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Summary Of The Readers Strike By John Ross

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In the reading, “The Readers’ Strike”, John Ross emphasizes the lives of cigar makers working in Ybor City, Florida during the middle of the Great Depression. Although the Great Depression was a hard time for most people, John Ross states that a few were well off through the great depression such as fine cigar makers, certain stock brokers and politicians. Furthermore, cigar makers worked long hours under the hot sun for low wages even though the cigar industry was doing better than most. However, they still pooled their money together to pay for readers. These cigar makers were often foreigners who were illiterate or spoke a different language. A contemporary issue arose with readers or “los lectores” reading to the workers the words of Zola, Dickens, Cervantes, and Tolstoy that everything they wrote was about the great depression and specifically the lives of the workers. …show more content…

Owners sought this act as the readers taking advantage of the poor workers and taking the little money they had. On the other hand, owners feared of workers being informed of their lives that they already knew they had but sought the idea that “knowledge equals power” and attempted to maintain their hierarchy be keeping the workers in the dark. By getting rid of the readers, owners thought the workers would forget and continue their repetitive job of rolling cigars but caused a huge backlash. According to John Ross, workers stopped working not because of the harsh conditions or low wages but they were denied a reader. The idea that knowledge is more powerful than money is incorporated in the reading similarly to the reading “Learning to Read and Growing in Knowledge” by Frederick

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