Our Way of Life

The rate of services is the average amount of required labor power needed to manufacture. In capitalism, workers are treated as commodities, in that we sell our labor power to the capitalists for a wage. Wages is needed to keep the worker and their family to survive. In our society today, trying to keep a family alive based on minimum wage is a lot more expensive than it is. Capitalists find ways to decrease wages, benefits and would move manufacture to a location with cheaper labor. This explains the countries where the cost of living is very low and labor protections are nonexistent.

            Take Bangladesh for example,

many of the garment workers do not have any labor laws, and even worst, child labor. Minimum wage is less than a $1. With low-wage workers trying to survive, David Harvey said “the basic struggle is still between capital and labor” (89). Nowadays, poverty line is increasing. I found an article from The New York Times by Annie Lowrey published in 2013 called Living on Minimum Wage. The article mentions on how increasing the wages could lift families above the poverty line. The article stated how President Obama made a raising minimum wage proposal but as you see, people are still trying to live off of minimum wage and the proposal has gone nowhere. Annie Lowrey made a good point that “it seems the minimum will stay where it is. Because of inflation, the minimum wage loses value over time if it is not bumped up”. I have to agree with Annie because even if the wages is still bumped up by a few cents, it doesn’t really do much in our society today. In order to provide necessities for your family, I believe it’s important to keep our family alive without living on minimum wage.

As for me, I am lucky to have my family help me pay with rent while living in Dekalb but I still have to work to pay off my own bills, transportation, food, and other expenses. I go home every weekend to work because trying to find a job in Dekalb is difficult and a minimum wage is not enough for me. With everything increasing nowadays, it’s hard for me to survive on $8.25. There are other people with families in the world struggling to survive, working long hours each and everyday and they probably never made more than minimum wage working at certain places in their life. Life is easier when you’re earning a descent living, but unlike most people, life is much harder living on minimum wage.

            In chapter 5 of The New Urban Sociology, I want to talk about the development of technology. “Technology became the means of growth” (114). Without technology, we wouldn’t have any running electricity/power, and the basic materials to support life. Since we weren’t able to see a video of Planet Money on Thursday’s presentation, I decided to go home and watch it. I thought this video was so interesting because today, with the use of technology, we can make cotton. The advances of technology is so high, there’s an app that shows where the tractor/picker drivers are. All the machines are automatic and the technology definitely has an impact to make cotton. Without machinery, there wouldn’t be a spinning factory to make shirts.

To get the fabrics of our shirts, the circular knitting machine is there to do so where they make yarn that turns into fabrics and with that, that’s how we are able to get our shirts. With the clothes I buy, I never realize where or how the shirts are being made. For me, I think it definitely taught me a lot of how things work and the advances that we have in our society today. Since it is the 20^th century, people did not have technology before. We as a society has become a technical world and the produce of technology will be even higher then before.

References:

NPR. (Dec 5^th 2013). ‪COTTON: Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt (Part I). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYa4zneKbeY

CNN. (May 6^th 2013). Trade rules and cheap Bangladeshi clothes. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKXdLIr4GtE

Lowrey, A. (June 15^th 2013). Living on Minimum Wage. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/15/business/living-on-minimum-wage.html

Gottdiener, M., Hutchison, R. & Ryan T. M., (2015). The New Urban Sociology – 5^th edition. Westview Press.