Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Sweating for Every Nickel and Dime

After reading the passage “From Nickel and Dime“, Ehrenreich is surely right about the hard struggle people from lower class deal with because it sheds light to the difficult problem of economy. Yet, people from the upper class are being ignorant to the situation of the struggle lower class workers face every day. They close to their own perfect world and ignore the fact that while they are enjoying their rich lives; on the hand, people that are in need of jobs are willing to do the upper class responsibilities at home or in general duties people have. In the passage of Ehrenreich, she gives a perfect example about the process a lower class person gets a job. In this case, she gave the example of maids, which is a low wage paid job. At the beginning of the passage, she is explaining the restrictions and rules of being a maid. Afterward, the new house cleaner is introducing the procedures and requirement that have to be down before they are able work as house cleaner. She also mentions how the company she is working for are taking advantage of woman’s economically. She mentions how the company get way more money than what the maid gets paid. The company gets paid $25, but the maid gets paid less than 50 percent of the profit. However, that is not the worst part of the problem, working as a maid requires that person to diminish their dignity, and be able to live with not even having enough money to pay for their own lunch in their breaks. Ehrenreich is able point out that regardless of the job a person works in, it should be consider respectful. Even, if the job is not the most well paid or is an embarrassing job, that person deserves every nickel and dime because that job required sweat and a lot of effort. At the end of the day and a long week working as a maid, the women is able adjust to her job and set her mind in a positive way to feel conformist working in that job. This passage proves that people living on minimum wage or even lower leads to people living in poverty and not being able to get out of it because of the fact that they are stuck in their financially problems.

2 comments:

  1. Deicy is certainly right about how people that work in the minimum wage jobs get taken advantage of by not getting paid enough for the work that they do. The workers could be doing so much more work and over working themselves and not getting paid what they should be getting paid for the work that they do. The upper class did in the article "From Nickel and Dimed" take advantage of the work that the maids did for their household's. They did not care how much the maids for getting paid, all the cared about was how well they were cleaning their house's. I agree that no matter what job you work for you do deserve every penny that you earned during the process because it is not right to make a human work their asses off and not get paid for it. It is hard to make a living making little to no money at all. People are willing to bend over backwards for these jobs because sometimes that is all they can get and they should not be taken advantage of because of it. I do believe that if people were more considerate of how hard people work on a day to day basis they could possibly try to pay them more or they could possibly set rules so that people do not over work themselves all the time for very little money. I really enjoyed this reading because it did show how hard the poor work just to make it in their lives. It shows that even the poor people that do try still are not able to make a living.

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  2. I agree with Asia and Deicy's viewpoints on Ehrenreich's "From Nickel and Dimed" about how people in blue collar and working professions are often times taken advantage of in their manual labor jobs. Their mother companies and bosses don't consider the welfare of their workers and simply treat them like dogs to get their money's worth out of them, because after all, to them, the workers are dispensable. Though, it is a sad fact that that is just how our society is run, we are based on a largely capitalist consumer society who places too much importance on money. Weather or not it is right or fair, the problem will continue with no betterment in the near future. I would like to however contract their ideas on one point. These home owners which are spoken of in the "Nickel and Dimed" essay may not be the unemotional and uncaring monsters they can be perceived to be. Weather or not one is in a blue collar job or in a salary paid job at an executive office both do work which is comparable to their skill levels. Individuals with homes which need to be cleaned by these women are most likely college graduates who have poured tears, sweat, and blood into their job and degree, getting to the position of financial stability they are currently in. Neither are better because both are needed to make "America," but both manual laborers and individuals with professional jobs face struggles and challenges in their lives and shouldn't be discredited.

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