badwages

Andrew Dugoni
Writing with New Media I
Marc Bousquet

I have to admit. I have never personally been a victim of bad wages. Nor have I ever really been personally affiliated with people who work for low wages. But I have however, seen what it is like. When I was a junior in high school, I had to do many service hours as a requirement for my school. For a lot of my hours, I went with a bunch of friends to help pick pomegranates from pomegranate trees. To me it was fun. I had a great time, I fooled around with my friends threw the pomegranates around and played a bunch of games. And I didn’t feel bad because my friends were doing it, and all the other people there were volunteers. But the more and more we worked still, the more tired we got. And when we got tired we got to take a break. And we always thought this doesn’t matter were not getting paid were just doing this for service hours. But none of us thought, however, what it would be like to do these hours upon hours day after day to earn such a small sum of money. I myself only did a few hours and I was already like jeez that was the longest hours I’ve ever done I hope I don’t have to do that again.
I never really thought about what it would be like to live like that. To live a low wage life. To work hours and hours 7 days a week to earn meager wages. Its hard for me to understand because I have grown up in a pretty wealthy family. And again, I have never really been affected by low wages because every job I worked paid at least $10 an hour. And I still find it hard to believe, that in a very promising and economic land that there are still millions of people in America that are so underpaid and underprivileged. The reason I want to write about this topic is because the more I read in The Working Poor and Nickel and Dimed, the more I came to realize how wrong that is. That the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. I want to understand how these people live, how they live their lives, how much they earn. Because even during my little service hours is nothing compared to the lives of these peoples.