The Effects On The Lives Of Overworked Americans

More specifically, one story talks about Shelly Comer a divorced 43 year old mother of three who also take care of her oldest child’s friend, Michelle. Shelly has worked her whole life doing a variety of jobs. She recently became a registered nurse and now works night shifts and makes an annual income of $70,377. Regardless of these things, she is currently going into debt so that Michelle can go to college. This article not only explains the “many average Americans that are struggling from rising costs” but also how it’s getting harder for American families to have any money for themselves.

Living in Bushwick commuting to school four days a week to Coney Island, and going to work four days a week at Rite Aid in Sunnyside, Queens, is more overwhelming than what it sounds. Working overnight from Monday to Friday, earning minimum wage and being taxed on top of that isn’t enough due to prices of gas, food, and necessities sky-rocketing. The job pays $7.25 per hour but I make a $0.75 differential for working the night shift. It’s difficult to be a student and work when you only have yourself as a form of financial support. There are days I don’t sleep and hours before I get a meal, because I get trapped by my living expenses, its long before I am able to splurge on luxuries and wants. Nevertheless, it has become challenging to

Everyone in the world wants and needs to make money one way or the other. People in the world say that money is not everything. Money does not equal successs. Money does not It give back themselves an oppurtunity to feed themselves, or enjoy the luxuries that America has to offer. When reading Wilson's Article, “When work disappears” According to the trading economies in the United States of America, the US unemployment rate was recorded at 4.9 percent in August of 2016, which not been changed two months prior. 7.8 million people in the United States are without jobs. Making it hard for an Average American to live comfortable. William Julius Wilson’s article “When Work Disappears” discusses the disappearance of work in the industrialized

Barbara describes in great detail, the hard work, everyday suffering and sacrifices that poverty-stricken Americans experience. She explains how workers of unpleasing jobs suffer from “chronic

Our country is quickly turning into a welfare state; this process by which the government takes more and more of our income and thus the benefit of our work for the common good doing this deters people from working for themselves to achieve a better life at all. This self perpetuates simply by the fact that if you’re not working then you becoming one of the multitude of individuals needing help. Requiring people to work twice as hard to reap a certain level of benefit is a stifling concept those without the fortitude to do this will simply accept a meager existence and be sustained upon the handouts given.

for better things and places somewhere else is rational in all of us, but should not overwhelm us to the point that where we are presently may be better and is the place where we belong and truly makes us happy. (Donkin 298-99). The drive for economic growth has led to disastrous results as workers have less leisure time, and companies have developed a dog eat dog persona leading to stock market crashes, employee contractions, and other deleterious effects. (Donkin 303-07). Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American wrote about how work has minimized the leisure time for most working people in America. (Donkin 302). The great Mexican artist illustrated in his murals that the search of a better life ended up as being confined as prisoners of the exploitation within the automobile factory (Donkin 301). Computers and new technology has changed the way we live is comparable to the change brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Cell phones, the internet, tablets voice mail, and e-mail has transformed the way people communicate and has changed the landscape of how people work. (Donkin 305-07). Martin Luther King Jr. warned that while technology was advancing, the spiritual and moral ways people are treat each other were being diametrically opposed to each.

The short article cut from “America’s New Working Class”, by Kathleen R. Arnold, depicts the failure of the American’s federal welfare system. It seems like mostly Americans agree that the propose of federal welfare programs is to provide economic assistance such as food stamps to people who need it. However, Arnold states that the real propose of welfare programs is to maintain a supply of cheap labor in order to make them to have obedient adaptive function and closely keep watch on those welfare recipients. For example, the bad treatment for parole people will only lead them go back the prison; and for those noncompliance workfare recipients, the bad treatment and poor support will lead them to become homeless and malnourish, which make them become much more poverty.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara talked on this topic. "To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant co workers put it, 'you give and you give. '" (Ehrenreich 221). When people have expendable income, they have the ability to relax while still enjoying great luxuries in life. These people can take more for themselves. As a member of the working poor you aren 't given that option. You can only work and give of yourself in return for survival, nothing extra or to be enjoyed. This is contrary to the American Dream, which advocates for rewards and enjoyment for one 's hard work. But this is an unattainable dream for those working low wage jobs. The low wages also take away the option of resting or taking time off because the people cannot make it without the money for that day. This amount of daily work with no breaks can be very taxing on a person as Ehrenreich considers. "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" (106). Barbera is reflecting on the mental effects of this much work and stress nonstop over the entire course of ones life. She feels like the stress will have a negative long term affect on someone and their spirits. This all is an effect of the low wages paid to these workers. This also leads to a lack of choice for

