Final Paper- Writing #3

It is the day before my paper is due and I am planing on spending the entire day making it the best it can be. I have a few concerns such as making sure that I have a nice amount of varied sources, not being redundant in the points I am trying to make, and coming up with a real way to solve the problem that I am talking about in my essay. I figured by spending the day in the library working on this essay, that will give me easy access to many more sources, which will make my paper stronger. Having these sources may give me new ideas to write about, which will also keep my paper from repeating itself. I know I had this problem in my first draft, which I hope that I have fixed already. Finally, solving this problem will take a bit more thinking, but hopefully with the help of different sources, ideas will come to me while I am working. I feel like this paper is on a interesting topic, so I have enjoyed working on it!

Evil Corporations

When I started to read the first chapter of The Corporation I had a little background from my sociology class and from seeing the documentary that closely follows the book. Although the corporations exploit workers and seem to have all of their priorities messed up to the public eye, it might just be that they are seen in a negative light.

Corporations take a lot of heat for outsourcing their employment to countries where they don't have to pay minimum wage, give health benefits, follow child labor laws, or many other rules that are placed upon businesses in America. They break the law constantly with such things as risking peoples lives in cars to save money on building the automobile. This makes the corporation seem like this evil being that has no regard to the scarcity of human life.

A corporation is a legal person and as that 'person' it might be categorized as a psychopath, but there are real people behind the scenes who care about the same things we do, and don't always like the way that the company they work for is heading either. CEOs of companies like Shell Gas might care quiet a bit about the health of the environment and pollution, but because they work for a company that takes blame for the depleting O-Zone layer, they are marked as being insensitive. Also, companies outsource to keep prices down in our country too. It isn't just to help them and make more money. If all of the factories were here, they would have to pay all their workers around $7.50 and hour plus benefits along with many other factors. This would make the prices in our grocery stores sky rocket.

There are so many factors that go into looking at the corporation and how it functions in society. So much of it is seen as negative, because much of it is, but like most things, there is a reason it occurs.

And Society Continues to Change

I feel like the same ideas were running through both the articles "Value-Free" by John B. Judis and "The Creative Class" by Richard Florida. Both discuss society, how it is changing, and how it effects the common person. This seems to be the trend in the reading for the past week or so. The concept of Taylorism was brought up in the Judis reading, where the employees are directed to say only specific things. This allows the employers to closley moniter their working and guest satisfaction.

In the Florida reading, a new class, the Creative Class, was discussed. According to Judis this class is being created by "sifts in values, norms, and attitudes" (Florida 36). The members of this class are creative and intelligent. They value individuality, diversity and openness. This class is being created do to the changing vaules of society. They are blending past ideas with new ones and keeping our society moving forward.

I feel like many people in my generation would be part of this new Creative Class, because we have many new innovative ideas and grew up in the age of technology. I have seen many people with strong opinions at younger ages, and being much more determined to accomplish things. It would appear that this class is full of people who want to make a change in the world. They have strong ambitions, focus more on the good then on the money, and want to make a difference. That is something that more of the world should be involved in!

STRESSED!!

I related most with the article "High-Tech Stress" by Jeremy Rifkin where he discussed how so many workers, especially those in countries like Japan, the employees in factories are facing terrible conditions. They are being forced to make products much more quickly so the companies can make more money. Devices are being designed to put pressure on the workers to spend less time assembling parts, talking to customers, or taking orders at fast food restaurants. Workers will start experiencing "burn out" where they have worked so hard for so long they become chronically fatigued and have to take off work. I feel like there should be limitations on working so that they body is not so worn down from work. Situations like that can take years off of a life, or even be the cause of death. So many more work place injuries or deaths could occur because the employees are exhausted and not able to concentrate as much.

Part of my work experience for the past few years can attest to this. There was constant pressure on us to make the burritos a certain size so we don't loose money and to be able to make them in under a minute, while still being friendly with the customers. On a slow day we would even be timed, and they would only keep the fastest employees on the line. The other workers were to be in the back making food or working the cash register. It is incredibly draining, and my situation wasn't nearly as bad as those in factories across the world.

Why can't you remember to say 'Thank You'?

