Employment and Job Availability in Our Society - Essay Example

Your F. 26 April Response Paper 12 For article number 34, “The Job Ghetto,” by Katherine Newman and Chauncy Lennon, discusses employment and job availability in our society. Sometimes people are so hard pressed for finances that instead of working, they turn to government assistance. The suggestion at the first part of the paper suggests that maybe it is too easy for someone to have free money given to them while receiving welfare benefits when they could instead be earning it. During the time of this writing, unemployment rates in the United States were down though they have significantly increased during the last two presidential terms. However, is it really that easy to find a job? That is the question that the authors also discuss about the ease of finding a job. For this criticism, the authors looked at the economy in Harlem and the low paying jobs that are found in the fast food industry. These are typically minimum wage paying jobs. These are the jobs that people who would like to cut back on welfare spending in this country would like to see people apply and perform rather than giving them welfare money to spend instead. This is because it is just a job. It requires no prior training or educational background but still puts money into their pockets. The authors look at the fast food industry, claiming shocking statistics. Over 2 million people are employed in the fast food industry now and a large majority of people got their first start at McDonalds. This doesnt even account for the other fast food chain restaurants that have jobs available. People are more so looking for and filling these job openings rather than enlisting in the armed forces post high-school education or even if they are secondary school drop outs. While many think that the fast food industry is a gateway job for future careers, the competition is getting tight. The reason behind this is that the manual labor work in factories and manufacturing are minimal. With competition to get any type of job, it can be difficult to even get one in fast food. The authors followed approximately 200 people living in Harlem in the early 1990s. Many of the people living in this area are unemployed and a whopping 40 percent of people live below the poverty line. Around 30 percent of these residents also receive government assistance. While many of these people would only receive minimum wage, they would at least be working to earn their keep. The authors had a discovery that very few were actually able to obtain jobs in the fast food industry because while the jobs are not particularly scarce, there is a lot of competition just to get them. Of the people followed by the authors, 73 percent were still unable to get a job after a year of searching and they typically had to apply at no less than seven or eight locations. Now, with jobs being in low supply and work being in high demand, older employees are shoving out competition from the younger applicants who once were the ones filling these minimum wage fast food jobs. So, this gives some people leverage to get better jobs. The welfare recipients are being beaten out of getting them because other people are at least getting a few jobs in order to build up their experience which then is more appealing to future employers. African Americans were the highest demographic that got rejected from jobs in Harlem. New immigrants are more likely to find jobs even because they are willing to work dirt cheap. For some reason, employers tended to hire people who had further commuting distances which made it hard for single mothers with children to watch over. Welfare recipients have a hard time getting off of welfare because they are typically looked over for jobs that are filled by people with high school educations and previous job experience. According to the authors, some of the factors that distinguish job holders from job seekers is their prior education and prior experience. Ethnicity is also a factor but not because companies hiring are discriminating but instead some people are more likely to work harder to earn less money per hour. It seems as though the authors find that welfare moms will have a hard time finding a job. They typically have no experience in jobs, may have not completed a high school education and need to find jobs that are flexible enough to allow them to take care of their children. Those that have received welfare assistance at all usually have little experience or have been unemployed long enough that they do not appeal to employers. It makes it difficult for a welfare mom to get a job. I think it can be difficult for anyone to get a job, regardless of any demographics right now. The economy is awful compared to the 20 years ago that they completed this study. I do think that it probably is hard for people on welfare to get any type of job due to their own personal marketability but there are other options other than just the fast food industry. The results of their findings really do not surprise me that much at all. Your F. Name Professor Name Course name 26 April 2012 Response Paper 13 In article number 33, “Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, the object is to evaluate the minimum wages in the United States. The situation is to determine whether or not it is even possible for someone to survive on those kinds of minimum wages. The cost of living is rather high regardless whether or not someone is living frugally. At the time the article was written, some of the minimum wage paying jobs were about seven dollars per hour. This would mean that a person on a single income would be lucky to afford low income housing or a small apartment on a small budget. In certain areas of the United States, it doesnt even afford those options hardly. Some people have these piddly jobs and then have to drive several miles to get to them. Any person that is able to obtain an unskilled job gets paid very little. This could include fast food industry jobs or retail or factory work. While these small wages separate working people from those living off of welfare, there is still little money for a working person to make ends meet with that kind of money being brought in. If someone has small children and has to pay for child care, the expenses of actually having a job barely even adds up for a person to break even. When one study was conducted, for someone, to have a small one bedroom apartment would require the person to make almost nine dollars an hour to be able to afford it. At the time of the articles start, minimum wage wouldnt even start to cover it. Now that minimum wage is higher, unfortunately so are costs of living. You can hardly rent an apartment for under five-hundred dollars any more. While having a job can lift a persons self esteem by creating the mentality that a person is earning their keep, they have many other expenses. On top of childcare, there is also money spent on transportation to get to work. Often some jobs even require uniform and rarely pay for the entire portion of it. There is no surprise that people cannot make it through this tough economical pinch that results from minimum pay. There is no incentive to really get off of welfare. A person doesnt have to work for it and a person just sitting at home, watching their own kids and not spending expensive costs as gas pumps, it appears as the cycle is vicious without a way out. At this rate, poverty will not end and neither will homelessness. For the author of this article, the first task at hand was to look through classified ads for jobs that require little experience and people can be trained on the spot. She used this as an experiment to look for a job that required few skills and if she got it, she was going to try to keep it. The job positions were along the lines of waitressing, telemarketing and being a desk clerk. She set out to apply for jobs either at a hotel or at a supermarket. There she takes on a 15 minute interview and is told to come back the next day for a drug test at the Winn-Dixie. She would be paid around $6 an hour. She had lunch at Wendys for