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  • Essay / Equality in the Workplace According to Nickel and Dimed

    It's no real mystery that the workplace isn't exactly a fair place. For years, people have been fighting for equality in the workplace, in all areas. Women are fighting for the same pay as men. Ethnic people are fighting for the same pay as white people. This has been a problem for a long time, even in 2001 when Barbara Ehrenreich published her book Nickel and Dimed which tells her story as she explores the upper middle class to the working poor. Throughout his book, Ehrenreich addresses difficult issues like (not so) affordable housing and employee benefits. But Ehrenreich also addresses the very delicate subject of equality in the workplace. Ehrenreich uses her writing skills and new knowledge to raise awareness about inequalities in the standard workplace based on racial and gender bias. She takes her upper-middle-class audience through three different states, showing them a part of America they may not have noticed. She breaks these three states into three different sections to give organization to the piece and also add juxtaposition between the different places she has experienced. Along the way, she gives details such as her inability to get a job because of her race, her friend George telling her about the parameters of her life in America, and the sexism she finds preventing her from accessing many job opportunities. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayBarbra begins her journey in Key West, Florida. Right off the bat, this is the first place where she really starts to see some racism in the workplace. She says, “Best Western, Econo Lodge and HoJo let me fill out application forms, and they, to my relief, are mostly interested in whether I'm a legal resident of the United States. » (13) Barbra is an older, white, middle-aged woman. It's not too difficult to understand that she's not talking specifically about herself; she's talking about those of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. She uses this to let us know that these places generally hire ethical people. Then, while in Maine, she mentions that when deciding where to go, she chose this place because “(she) was struck by what seemed to be an extreme case of demographic albinism.” (51) She then goes on to explain why this is good. because that also means that housekeepers, maids, and others were white here as well, implying that in other states she would be less likely to get a job in the housekeeping field because the companies in the Other states generally employ a majority, if not only, ethnic people. It's little things like the ones she says that only highlight racial bias in the workplace, as Barbara and hundreds of thousands of other Americans have seen. know. When she worked as a waitress in Florida, she worked with a Czech boy named George. George is a dishwasher at the second restaurant where Barbara worked, Jerry's. On page 38, Ehrenreich tells his readers how George explained to him that he wasn't actually paid by the company, but that the money he made went to the agent who sent him here, and that out of the money he earned, the agent only gave him $5 an hour. I think this is something that many Americans are not aware of. Ehrenreich could have left it out, but she made it her duty in her book to educate people who don't