My Work after Winning a Lottery - Essay Example

1. The Meaning of Work Firth (2002), in an attempt to describe life and work, narrates: “…when my father, in the twilight of his career, was taken off the board of directors at his company and replaced by an up-and-coming bright young thing, did work present itself in our lives as anything other than: the means to bring money into the household, and a place that my father went in the mornings and left behind in the evenings, … instead work became a source of pride and dignity, a measure of personal achievement, and an expression of one’s identity and relationship to the world.” After winning a lottery, I may not continue my work, what with all the money that I got now. But work has become other than a source of money, or a place to go in the morning and spend my time the whole day. Work is a matter of the three things mentioned by Firth – pride and dignity, personal achievement, and my relationship to the world. I have to spend my time and effort to the place and people that I have been in contact and accustomed with before I got this big money. Work is not anymore the source of money; this is my life now. I cannot think of other ways of spending my life except to work, if not I may not live long and the money that I’ve won would be put to waste. 2. Best and worst jobs These odd jobs are the jobs you won’t find in the classified jobs. In CNN.com: “They arent your run-of-the-mill doctors, lawyers and the like. Some are simple, some complex; some are common, some one in a million -- but one things for sure -- they are all (extremely) unusual.” I really can’t find myself in one of these jobs. I don’t want to be a part of those who work in the streets, the subject of people’s curiosity. Some of these jobs that would be a nightmare to me are the very peculiar “condom tester”. I wonder how it is done but the name alone is disgusting. And there’s also one in the pages of the book of Nancy Rica Schiff, the page turner. A page turner turns the pages of a music book as someone plays the piano. But something that I really hate is the one I knew when I was still a child. Have you wondered working in the Post Office and you stick young tongue out to let your saliva wet envelopes containing letters? That can be the weirdest odd job one can ever have. 3. Unemployment The employment situation has worsened, especially with the continuing problem in the stock market, or in Wall Street. There would be a continuing employment problem. Even months before this problem in the stock market, there was already employment with many Americans still unemployed, not finding any suitable job. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the “nonfarm payroll employment declined by 159,000 in September, and the unemployment rate held at 6.1 percent … Employment continued to fall in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade, while mining and health care continued to add jobs.” Well, there’s still some hope. The last part of the report states that mining and health care continued to add jobs. It’s not at all hopeless. There’s hope in the American dream. For that’s what Americans are good at. Americans are always able to rise above any adversity, be it an attack, a depression, or any kind of world problem. The question is “Are we in a state of depression? If we are, how long will this be?” 4. The changing nature of work Firth (2002) describes the origin of work: In the Book of Genesis, God is very specific about what work is for. Work is a punishment for having eaten of the tree of knowledge. The serpent tempts Eve, Eve tempts Adam, all hell breaks loose, and before we know it, we are all doomed like Adam. For the beginning, man has regarded work as punishment, and this can be explained from the quote from Firth above. Work was a punishment for sin. During the medieval times, work didn’t really have that dignity carried along with it. Man tilled the soil because it was the source of food. He could not eat without giving sweat, without getting tired. During the industrial revolution, again man worked in order to have money so that he could buy food. And he worked hard, work was some kind of punishment. Harsh labour, discrimination, forced labour, slavery, punishment – all these were connected to work. And because of this, man tended to hate work. It’s as if there never occurred in his life that he was happy in his work. Now, we have the machines and technology, but Firth says, “…work never really shifted beyond the mundane and the repetitious” (46). 5. Does history repeat There certainly is a similarity in Jacoby’s description to the present situation in developing nations. Work in the developing nations is still a coveted prize that one looks for; meaning it is not easy to find a job. And if you can find one, conditions in the work place is not that good and conducive to working. Many of the skilled labor in these countries find jobs in the other developed countries such as the United States and the Middle East, with still low compensation. While inside their own countries, there is some kind of chaos in the work place. Salary is very low, not commensurate to the kind of work the worker does. We can not explain if unionization of workers has helped them in their predicament. When a strike is declared, trouble and chaos erupts between security guards and the striking workers. The workers themselves have to resort to clandestine ways of acquiring food for their families. When there’s no strike, the workers have to follow whatever the owner of the establishment says. There are still discriminations and disregard of laws. 6. Sociological Imagination Now that you have had some time to think about work, lets begin to consider work from a sociological perspective and use our sociological imaginations. In what ways have social forces influenced your work choices and decisions. You may even wish to consider your decision to be a student. Almost everything at home, school, in the community, and in places of work, is dominated by technology, high-tech machines, instruments or equipment that perform work for us. We can not anymore work without these high-tech tools. We are, in a way, dominated by these machines. They work for us, they influence us. And I think, this will be a dominant feature for many years and generations. Why? Our children use these instruments and equipment. They are a big influence on their lives, from home to school. Every piece of work for the child and adult uses technology. We will have technology for the rest of our lives because we allow it. This is the new culture and the new cultural capital we invest on our children, allowing them to be influenced and dominated by technology. 