Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Nickel and Dimed

After reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “From Nickel and Dimed” she provides an understanding on the struggle of having a difficult job but still having a bad pay.  What I like the most about this essay is the fact that she knows how to explain and provide images on how hard it can be for someone to live like the way they do. And how little we pay attention to these problems. Society portrays the poor or the lower class people as lazy and not being able to get a job. But the truth is, even if they do get a job they might not have the money to buy a uniform, transportation, etc. She uses a maid as an example to illustrate a lower class person with a job. And the character in the essay mentions how the company gets paid $25 dollars an hour but the maids only get paid $6.65 for each hour they work. Which doesn’t make sense; they have these hard jobs but get paid so little. They get paid to go to a house, clean their mess and they have to clean in a certain way but not receiving enough money. We judge the people who are in poverty but we tend not to help and we still end up judging them. What we also do not understand is that the economy is getting worse but we are still getting paid minimum wage. So of course for some people it is hard to provide for themselves, imagine having to provide for a family and how difficult it could be. This reading can give people a good understanding on how even if someone has a job it can still be difficult to get out of poverty. It is not impossible but it can be very hard to and that is what society needs to understand. Everybody has a different life, some people are born into being rich wealthy and some are born into the poverty side. And some people have to work for their money but some people are getting handed that money.


4 comments:

  1. I also love how she explains and provides details behind the difficulty that is getting a job, especially when it's a difficult job with crappy pay. I relate to her article very well, growing up my mom worked at Walmart, which is notorious for treating their employees like dirt, and just that occurred. She was dealing with the divorce as well, and she was struggling to keep the apartment she was renting and it sickens me that people who are lavishly spending their money would call her lazy and a deadbet. In high school, I worked at sonic. I liked the people I worked with, but the job was not easy, especially with the customers that would come there. We were paid 3.12 an hour plus tips, but if you weren't as fast as McDonald's, you didn't get a tip (maybe a few pennies). Sure, Sonic was a job for me to put gas in my car and occasionally have some spending money on those good days, but there were people working there who had families to take care of, who had no other option but to work 40+ hours a week at a job that paid you very little and you received very little tips. It was hard to watch those people struggle and even harder to go to school the next day and have my peers tell me that sonic was an easy job and that the people working there who weren't teens were just lazy, and I knew that wasn't even remotely close to being true. I loved this article and I loved how you discussed it in this blog post.

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  2. I will be responding to the Reading for Ideas text for my blog comment. It seems difficult to actually grasp Ehrenreich’s actual position on Blue Collar work because the ending of the short story seems to take an unclear stance. I will offer a possible interpretation of the reading drawing from contextual clues within the texts. After our author leaves Mrs. W’s house, Ehrenreich rushes home, takes a shower, and spends an evening reflecting on her first work week. She stands in the shower “thinking all this water is mine. I have paid for it, in fact, I have earned it.” This initially lead to me believe that though she did in fact do a lot of bickering about her strenuous and unfair work at The Maids, she was now of the position that she proud: that she thought of her hard work and suffering was worth it. Many who read this text may interpret this as her final stance on her work. Perhaps, even, that is the actual position that she takes in that particular moment in time. However, the very last event that takes place in the story forces her to a different position; one that is not pride. She sees a band playing along the beach and comments, “I see then that they are the secret emissaries of a worldwide lower-class conspiracy to snatch joy out of degradation and filth. When the song ends, I give them a dollar, the equivalent of about ten minutes of sweat.” The “degradation and filth” is her job and the “joy” is taken to be in the form of a dollar. She therefore ends with the stance that it is not work and painful corporate exploitation of workers that is meaningful, but rather leisure and the arts. The word “conspiracy” implies that the very event of music and leisure is an act of rebellion against corporate work.

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  3. In response to Ehrenreich’s article and Andrea’s blog entry, I can honestly say it was eye opening. I strongly believe the people who live in poverty do it to themselves because of lack of self-motivation and laziness. But after reading this text I realize how hard it actually is to provide for a family. I have always been fortunate enough to have parents to help me afford the things I want and need in life. That doesn’t exactly mean I get everything handed to me though. I had a several minimum wage paying jobs through high school, starting at age 15. As a result, I learned how to deal with money and responsibly at a respectably young age. Although my parents still paid for a lot in my life, it gave me a since of motivation to keep working in order to ensure a better future for myself. Obviously this is no where near the obligation of providing for a family, but I can now understand the complications of “making ends meet”. I feel sorry for the people who have this type of income because they struggle on a day-to-day basis and therefore, they live their lives in poverty. It’s not fair to them to be categorized as poor because they’re lazy when some people actually work their butts off and still cannot afford an ideal lifestyle. It is becoming harder and harder to find well paying nowadays and with our economy the way it is, minimum wage is not enough to live off of.

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  4. I completely agree with what you have to say about “Nickel and Dimed”. Though Barbara Ehrenreich has a unique way of trying to explain the low pay of hard working citizens and ends on an unclear ending, I got the point of her story. People that don’t have to experience the life of living in poverty or work jobs that are considered to be low class don’t realize how much effort goes into it and the sacrifices that need to be made to make ends meet. Often times, the people that work these low paying jobs are accused of being lazy but in reality they work just as hard, if not harder, than the average person. I feel as though people working the jobs nobody wants to work should get paid more for their efforts and because those jobs often provide services most people can’t live without. During high school I worked at a fast food restaurant, and though it was mostly teens that got employed there I’m fully aware that many adults work in a fast food setting as well. While getting paid just barely over minimum wage may be good spending money for a high school student, the bi-weekly fast food check hardly scratches the surface of the cost to raise a family and pay bills. In the story, the newly hired maid couldn’t comprehend how her coworkers had a job and yet still couldn’t afford a decent lunch, but what she failed to realize was that they had other responsibilities while she was just living by herself.

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