Reading Diary of Ehrenreich pp 1-119

First off I have to say, I love Barbara Ehrenreich’s writing style. The way she writes reminds me off when a friend is telling you an interesting about an experience she just had. Like when your friend has gone on a backpacking trip around Europe and has come home with all these amazing stories of how they live over there, what their lives are like, all the day to day aspects that you did not know and are fascinated by. I feel like that when I read her book.
I felt shock, amusement, disgust and sadness when I was reading this book. Sometimes I had to even take a moment and re-read what I had just read because I could not believe what I was reading. When I was reading the part about how Holly would hate Barbara forever because she had defined Holly’s authority as team leader, I (internally) jumped to Barbara’s defense, much like how I become defensive when one of mine are attacked.
I think one of the things that astounded me the most is the working conditions and the amount they are getting paid to work. Call me sheltered (because I probably am) but I did not realize that there were people out there that take advantage of a desperate person like that. At least not here in the so-called developed America. They are paying people barely enough for them to feed themselves and pay the rent, this is not even taking into account school fee and heaven forbid they fall sick and need to pay for medicine. I have heard of this sort of thing happening in places like China, where big corporations are now outsourcing to due to the low wages and the “flexible” working conditions requirements, but I never thought it would be happening here. For a person, like Holly, to be terrified of showing any human weaknesses, working through her broken ankle, reminds me of a machine. What these corporate heads are not taking into account is that these workers are humans, they are not machines, they break, and when they do you can not just get rid of them and replace them with the newest model. These are also human beings with their own lives to live, not like a machine in a factory whose “life” ends when the factory closes at night. The workers, after work, have to still go home, get dinner on the table, spend time with their kids, do the laundry and sleep.
What these managers and heads of who-knows-what are doing is inhuman. Like Barbara says they are employed to sit around in a cushy chair all day with the sole goal to ensure that no one else in that place sits eats or show any sign that they are human or have a mind of their own. They make their living of the misery of others, for example the maid agency charges the client $25/ person-hour but only pays the maids $6.65/hour, adding a generous $2/hour for cleaning supplies (which the maid are instructed to use scarcely) and gas, that amounts to under $10/hour as the cost. Even if we did bump it up that that company’s cost is $10/hour, the company is still making a generous profit of $15/hour per person! $15! How can this be possible? When their employees are earning barely enough to not enough money to feed themselves, when the employees cannot even scourge up $2 between a car load of them to buy something. This is just not right.

Alicia