Mike rose shares his personal experiences and ideas of cognitive psychology. Rose thinks that the everyday work that most of America does is not mindless. he believes that society today is devaluing the work that these hard working people do on an everyday bases. all the words he uses kind of sugar coats what people really think. This sis what socially separates a fully functioning society and also creates inequality
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Robert Reich explains the dilemma we all face as americans of the growing inequality in our falling society. With more and more people joining the work force, the competition for work is harder. all of the low-income jobs today are being stripped away and all the high salary jobs are jumping off the charts. He also explains how these people that rely on the low-income jobs do not even stand a chance in the competition with all the whit-collar jobs that soaring.
Both of these arguments are very convincing, but Robert Reich's is definitely stronger. Mike rose uses a good amount of personal experiences and not a lot of facts. Reich's argument also had more validity due to his formal language and presentation, and the fact that he was a professor. his work is original and his argument has tangible data.
Mike Rose's "Blue-Collar Brilliance" tells the readers about his studies as a psychologist. He praises the hard working, physical labor, blue-collar workers, such as his mother Rosie, and his Uncle Joe. Though, he acknowledges they both dropped out of school at an early age, before finishing high school, he notes that they are brilliant in their own sort of way. He talks about Joe picking up on little details as a foreman, he knows nothing about how the oven to dry the paint works, however he does, over time, learn more efficient ways of drying the paint while using less energy. Also, he implements a rotational work force, meaning the workers don't have to sit at the same station repeating the same job countless times, they would perform a certain job for a while then would switch to the next job. As for his mother, she learned many things while waiting, one of which is memory techniques. Rosie, his mother, would use techniques she picked up on to remember orders and who ordered what, and also things such as stacking numerous dishes to keep from taking dozens of trips.
ReplyDeleteThe next passage, "Why the Rich..." by Robert Reich talks about companies in the 80s, and 90s that laid off thousands and thousands of different American workers, because a worker in Thailand, or India would do the same work for a fraction of the cost. He talks about how AT&T was based out of Shreveport, Louisiana for a number of years in which the workers constructed telephones. Then, they slowly learned that Singapore workers would do the same job for a fraction of the cost, and that Thailand workers would do it for even less. Robert gives many different examples with many different companies and he explains that this is a huge problem in the United States, taking away literally thousands of jobs.
Though both of the passages has a lot of useful information, the second article by Robert is a lot less usable. The reason being this passage was written in the 90s when companies just began farming their jobs out to cheaper foreign workers, though this is still a problem the article is from roughly 20 years ago now and could use some much needed updating. The other article is much more current, but this doesn't automatically make it a good source. There are plenty of things I could pick out of the article to use, however much of the info would be paraphrased and dug out of the text because much of it is not clear cut facts. So between the two articles the second is the better of the two passages for gathering information merely because it is much more current.