7. Alienated labor According to Marx, ‘The worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.’ (Marx’s Estranged Labour) The object is the product or the commodity the worker has produced. Objectification is the “loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation”. The worker is reduced into an object, or he becomes a slave to the object he has created. He is alienated to his product or object; he is estranged to his own commodity. The working man is alienated to labor because of the inhuman conditions imposed by labor and capital. Instead of being ‘in love’ or attached to work, or instead of dedicating his time and effort to his work, he becomes detached and hates what he is doing. As the worker increases more effort, he is reduced to an object in the process, and the object is more valued than himself. That’s why it is called ‘alien’, because it is outside, not himself, the commodity becomes bigger, more important than the worker. The bigger and more important the commodity, the smaller he becomes. The more he works hard, the more he loses for himself. His life becomes not his own now, but to the object he has made. The worker is alienated to the products of his labour. He is being alienated because of the activities inside the production site. He hates his work; he only does it for survival, because he has nothing to eat if he won’t work. He is just forced to work. It is forced labour. He is not satisfied with his labour, it is “a labour of self-sacrifice, or mortification” (Marx’s Estranged Labour) 8. Iron Cage The kind of work that we attain is influenced by the cultural capital that we or our parents have invested in us when we were children. Cultural capital is the capital we invest at home, on how we raise our children, and when they grow up, they get good and fulfilling jobs. We invest in rearing children because we also want to get the kind of prestige according to our status in life. Acquiring the right work and occupation according to our class and structure is important in the functionalist model. If you are a family of professionals, or the parents are both teachers, you wouldn’t want your children to go to a vocational school and make technicians out of them. The kind of occupation or work when they become an adults and a bread winners will determine their status in life and their class in society. This means that there is prestige in work. It is not just to provide sustenance for the family, but it determines the kind of social class one is in. 9. Power and control in the workplace Consider whether or not scientific management can be implemented successfully, should be implemented and in which types of industries it would work best or not work at all? To what extent, if at all, can workers resist the principles of scientific management? Provide examples from your own observations of workplaces. In Business Encyclopedia (Answers.com 2008), “Scientific method of management and jobdesign, which originated with Frederick Winslow Taylor (1956-1915), entails analyzing jobs to determine what the worker does and what the requirements are for the job… the job is designed to ensure that employees will not be asked to perform work beyond their abilities.” For me, scientific management can be implemented on large companies and even in government where lots of employees’ jobs are not so well defined. These big companies need to really narrow down work, and their welfare should also be looked into. Many of the work in those big companies are not so well distributed, some are wasting their time, while many are overworked. There should a scientific approach so that resources and time are not wasted. This also goes to government bureaucracies; some of them are so bloated, while others are understaffed. Some government offices in other countries are not well organized; these need more further studies with scientific approaches. Human resource should also be done scientifically. Workers and employees should be properly screened so that only qualified ones are placed on a particular office or department. The employee’s skill and abilities should match with the requirements of the job. 10. Race ethnicity and the workplace From Abstract: Blacks on the Bubble, “…black employment in high-status occupations is partially dependent on an organization of jobs that mediate racial pressures, such as affirmative action jobs. They also indicate that this structure of opportunity is unstable because it fluctuates in response to race-conscious political conditions. Therefore, black attainments are not necessarily evidence of deracialization in the labor market. At least partially, they indicate a dependence on (versus autonomy from) employment practices that are sensitive to the politics of race.” The quote above strongly argues that there has not been much achieved by society regarding deracialization in the labor force. There continues discrimination, although now this has been slightly addressed. Still, it remains an issue that there is ethnic segregation. In Hellersten and Neumark (2004): “Skill-related segregation may arise if skilled workers are more complementary with other skilled workers than with unskilled workers. But because skill is often correlated with race and ethnicity, skill-related segregation could generate workplace segregation by race and ethnicity.” Added to this, is the so-called politics in the workplace. There is a certain kind of politics where people only choose or hire people they know or are acquainted with. If there are Blacks in the Company, there maybe other Blacks too. But the question is, “What if there is no Black?” So the company won’t hire any other Black even if there are many applicants who are qualified. In Gender Inequality at Work, “Women of color have lower wages, are poorer and are more likely to be unemployed than the average non-Hispanic White female. African American women earn 65.0 cents to the overall male dollar, while Latinas earn only 55.5 cents. In 2001, White women had weekly earnings of $521, Black women made $451, and Hispanic women made $385.” If you’re ethnic, you are discriminated; more if you are a woman. 