around $5 and then went on to apply at other places that still offered small wage jobs. In total she applied for nearly 20 jobs and was never called back for another interview. The author then realizes that some of these places that place want ads in newspapers are usually printed almost all the time due to the high turnover rate at the employer. It doesnt necessarily mean that they are ready to hire someone at that point. She went ahead and set out for a waitressing job where she was to make under $2.50 per hour plus tips. While some women working as waitresses may try to keep an upbeat behavior, telling the story of their lives may be boosted up a little bit in order to tell other people extreme stories that could make them look really good or to make them look bad so people would feel sorry for them. A person who makes more money can make a person who works in an unskilled job sector can make the person feel inferior because of their small salary. Actually living the life gives outsiders a true inside look at how things really work and give an insight on how live is each day. Being an outsider versus being an insider is definitely two different perspectives. I know that if I had to quit school right now that I would have to either pick up another job or even have another person to come live with me to help out on the finances. I actually understand in a way why some young women work degrading jobs just in an effort to try to make money in an easy way just to make ends meet. My parents would probably help as long as they could but its not really fair to them. I would have to eat very little, no more $5 meals but instead 50 cent ramen noodles. Some people in college find strange ways to make quick money like selling plasma or acting like lab rats for health studies. I think people who dont have help eventually will run into some lucky, have to live off the government or if they are one in ten million, may win the lottery. It just isnt logical to live paycheck to paycheck when it is this minimal. The minimum wage, it can make the value of a dollar go down. However, expenses are getting higher. The money people spend on food for lunch while on lunch break at work costs about the same for a meal as it does for them to work an hour at the job. Finances are not evening out. With the economy worse then ever, it appears there may never be a way out, especially for a person who has to settle for a minimum wage position. Im not very hopeful that things will change that much. Too many fat cats have the money while the others are like stray cats with nothing. Your F. Name Professor Name Course name 26 April 2012 Response Paper 14 In article number 39, “Tales Out of Medical School” by Adriane Fugh-Berman, M.D., the author discusses the role that gender may play in college classes with the same teachers but still have a much different classroom experience. Since the author is a doctor, she tells tales of what it was like for girls to try to change things. As it seemed to the author, a classroom scenario was typically different for males and females because the females were treated as though they were invisible. The author herself went to Georgetown University School of Medicine, having graduated in the late 1980s. By the time she was in medical school, she really noticed that even a big league medical school like Georgetown had created a certain disrespect for women students. She acknowledges that even the faculty was mostly white males and of all medical students in the United States, only a third were women. Fugh-Bermans Georgetown medical school class consisted of almost three-fourths male students and more than 90 percent white students. Since women are entering medical school at a much higher rate than before, it is creating discussion among the way each male or female student is taught. One issue at hand was a neurosurgeon that worked as a professor at Stanford University. Her reason for resigning was due to “pervasive sexism.” As a neurosurgeon, her occupation is largely dominated by successful males. However, her story of differences due to inequality in the classrooms is not uncommon. As Fugh-Bermans story continues, she discusses that her anatomy teacher in medical school disrespected one of the cadavers saying that she must have been a Playboy bunny. The students were then instructed to cut off her large breasts and toss them into the container for waste. She discusses that it was obvious that since the breasts were just cut off, then it was obvious that they would not be dissected, almost as if there was nothing to learn from the way they were constructed. Others carved a tic-tac-toe game into the body of a cadaver and another acted as though he had just had sex when he had cut open the female genitalia of a cadaver. One thing that concerned the author was that since humor was a way to cope with the dissection of what was once living, that it also allows for students to start the depersonalization process. This process may also then become a learned practice utilized when a doctor is caring for a patient. A patient might be seen as just another unfortunate body and she was encouraged to treat patients the same as she would lab animals. Another instance was when only males in the authors class had gained experience from placing an intravenous line into the major vein in the neck. Not a single woman raised their hand that they had been taught taught that skill. Most women just got to watch procedures be done rather than take them hands on. At one point, a female instructor gave a presentation on radiology and it was the first time that the author had actually felt engaged in the lesson because she made eye contact with all students while male professors typically just met the eyes of other male students. Other women tried to interview to get into a particular class about sexually transmitted diseases offered through Georgetown and were not allowed. The women simply were not allowed to take some of the same courses. When the STD class disappeared, a urology class took its place. For the urology class, two women were finally admitted to take it. Anytime topics about STDs were discussed, only two of all lectures focused on women, two of them focused on homosexuality and neither mentioned lesbians. When the female students started a womens group to focus on the discriminations at Georgetown, they received hate male and harassment from their male classroom counterparts. If there was a more equal ratio of men to women in a Georgetown medical school, there would be less sexism. If the women were not in the minority, they would have an equal representation in the classroom. Professors still might make their selections based on gender, treating the women medical students as the lesser. However, this would give men and women an equal ground to stand on in hopes that it would lead to each of them looking at each other as peers rather than competition. However, since the 1980s, schools have become much more liberal and women are now reaching for goals that they would not have before. The women were victims of hate crimes because they received nasty letters and cards in their mail. Some of them even contained obscenities and one was a rape. These letters only appeared after the start of the all womens groups. The male students may have felt threatened by the female students or wished that they would stop trying to create havoc for the rest of the class. If the women would have just kept quiet, the men could carry on with their classes as they expected. There is an obvious gender related discrimination here. However, I feel like that as women are becoming more so the breadwinners these days, times have probably changed. I was appalled by some of the antics that were pulled and being a college student myself, I would never have noticed the differences between males and females in my own classes. The treatment must have been extremely severe for the women to feel as though they needed to take action. Hopefully with the changing of times, equality will prevail and women will be seen as excellent students and intelligent individuals as well. Read More