That place to unfold your passions, and where the feelings of uneasiness show. There are many different attitudes people have that entail if they actually like the job that they have. In Matthew B. Crawfords,“ The Case for Working with Your Hands” the narrator has several different jobs throughout the story. He comes to find that when people have a bond with the job that they have they tend to have a better attitude towards what they are doing. When working and not enjoying being at this job there is a tendency to not work as hard. In Barbara Ehrenreich 's story “ Serving in Florida” she shows that most people dislike working in the middle class. Ehrenreich proceeded to tell us how that most of the people that she works with are living …show more content…
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 …show more content…
Along with if they are willing to put in the time, effort, and they heart into what they are doing even if they aren’t making the money they want and or deserve. Money plays a big part of what the United States is about nowadays. It’s the country that’s ran by money, rather being ran correctly. Attitude is important in everything that you do. Having a positive attitude about working can mean the difference between hating your job or absolutely loving it. Having those fellow co workers that bring you down, the ungodly amount of hours you have to work, and at time just the job in itself can be the reason that you have a horrible attitude about working. Find a job that you know you will enjoy doing, because doing that boring job in the end will do nothing but give you a bad attitude about the rest of the working
Nickel And Dimed: Occupations Barbara Ehrenreich provides evidence in “Nickel and Dimed” that she’s an outstanding author with this book. Its engaging and compelling, no question about that. But it’s hard to get from side to side at times since of the authors attitudes. Her key summit is to carry concentration to the scrape of the working deprived, but she manages to be both abusive and divisive. Occupation on attacking our industrialist system, she fails to become aware of that the endurance of upper classes seems to be what motivates the poor, fairly than what dispirits them. She blames capitalism for the injustices of the world, slightly than easy bad management techniques. A company should be shown that would benefit from a union and it will be shown to all around that one that will promote even better from decent, gentle management decisions. Most irritating, she’s constantly negative about the whole lot, even the positive experiences she has. When one of her colleagues offers to allow her move in with her and her family, not only does Ehrenreich turn the propose down, but she still describes it sneeringly as a "touched by an angel moment." Does she have to dribble with irony yet when writing about an authentically type deed? She condemns "visible Christians," any and all organization, yuppies, anybody who hires and consequently exploits maids, welfare reform, and still tosses in a prod at people who study John Grisham. Is there someone she likes? Her logic is troublesome as well. She begins her research to see if the functioning poor have some financial endurance tactics that the center class don’t know regarding, and decides at the conclusion that no, they don’t, as if admitting that this would signify the poor are imp...
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.
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.
...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.
When you see a man in a suit walking down the street, you automatically think that he is a multi-million dollar owner of a company. That man is not necessarily the owner of a big company, he could just be getting out of a meeting where everyone had to dress nicely because the CEO of the coffee shop was going to be there. The people of America made their assumptions that if people dress a certain way then they are a big time corporate executive. What Ehrenreich does is make a list of “classes” that college students should be taking to inform them of what is happening in the real world once they graduate. These classes include : Elementary Class Structure of the U.S., Presidential Architecture, Race, Gender, and Occupational Preference, Topics in University Financing. The next story that is very closely related to this is called “could you afford to be poor?” This story talks about the high cost of living in low-income urban neighborhoods. Since there is such a high cost of living in these neighborhoods, it is harder to provide for your family if there is low income there. In these low-income neighborhoods, people are less likely to have bank accounts because of the expenses it can cause them to have if they have a low balance. To cash their checks, they have to pay anywhere from $5-$50 just to cash their check. So essentially you are paying more money to cash your check. They are also less likely to have access to a large supermarket store without driving a long way to get there, so they rely on smaller, but more expensive food stores with lower quality for their
The juxtaposed contrasts that she often uses are seen explicitly in anecdotes or implicitly in conscious thoughts. Such contrasts first appear in the first paragraph. Even before Ehrenreich makes any substantial effort to join the poor working class, she is hit with this sudden unease of being recognized. At that time, it is clear that she has not relinquished her middle class status since she feels ashamed of being identified as a poor worker. In the world that the author originally belongs to, name and reputation are considered important to one’s standing in society yet in the working class realm, as Ehrenreich later finds out, one is often “unnoticed” and names are “unuttered.” Not only are names forgotten but one’s ability and education are also ignored when looking for jobs. Oblivious to the “rule” for hiring for unskilled jobs, Ehrenreich initially worries about her over-qualification but only to be shocked when she realizes the employers are not even interested. Whereas jobs for the middle class often demand higher education and past accomplishments, jobs for the low-wage workforce are simply depended simply on luck or as Ehrenreich claims “ being in the right place at the right time.” One can convey this as part of a corporate scheme to ensure the
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
Briefly state the main idea of this article: The main idea of this article is that economic inequality has steadily risen in the United States between the richest people and the poorest people. And this inequality affects the people in more ways than buying power; it also affects education, life expectancy, living conditions and possibly happiness. Another idea that he brought up was that the American government tends to give less help to the unemployed than other rich countries.
