My Low-Wage Life Proposal- Briana MacDonald

For this hypertext I want to focus on the low-wage life of hotel housekeepers. In my hypertext I want to explore and explain the daily duties of hotel housekeepers, the affect the low-wage has on the workers, what type of workers it draws in (demographics), the risks involved, and the ethical sides like the debate over tipping, and gender. One concept I plan to look into is an idea that came out of The Working Poor by David Schipler, that many low-wage workers typically are not American, but are an essential part of American (pg. 91). On average, the housekeeping staff at hotels around America are generally immigrants or of a minority group so I plan to explore into the demographics of non-Americans in the system contributing greatly to the hotel chains and tourism. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich needed two jobs in order to keep out of poverty, so I will look into the concept of the need for housekeepers to hold two jobs as well, due to their low-wages (chapter 2). In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser explored into the dangers of slaughterhouses and how the dangerousness of the job often left workers injured or unable to work (chapter 8). A similar connection can be made to the hotel housekeeping industry where back injuries and other sorts of injuries happen from the job, so I plan to investigate into the effects of this on their already low-wage life of poverty.