
Ehrenreich’s use of statistical information also proves to her audience that she in fact has done her research on this topic. She admits that poverty is a social topic that she frequently talks about. She researched that in 1998 the National Coalition for the Homeless reported that nationwide on average it would take about a wage of $8.89 to afford a one bedroom apartment and that the odds of common welfare recipients landing a job that pays such a “living wage” were about 97 to 1. Ehrenreich experiences this statistic in first person when she set out job hunting in Key West, Florida when she applied to 20 different jobs, ranging from wait tables to housekeeping, and of those applications, zero were responded to.
Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Vintage). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2008.
In ?Everyday Use?, Alice Walker chooses to develop the idea of poverty by focusing exclusively on the environment in which her protagonists live. Setting attributes, such as the ones used to describe the house in which the protagonists reside, enables us to better understand the theme. In fact, the dwelling does not even have any real windows. Instead, it has holes cut in the sides, like the portholes of a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. Then, Walker proceeds with inside description of the house as she points out that the protagonists use benches for their table instead of chairs because they cannot financially afford any. Further, the author supports the theme by providing us with some physical description of specific objects. The use of quilts that ?Grandma Dee? sewed from the scraps of her dress and the churn that Uncle Henry whittled from the wood is not derived from the protagonists? intention to preserve ?family values? but rather from a necessity to ?survive?.
In today’s society, the question of minimum wage is a large political topic. Many people argue that it is impossible to live on a minimum wage lifestyle. In her novel Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich looks into this issue. In an experiment in which she mimics the life of a single woman, she moves into the low-wage workforce in three different cities in America. Within these cities, she attempts to make a living off of low-wage work and records her experiences, as well as the experiences of the true low-wage workers around her. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich utilizes both vivid imagery and data in order to persuade the audience to agree that the low-wage lifestyle is truly un-livable.
In her inspiring nonfiction novel, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich captivates readers as she researches whether or not if single parents, who depend exclusively on what they can make at minimum-wage income, can endure financially in the United States. She chooses to go as an “undercover” journalist to discover, first-hand, if one can survive in some of the most prominent, urban areas in America. In the first city, Key West, Ehrenreich works at two separate restaurants and as a house manager in a lodge. She soon finds that being a waitress is a tedious job, filled with aching pains and low amounts of sleep. Next, Ehrenreich moves to Maine, the state of the practically all-white low-wage workforce. Ehrenreich discovers that, even though Maine has more jobs available, the wages paid are similar to those of Key West. The last place Ehrenreich stays is Minnesota, where she finds the most trouble finding housing accommodations. In Minnesota, Ehrenreich uncovers the toiling process of job application that she had not taken into consideration. Lastly, Ehrenreich evaluates her overall experience among the minimum-wage worker’s class. She concludes that the minimum-wage lifestyle is unfair and difficult to deal with. Ehrenreich notes that the government is also a factor to be considered when it comes to low-income workers, being that the government decides the minimum wage. She also indicates that the markets are getting increasingly expensive, being that low-income housing and jobs are continually disappearing.
In the book Nickel and Dimed On (not) Getting By in America the author Ehrenreich, goes under cover as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich’s primary reason for seriptiously getting low paying jobs is to see if she can “match income to expenses as the truly poor attempt to do everyday.”(Ehrenreich 6) Also Ehrenreich makes it extremely clear that her work was not designed to make her “experience poverty.”(6) After completing the assignment, given to her by an editor, she had planned to write an article about her experience. Her article purpose intended to reach the community that is financially well off and give them an idea how minimum wage workers deal with everyday life. It also illustrated to the Economist of the harsh reality in the ultra-competitive job environment and how some one in a low paying career cannot survive. Ehrenreich’s motives gave her the tools to experience poverty from a statistical standpoint, but kept her from experiencing the problems poor people face everyday in life. The insight to the fact that maybe a person on welfare needs to be there not because they do not work hard enough but because the way society is setup they are going to be doomed to from the beginning. For example, her personal experiences described gives the reader knowledge that unless you are “Superman” you can almost never work enough to get ahead in life, and you would not have enough time to “go to college” to gain the education for a higher paying job. The first person point-of-view personalizes the book and that allowed me to be drawn into the storyline and plot completely. Some ways she handled situations angered me. I did not like a few parts of the book , they seemed to be confusing, but all these attributes in the end showed a human spirit flaws and all.
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.