KINE 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Pierre Bourdieu, Social Class, Working Poor
22 Oct 2017
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Document Summary
Nickel and dimed on (not) getting by in america barbra ehrenreich. Journalist that went undercover to investigate the impact of the welfare reform act on the working poor. Ehrenreich attacks the notion that low-wage jobs require only unskilled labor. A journalist with a ph. d. in cell biology, she found that manual labor required incredible feats of stamina, focus, memory, quick thinking, and fast learning. She also posits that one low-wage job is often not enough to support one person (let alone a family); with inflating housing prices and stagnant wages, this practice increasingly becomes difficult to maintain. She also comments that she believes they are a way for an employer to relay to an employee what is expected of them conduct wise. "help needed" signs do not necessarily indicate a job opening; more often their purpose is to sustain a pool of applicants in fields that have notorious rapid turnover of employees.
