Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

We need them, as they need us
In the United States, service jobs are essential to the community, but not enjoyed by everybody: the workers. Barbara Ehrenreich decided to live by herself a service-worker life. During the process, she wrote her article “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”, in which she tells us her discoveries and feelings about her new life. On the other hand, another writer, Sonia Nazario, wrote the article “Benefit and Burden”, in which she explains the good and bad facts about immigration. These writers basically write about two completely different topics, but there’s a point we can relate: immigrants are most of the service workers. In fact, instead of complaining so much about immigrants, we should realize how important they are in our lives. Without immigrants, there wouldn’t be service workers to please us.
In Ehrenreich’s adventure, we are able to see that even if the U.S. is called the “promise land”, not everyone can succeed. Living at low-wage is really difficult because the chances to get to a “‘living wage’ are about 97 to 1”(321) and when the author thinks about this, she states that “low-wage work is not a solution to poverty and possible not even to homelessness”(321). It must be really hard to be able to pull us out of a situation like this because even service workers are not requested a lot. Ehrenreich filled out
twenty applications in which she received no responses. So, we can say that a lot of people are living low-wage, and we don’t realize it because they seem so happy when they are serving us; it’s actually their job to do that.
I got really impressed when the author listed her service worker friends’ houses. They couldn’t live alone because the rent was too high; one of the girls had to conform to her roommate who hit her, just because she couldn’t make it alone. This is because they
were not earning the living wage that the National Coalition for the Homelessness...