As the child of Mexican immigrants, I am always encouraged to work to the best of my ability because of the sacrifices and struggles my family went through to get where we are today. Too young to remember, I am constantly reminded of the difficulties my family experienced as they attempted to rebuild their lives in a new country with nothing but their clothes on their backs and the few cash they had in their pockets. The place we called home was a shabby, old apartment in a neighborhood where the crime rate seemed as if it doubled in a matter of seconds. At a point in our lives my family begged for pennies to afford medicine from gas stations, and even the dollar store when we fell ill. It was never that we were out of money, but we were just financially unstable. We had a roof over our heads, food on our table, clothes, and even a family car, but my father’s income was not always enough to support the life of a growing family and on top of that, enough to invest in my family’s future.

The probability of the number of Americans that struggle with joblessness and being poor throughout their lifetime is still high. According to the Associated Press, Four out of five Americans struggle without jobs, close to poverty, or relying on welfare for at least parts of their life. We can only say the percentage of people facing those problems at least once in their life, not the percentage of people going through it now. This cant be figured by itself because you'd have to know if economic security troubles were lower than 80% before. In 2001, Rank and Hirschl used PSID data to see that 51% of Americans go through poverty at some point in their life. A small majority of American still spend at least a year of their adult life in poverty.

As peoples need for material items grow they increasingly need more and more money to serve this need. This is causing people to stay extra hours at the office so they can afford their seven year old daughters dream gift. In White- Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser , Fraser talks about how people nowadays get stuck in jobs that they hate just because it may pay a little more and how overwork is becoming an epidemic. These people then get home have less time for their children and spouses or ignoring them when they do by turning to media for a stress reliever. I mean I love my trashy reality tv too, and I know you have just need to find out if camille with ever stop crying because her children will have to share a wing of their new home, but family should come first People then try to compensate for the loss of human connection through material items and it becomes a never ending

I work extremely hard, harder than most of my peers. I was taught how to train my body and mind for hard work at a very early age.  For the past year or so, I have maintained a job, cooking and cleaning for the elderly. I did this while also working a severe, hard-hitting Hoover Football two a day’s schedule. I would leave home at 5:30 in the morning, and not

Sylvia is a single, working mother of four kids. Everyday Sylvia balances the demands of children and her full time job. Sylvia enjoys her job, although demanding, it allows her to pay her bills. She works day in day out giving it all she has. She is tired and stressed about making ends meet. She has worked hard her whole life to get a job where she could stop living paycheck to paycheck. Her salaried job requires that she work 45 hours a week, on the graveyard shift. Sylvia is a model employee, she shows up, works hard, and gets all her work done ahead of the set deadlines. Sylvia knows that she can get her work done in far less time than her employer requires her to be there. She often has down time and often daydreams about spending it

In the article, “You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much”, author Tim Wu believes that part of the American character is to prefer work to leisure time; therefore he provides an enlightening solution through which white-collar workers can confront this damaging work system. According to Wu, the majority of American professionals like taking pride about the job they have, want to seem important in the eyes of society and worry about the income they make; therefore, they usually prolong their work hours and forget about their spare time. However, Wu suggests a possible solution to this problem, by advising workers to “return to the goal of efficiency in work—fulfilling whatever

Economic issues top the list of priorities for most American. Unemployment is a word that Americans hear on a daily basis. Currently the 62.7% of adults who are able to work are currently working and three major factors are driving the decrease in workers. Due to the large number of “baby boomers” who are retiring, which is healthy and understandable, we have a decline in the number of adults who work. Another positive reason is due to a larger number of college students and graduate students. The cause that is worrisome is the people who have “given up” on finding work. The Wall Street Journal estimates that about 2.6 million of the roughly 92 million American adults who don 't work want a job but aren 't looking for one (CNN, 2016). Politicians and citizens alike recognize this as a political concern.