Not Getting By In America

Fabricio Guerra
Mr. Roddy
IHSS
30 September 2019
Poor Wages and Working Conditions
     Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, products have been way easier to produce, transport, and refine. This means that (in a capitalist society) you needed people to run factories and people to work in them. The workers, who frankly had very little rights and horrible working conditions, were paid dirt poor wages which made it very hard to get by. After the start of the Industrial Revolution, industry began to spread from simple things such as electricity production to more complicated things such as refined oil, especially during the outbreak of the First World War. During the booming 20s and the Great Depression, the gap between rich and and poor began to grow exponentially. During the 20s you had rich businessmen taking advantage of workers to produce as many products as possible so they could make boatloads of cash, and during the Great Depression in the 30s the businessmen (who had grown incredibly rich) now hoarded their money, which made the poor even poorer.
     In her book, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich written in 1998, she did an experiment in which she went to three different states to see what it would be like to live as a "poor" person. She began in the state of Florida, and started working as a waitress. Her waitress job wasn't enough to get by on, and she promptly had to get another job as a maid. However this second job was too physically demanding and she ended up leaving Florida. Her next state was Maine, where she got a job as a housecleaner. This job was also way too hard for her and she moved on to her next state. The last one, Minnesota, was the one where housing was the most difficult to find, but its also where she had the highest fixed wage. In her conclusion she stated that the reason that most low wage jobs keep having a low wage is by exploiting the worker's low-self esteem. 
After hundred's of years of greed, the high class has now reached a point where they have become so rich that it would take several stupid mistakes to lose all of it, yet the poor have been dealing with the same scenarios for the past 150 years. However if we were to look on the bright side then we can see that workers have been given several rights, especially those of worker conditions and wages. However in some places in the world we still see jobs that are similar to slavery, such as technology factories in Asia that have children working in them for practically free or extremely dangerous mining jobs in Africa. Though the road towards adequate working conditions and justifiable wages is long, it is certainly traversable. We just have to want to.

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