“He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning.” The promise of reward for all the hard work and extra hours is wasted on a shortened life barely lived. Every day turned into a blur, barely distinguished from the next. In “The Company Man” by Ellen Goodman, she used a variety of rhetorical devices to tell how she feels Phil, and other working class Americans, work too hard and end up sacrificing their lives, hobbies, and families for a chance at success and how the ideology of big companies ruin the lives of their own.…
In the essay “Serving in Florida,” Barbara Ehrenreich records managers being the “class enemy” and how low level jobs are inadequate in terms of pay. She states that most managers and assistant managers were prior underdog employees of the restaurant business and they are only there to make the big bucks for corporations. Ehrenreich bemoans how managers are the “class enemy”; for instance, they never allow servers to take a one second break but the manager’s just sit down all the time and don’t do their actual job. She also states the fact servers will have to attend mandatory meetings, and the managers threaten the servers to have their rights be taken away including lockers, breaks, and the managers rifling through their belongings without personal consent. Not only is management a problem, but the low-income is far from a comfortable living situation. The author seeks her own survey among her fellow co-workers about where they live, some in cars because they cannot afford to live in a hotel/home, and are living in nearby hotels because the gas to drive to their job is just too expensive. She defends “It strikes me, in my middle-class solipsism, that there is gross improvidence in some of these arrangements,” and she points out that she is shocked for the fact no body plans for their future. Ehrenreich finds a second job at Jerry’s to take on so she doesn’t find herself not having a place to live, nor gas to drive, or food to eat. Ehrenreich gives examples of how to deal with exhaustions management and tells herself “Ideally, at some point you enter what serves call a “rhythm” and psychologists term a “flow state,” where signals pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a Zen-like emptiness sets in.”, while being undercover as a server in a minimum wage…
Also, in this job, his or her goals should be easily achievable and unstressful. In order to achieve this goal, a person must find a beneficial range of determination. If a person is too hardworking, it is can have a disastrous effect on themselves and their family, such as the main character, Phil, in “The Company Man.” He was an overweight, workaholic and was a fifty-one-year-old vice president, who hardly spent time doing anything but work. His wife, Helen, felt that her husband’s work life completely took over his personal life too since she already missed him before he passed away.…
Happiness is defined as 1 a state of well-being and contentment/ a pleasurable or satisfying experience. In this paper I will discuss the importance of happiness in the work place and what factors can in fact improve profits, and general satisfaction within the employees and customers. The mission of this paper is to inspire people to transform their workplace to a happy environment in times of austerity. Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA once said 2 “Work should always be fun for all colleagues. We all only have one life. A third of life is work. Without desire and fun, work becomes hell." Whats going on? About one fifth of American workers suffer from dealing with bad jobs, low wages, almost no benefits, constant changing schedules and little opportunities for advancement. This is because most companies believe that paying employees more will not increase profits within the company. Since labor is a controllable expense and can count for 10% of revenues, most people see that labor is a costly aspect of the business (rather than a sales driver) and therefore focus on minimizing its costs. In retail for example, regularly there’s an evaluation of store managers on whether they meet monthly (or weekly) objectives. This happens because a percentage of sales goes to the it’s employees. And yet, these managers don’t have much control over sales. For example, the store managers are almost never expected to make decisions on merchandise mix, layout, price, or promotions. So when sales decrease, the immediate response is to reduce the staff.…