Barbara Ehrenreich And Lapham Summary

Barbara Ehrenreich and Lewis Lapham asked themselves how anyone lives on the wages available to the unskilled. (Introduction: Getting Ready) Roughly four million women were about to taken off welfare reform programs to get jobs that paid $6 to $7 an hour; how will they survive? Barbara wanted to see how the 5 division of Dennis Gilbert and Joseph A. Kahl’s (1993) 6 part class structure handled everyday life without government assistance that she left her regular job and sat out on the journey. Although she has a PH.D in biology, she took the role of a sociologist and invested time, energy, and other resources to take the scientific approach of empirical substantiation. The rules that she set for herself were comparable to the real life struggles and decisions that her coworkers, the working class, faced on a daily basis. I believe the nomothetic question asked in the beginning gave way to ideographic explanations to how and why the working class do what they do and the means to do it. I also don’t
While Barbara worked in Maine as a maid she noticed how convenience store clerks, who made $.65 less than she made an hour, look at her and her coworkers as if they were beneath them. Another example of this was when she stated that everywhere she went people looked at the uniform and instantly regarded her and her coworkers as lower class citizens. People saw there green and yellow uniforms like the white and black stripes of a convict and that their style of life isn’t as good as people in their social class. One particular instance when she bought a beer from the grocery store she could feel the cold stares that implied that the reason she had that maid job was because all her money was going to support her alcohol habit; even though Barbara has a PH.D and probably made more money than many of them all they saw was a lower class