11. Gender Inequality In Gender Inequality at Work, we have this information. 1.) “Working women are an increasing vital component of our society, becoming more essential to our economy’s health. 2.) Female-dominated occupations (e.g. secretaries, elementary school teachers) over all have lower wage. With the rising cost of living, housewives have resorted to doing jobs fit or were usually done by men. This is because of the rising cost of living. The wife has to work to augment family income. With technology things changed. There are millions of men now who work in female-dominated occupation. Sometimes, the home is left with nobody, or the child is left to somebody to care for. The new age has changed the family. Both husband and wife have to work. With this development, we can still see in the workplace that women are not equal with men in benefits, wages, privileges, etc. There is inequality even in retirement and pension benefits. There also more reports of assault and violent acts on women, aside from discrimination on women of color. (Gender Inequality at Work, 2008) Men still rule, and would like to rule forever, the workplace. And men are more privileged. “Although women compose 47 percent of the workforce, they suffer 60 percent of [violent] attacks.” (Gender Inequality at Work, 2008) Why is this so? There is still that chauvinistic philosophy that men are superior to women. And this occurs more frequently in the workplace where women are now the majority. Men can’t just surrender their flag to women. 12. Sexual Harassment Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986) is a case of sexual harassment that reached Supreme Court. Complainant Mechelle Vinson claimed that her branch manager, Sidney Taylor, sexually harassed her. At first, she was invited to dinner by Taylor who then proposed sexual intercourse, and successfully made his intention for forty or fifty occasions. Vinson resisted but could do nothing under the circumstances, saying that she was afraid she would be fired. She was finally fired for taking excessive absences. However, after she was fired, Vinson filed a sexual harassment case against her employer for violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vinson was claiming liability from her employer for Taylor’s act of sexual harassment. Both the bank of Taylor denied Vinson’s claim. The federal district court ruled that “for a sexual harassment claim to prevail, the plaintiff had to demonstrate a tangible economic loss… and that the bank was not liable for the misconduct of its supervisors.” The Supreme Court in this case held that “employers were not automatically liable for sexual harassment by supervisors.” (Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson 2008) This is one of those cases favoring the employer and the immediate supervisor who is the harasser himself. Sexual harassment is not so difficult to prove; it only requires for the victim to show proof. In this case, the victim was able to show proof, but the Court sided with the harasser and the employer. There are a lot of victims of sexual harassment out there who maybe just content with leaving their cases as simple experience, and are afraid of exposing these dastardly acts of supervisors and employers. This is because even our own Supreme Court is not too strict of implementing the law. The law has to give more weight on side of the victim so that harassers and those who intend to commit more acts are deterred of doing so. 13. Career Women Bad Wives In Forbes.com (2008), editor Michael Noer published an article entitled “Don’t Marry Career Women.” This provoked a heated response from Elizabeth Corcoran, an author and member of the Silicon Valley of the same website. Michael Noer advises guys not to marry career women for, as scientists believe, “you run the risk of having a rocky marriage”. Other arguments of Noer, with evidence from surveys and research: a.) Noer quotes Social Forces, a research journal, which says that “women are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner”. b.) Career women are more likely to get divorced and become unfaithful as time goes by. c.) Nobel laureate Gar S. Becker argued that when both spouses are career-oriented, the value of the marriage is lower for both. d.) Women’s work hours increase divorce, while for men it has no relation at all. (This is according to John H. Johnson’s Survey of Income and Program Participation.) e.) Educated people are more likely to have extramarital sex (this with evidence from surveys). Noer further advises single male persons to remain single rather than marry career women. But Elizabeth Corcoran published her response also with strong arguments: “Don’t marry a lazy man”. She says that “marriage is a two-way street, [where] men should own up to their responsibilities.” Men should know how to handle responsibilities, and should have the right career and job to raise a family. Elizabeth cites her own life where she has raised two kids, works more than 35 hours a week, earns more than $30,000, and yet she and her husband were to celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary. They both have time for themselves and for