2.00 A Day Reflection
Throughout chapters one to four from the book $2.00 A Day by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Schaefer, I could see a pattern about people trying to find a job and trying to maintain a job. They talk about how hard it is to find a job when they do not have any form of transportation and had to walk to their interview. Many dreamed about “a full-time job paying $13 and hour, a set schedule, and decent working conditions” (Edin and Schaefer,2015, p. 47). With this money they can see themselves having a nice apartment, supplies for their kids, food, and even a used car. When living on $2.00 a day, many have to be smart and turn to “public services like nation’s libraries, food-pantries, homeless shelters, and so on (Edin and Schaefer, 2015, p.99) in order to get things done. They rely on these services to find jobs or help their kids with school work.
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One person that stood out the most was Jennifer, who had two kids and was living in a shelter.
She was working for the city of Chicago cleaning condos. For awhile she was doing fine, even with the horrible working conditions she encountered. During the winter the conditions were terrible that she was consistently getting sick and had to ask for some days off. Sometimes she would go to work sick but her manager would send her back. She started noticing her hours declined and soon was forced to quite when her manager would not give her more hours. Her experience can be seen throughout the book because some many people fear getting sick or having difficult availability due to their kids or other unforeseen emergencies. Their experiences imply that to have a steady job one has to be willing to work through anything and take any shift that is given to them. This is difficult to do when people are not machines and do get sick and have kids that they are trying to look out
for.
In class on February 8th, we talked about how having difficult availability makes it hard to find a job. People feel the press to put down that they are available whenever, but in reality they are not. Also, when employers are told that the workers can not work at that time, they see how their hours decreased or sometimes forced to take on an extra shift when they are not able to. We talked about how sometimes employer abuse their power and make the employees feel like they are nothing and are consistently implying that the employees are easily replaceable.
One person that stood out the most was Jennifer, who had two kids and was living in a shelter.
She was working for the city of Chicago cleaning condos. For awhile she was doing fine, even with the horrible working conditions she encountered. During the winter the conditions were terrible that she was consistently getting sick and had to ask for some days off. Sometimes she would go to work sick but her manager would send her back. She started noticing her hours declined and soon was forced to quite when her manager would not give her more hours. Her experience can be seen throughout the book because some many people fear getting sick or having difficult availability due to their kids or other unforeseen emergencies. Their experiences imply that to have a steady job one has to be willing to work through anything and take any shift that is given to them. This is difficult to do when people are not machines and do get sick and have kids that they are trying to look out
for.
In class on February 8th, we talked about how having difficult availability makes it hard to find a job. People feel the press to put down that they are available whenever, but in reality they are not. Also, when employers are told that the workers can not work at that time, they see how their hours decreased or sometimes forced to take on an extra shift when they are not able to. We talked about how sometimes employer abuse their power and make the employees feel like they are nothing and are consistently implying that the employees are easily replaceable.