When reading these two articles: "Scripted Talk" by Adria Scharf and "On the Front Lines of the Service Sector" by Stuart Tannock, I was pretty sure it was written about my life. Many of the things that were said became reminiscent of the memoir that I just wrote.

In "Scripted Talk" Scharf discussed how each business has a specific way that the employees are to communicate with the customers (mostly those who worked in businesses like fast food). When I worked at the water park making burritos, we were to ask how the customer was doing, if they were having fun at the park, and then take their order. When working register is was necessary to say "Thank You" when they left. If you wanted to add a "have a nice day" or something at the end, that was fine, but "Thank You" must be said. In the mornings we would have meeting and the managers would always bring up that we aren't thanking the customers, and it really shouldn't be difficult to remember. We also had secret shoppers, who were discussed in those morning meeting too. The managers told us what to look for in a secret shopper so we could try and spot them, like how they ask a lot of questions and look around the stand more then a normal customer would. Scharf was right in all that she wrote. The fast-food industry is designed to have specific conversations with customers to sound polite, but not waste anytime in taking their money.

The article "On the Front Lines of the Service Sector" by Stuart Tannock, it was discussed that the jobs in fast-food and grocery are high stress, low status, and low wages. This is SO true! Customers will yell at you and tell you that you are too slow, when working a job like that is a huge juggling act. All of those jobs are so much more complicated then it looks like from the outsiders perspective.

I know from working in a business like that for two years, I have a lot more respect for those working in any restaurant or food industry.

Can what happened over 100 years ago really be the cause of problems today?

When reading the article "Technology Versus African Americans" by Anthoney Walton part of me couldn't help but become agraviated. The piece opens up talking about a man who has started a business that design and constructs web sites and how this business is well suited for African Americans. I found that to be great and how they adressed it being a good thing for high school aged students to get involved in. However, I found it agraviating when the author started explaining why it is so hard for African American's to advance in the society.

A good chunk in the middle of the article was devoted to talking about the past of African Americans, and how they have delt with slavery and difficulties for the past 400 years. This however, made it feel like more of and excuse that "Blacks make up 13 percent of the population i htis country, yet in 1995 they earned a shockinly low 1.8% of the Ph.D.s conferred in computer science, 2.1% of those in engineering, 1.5% in the physical sciences, and 0.6% in mathematices" (103). He also makes sure to state that "blacks have traditionally been poorly educated-look at the crisis in urban public schools- ad deprived of the sorts of opportunities that create the vision mecessary for technological ambition" (102). I sit here and question why it is just the black people of the urban communities that are deprived of the good education. There are many white people and those of various other races that live in areas like that also, where they might not recieve the best education and will also suffer from it. There is another passage in the article that also sounds like exuses are being made: "Poor whites, non-black Hispanics, and Asians were not dragged from their native lands to work as slaves and then buffeted for hundres of years by the vagaries of technology and an ecomony that they did not control" (99). These all seem to be an excuse to me as to why they have not been able to advance as far as some of them could have wished. This may seem to be awful, but it was hundreds of years ago and the world has advanced so much since the time of slavery. Although there is still discrimination, and unfortunaly always will be, it can't be an excuse for how the the black community is advance in 2009, almost 2010.

Although there were some excelent points made, and I agree with portions of the article, the tone of how it was written doesn't appeal to me.

Different Worlds

I found the most interesting part of this essay, Getting Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman, to be how different the writer thought from everyone else. Not going to lie, I was rather confused for the first few pages of this essay. They way the author talking in the language of her field, I just didn't understand it. I knew what was going on for the most part, that they were creating a system for filing information about people with AIDS, but the detail of what they were doing flew over my head. However, when Ullman sat down with the actually people to discuss it, was when the essay got interesting. She had to keep slowing down her thought process in order to communicate with the users. Her mind worked on a more

technical level, while everyone else in the room worked on a more socially aware level.

This is kind of like comparing different areas of work, or even just majors when in college. We are all learning different things and can talk in different "languages" depending on what discourse community we are in. We operate in different ways and speak differently on if we are with those in our major compared to our roommates which can be compared to student activities that we participate in.