Social Class and Work

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Stud Terkel's book, "Working," which discusses the lives of American workers, the work that they do and their work's repercussions in their personal lives. The paper delves into the participation of women in the labor force and it also focuses on the workers' group in general and how they find ways in which to give invaluable meaning to their work by viewing their work as a contribution to their society.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Women in the Labor Force
Producing Something: Workers Making Sense of their Work Lives
Summary: Disenfranchisement of Specific Sectors in American Society

From the Paper:

"These passages from workers in America highlights the responses disenfranchised workers have adopted in order to alleviate or escape the state of marginalization they feel within the society. The first response is to "make sense" of their reality as a worker, justifying their worth not through quantitative, but through qualitative means, on how they have produced work that is considered important or valuable to American society. However, a more radical response adopted by most workers today is the path towards self-realization and -acceptance, using reality as their way of alleviating their disenfranchisement. That is, by accepting that they are parts of the whole economic machinery of capitalist America, they are able to perceive their work and themselves (as workers) as parts of a whole, but not necessarily "romanticizing" this notion as equivalent to 'contributing something important to society.'"

Sample of Sources Used:

• Houseman, S. and M. Osawa. (2003). Nonstandard work in developed economies : causes and consequences. Michigan: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
• Terkel, S. (1985). Working : people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. NY: Pantheon Books.
• Thiessen, V. (2002). "The social distribution of youth's images of work." Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 39, Issue 1.

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