My views about Ehrenreich’s novel that it was filled with educational details of minimum wage job occurrences. The author captures concrete memories of her experiences of several job positions. Working in several jobs of hard manual labor is exhausting for the mind and body. The job experiments involving all these jobs to see what many struggling people endure on a daily basis. I thought the experiments resulted in average, and intolerable work environments. Working one or two jobs was needed to survive and pay for necessities. From my perspective, it was a useful trial to show readers the hardships people of every culture deal with constantly.
In this book, Ehrenreich tries to work in three different places to see what it is like to work as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich worked as a server in Florida, housekeeper in Miami, and sales person in Minnesota, and still she didn’t make enough money to live comfortable. As she says, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rent too high”(Ehrereich’s 199). She notices how hard it is for poor people to try to survive when they have to work with a minimum
Shipler concludes the book with these thoughts: "Workers at the edge of poverty are essential to America's prosperity, but their well-being is not treated as an integral part of the whole. Instead, the forgotten wage a daily struggle to keep themselves from falling over the cliff. It is time to be ashamed." No, it is time to move past the ideology and make work pay for all Americans.
Dr. Ehrenreich understands that she will never have a real experience with poverty, especially since this is nothing more than experiment for her. In addition to this she has a couple of important advantages over a lot of low income workers this being that she is a natural born English speaker and she owns a car as well. Her goal in this project is simply to see if she can live off that income and pay basic expenses as the lower class does on a daily basis. One of the well illustrated themes in this book is simply poverty in America. America has a lack of social programs for the lower class and can seem rather oblivious to this issue with its least privileged citizens. Poverty is not just a cause and effect of unemployment because nobody is safe from it those who are fully employed with a great check can still slip into deep poverty. This theme is demonstrated just by Dr. Ehrenreich even
He further shows us that the people of today are richer than their grandparents but are not happier in their lives (from National Statistics of social pathology). Even with these facts, people in the United States still believe if they had more money all of their problems would be solved, but once they reach that next income bracket they are not satisfied and try to reach the next one. Myers et al tells us, "even if being rich and famous is rewarding, no one ever claimed material success alone makes us happy. Other conditions like - family- friends- free time - have been shown to increase happiness" (Csikszentmihaly 145). therefore we must find balance in our own lives, and not just focus on making money. Instead we need friends, family and even free time, as aforementioned doing an activity you enjoy such as listening to music or
To begin, I honestly believe it is necessary to be dedicated to your job. It is necessary to be one hundred percent dedicated to whatever you are doing if you wish to get substantial results. If you look at statistics, you will realize that it took years of blood and sweat, otherwise known as dedication, to get something fulfilling. Jesse Owens once aptly stated, “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.” I honestly believe that if you wish to be successful in your occupation you must be willing to put in the effort. You will not be satisfied with your work if you do not do whatever you can to get it done. To sum up, you must ...
..., 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.