their kids. The argument that career women tend to be unfaithful is not true, and that this could happen to anybody who does not value the other partner’s welfare, such as likes and dislikes. Money is not a problem, except when there’s not enough to pay for bills, but not when one is earning more than the other. Elizabeth says that she and hubby love each other’s company, and that they keep on adapting to the changes of their daily lives in the course of their marriage. I also think that Elizabeth is on the right argument. It is not true that career women can cause a rocky marriage. It all depends on both couples. It has to be a give and take proposition, and process of living together. A career woman is an educated individual who has all the understanding in the world for her husband and family. But a career woman can also pick the right partner for her life. She can not marry a lazy individual who is only content of being at home caring for the kids. Of course, times can test marriage, and money is not a problem. Both couples should know the process of give and take. A career woman knows that. 14. Family Friendly Workplaces A situation from Firth (2002) is, for me the best example for a family-friendly workplace. SAS Institute (www.sas.com) has been in the top ten of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” and also selected on the “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers”. It is a $1 billion dollar software company in North Carolina. When six employees left to get married and have children some twenty years ago, Jim Goodnight, founder and president of SAS, and HRM manager David Russo, set up the first day care facilities in the company, gained back their employees, and have all the amenities for a family-friendly environment, including benefits, insurance, care facilities, gym, etc. It is now a progressive company, “with a professional turnover of just under 4 percent, losing 131 people out of 3292.” This is the kind of company that we need in the present age of technology and the internet, a kind of business that values the family. With businesses these days which only value profits and more profits, we need a company that is family-oriented. Because if we value the family to which the employees belong, we give our employees the necessary importance as individuals. They will value the company and the organization they belong. The need now becomes reciprocal. Success is not far behind. 15. The Motherhood Manifesto The Motherhood Manifesto is “a call to action, summoning all Americans – mothers, and all who have mothers – to start a revolution to make motherhood compatible with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” (The Motherhood Manifesto, 2006) I would like to discuss the last letter of MOTHER; R is for Realistic and Fair Wages – two full-time working parents should be able to earn enough to care for their family. And working mothers must receive equal pay for equal work. While this country claims to be a democratic and fair-to-all, it seems it’s only a word of mouth. Our mothers don’t receive fair wages, especially mothers with growing kids to take care of. The two should go together, meaning the father and the mother. The last R represents unity for the family, where both mother and father equally share in the responsibility of taking care of the home. The mother should receive an equal and fair wage. She suffered hard enough being the mother, does she have to suffer more? Moreover, the father should be given equal responsibility. He has to receive fair wage but he must not leave his family alone. He has to be responsible and discipline enough to raise a family. The call of the Mother Manifesto is a call to all, to the government and every responsible citizen of this country, to take of our mothers. And they are right in calling for a change of laws to cover more benefits and fair treatment to our working mothers. What would have happened to this country if we did not have our caring mothers? They suffered equally during the founding of this nation. Shouldn’t we have the heart to fight for them? We must implement our laws by caring for our mothers. A question that I should like to raise is: What more laws should we need to benefit our working mothers? References Abstract: Blacks on the Bubble (The Vulnerability of Black Executives in White Corporations), The Sociological Quarterly (2008). Retrieved October 29, 2008, from: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119296650/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 Business Encyclopedia: Scientific Management (Answers.com, 2008). Retrieved October 29, 2008, from http://www.answers.com/Scientific%20management. Employment Situation Summary, U.S. Department of Labor. (2008). Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm. Firth, D. (2002). Work and Life Express. United Kingdom: Capstone Publishing. Gender Inequality at Work (2008). Research Bulletin. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.uaw.org/publications/jobs_pay/03/no2/jpe03.cfm Hellerstein, J. and Neumark, D. (2004). Workplace Segregation in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Skill. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from: http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/wp/WP_404JHDNWP.htm Marx, Karl. Estranged Labour (From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The Marx-Engels Reader R.C.). 1972. R.C. Tucker (ed.). W.W. Norton and Company Inc. Meritor Savings Bank v. Mechelle Vinson (2008). Answers.com. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.answers.com/topic/meritor-savings-bank-v-mechelle-vinson Perruci, R. and Wysong, E., 3rd ed. The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream. Some Really Odd Jobs, CNN.com/living. (2008). Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/03/05/oddest.jobs/index.html The Motherhood Manifesto. (2006) The Nation. Retrieved October 29, 2008, from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060522/blades/5. Read More