500 Word Essay, "My Low Wage Life"

Joshua Ronen
11/1/09
Writing in the New Media
Marc Bousquet
3:40 PM T/TR

Research Hypertext: Living the Low Wage Life

----->David Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America, brings about several intriguing, yet important topics plaguing the streets of the USA today. Those very topics are: poverty, unemployment, and little to no education. The poverty and unemployment can be specific to older age groups or younger ones, but both age groups have trouble whether it is because of a disability or not being a legal immigrant of the USA. Those illegal (or legal) immigrants that cross the border know the most of the low-wage jobs offered in the US that are the same in their home countries pay at lot more (well not necessarily “a lot” more, but more than they are used to earning-like in sweatshops around the globe that manufacture college apparel). Most of fear of being deported. But, the main reason why a plethora of illegal immigrant workers come to the USA is for better job opportunities is to put food on the table and put clothes on the bodies of their families and a shelter over their heads. Most are willing to overcome the fear of being deported and try to live some semblance of a normal life in America under the “watchful eye” of the United States Federal Government. As for education, a Bachelor’s Degree doesn’t get a person very far anymore in the corporate world, but what about people that haven’t had the opportunity to even graduate from high school? What kind of jobs can they take? As I examine these ideas that are prevalent in the USA, I also can make some connections to them in my own life.

----->At my synagogue as a junior in high school, I took a class called L’Taken. This class highlighted the connections between multi-faceted Corporate America and Judaism. We studied and researched “Kosher” clothes, immigrants who worked for low wages to get by and were treated unfairly by their employers, and the juvenile court system. In this case specifically, I would like to talked about the things I learned about the immigrants who worked for low wages to get by and how they were treated unfairly by their employers at the same time. The L’Taken program, taught by Rabbi Melanie Aron, the head rabbi at my synagogue, gave the students the opportunity to meet with people who faced working conditions much like the type I mentioned. But, we soon came to learn that this was not all. There were horrid working conditions paired with the fact that the employers would not pay the workers for any work they did over time. In some cases, even health care became a huge issue. Some jobs were cutting down on wages and could not offer any health care to their employees because the respective companies that they worked for weren’t making much money at all. If employees every got injured on the job, they had to work with that injury because they did not have enough money to even go to their local clinics to get some minor help (even at that). This problem in the low-wage work place that the US faces is preposterous and needs to be stopped. The workers that are working for low wages do not need to be affected any more then they already are. There need to be a strict set of laws set up for low wage working institutions around the US that include and promote health care and safe-working conditions. A healthy employee has no reason not to wake up in the morning to go make money for their loved ones, no matter how little it may be. However, an injured employee does have reasons, he or she needs the money, but doesn’t want to risk getting injured any further because he or she can’t see a doctor in the first place. It is best for these workers to know that there is a happy medium in the workplace, somewhere where they can come to work, earn their living (no matter how big or how little), and go home happy knowing that if they ever get into a tight situation at work there will always be someone to help them out of it.

(722 Words)