Write an essay answering ONE of the questions.(pick question #2)
Refer to at least 3 of the readings. (readings attached on file "3 article")
Use specific examples/quotes from these readings.
Read the Precariat and Basic Income then read other 3 article then write 3 page essay about these 4 article. Please quote them when you writing about that articles.
The Economics of Agriculture This week we are looking at agricultural labor, the labor that was typical of society before the industrial revolution. What I'd like to show you is that agricultural labor has been both romanticized and criticized. The Dodge commercial, featuring Paul Harvey reading his own words on "So God Made a Farmer," conflates agricultural labor with religious piety, national pride, and, strangely enough, consumerism. Have you ever worked on a farm? The work is difficult and must be done every day. It is physically demanding and requires the farmer to be up before dawn most days. There is little in the way of leisure time during the growing season. Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd President of the United States and a former Secretary of State to the first President, George Washington) saw the yeoman farmer, working on his own farm, providing for his own family, as the ideal citizen. He imagined America as a country full of yeoman farmers, working for their own sustenance, free of overly intrusive government or urban society. However, Jefferson's vision had problems, problems pointed out in "Cabinet Battle #1" from the hit musical Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the song, Jefferson claims that Virginia owes its economic success to agriculture, and he denigrates the New York world of finance and banking. Hamilton points out that Virginia's success in agriculture comes because of one crucial fact: much of the farm and plantation work in the South is performed by enslaved people. The factors that led to the common practice of slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War are multiple and various, but for the sake of discussion, we will focus on one economic factor and its socio-cultural consequences. In a land of yeoman farmers, families would make up the primary laborers on their own family farms. But capitalism and agricultural entrepreneurship led to larger farms, larger plantations, and thus the need for more and more labor. That labor need was satisfied early on in colonial America through the use of indentured servants. Indentured servants were recruited in Europe and offered a deal: an indentured servant would work for a period of time, usually seven years, for his or her master, and in return s/he would receive passage to America and, after the indenture was complete, some land. Early African people who were brought to America served as indentured servants at first, but by the mid 1600s, laws in Virginia and other southern states evolved to create a new status for Africans: chattel slavery. Enslaved Africans became slaves for life, and any children born to enslaved women were born into slavery. This change in legal status of African people helped the plantation economy grow, especially as cotton became more easy to grow, harvest, and process, especially with the invention of the cotton gin. The movie "12 Years a Slave," directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a powerful depiction of the ugly reality of slavery. It shows a few significant effects of enslaving people: 1. Although slaveholders saw themselves as religious Christian men, they used selected portions of the Bible to justify enslavement of black people. 2. Dehumanization, in the form of psychological and physical abuse as well as the refusal to teach enslaved people how to read, was a crucial component in the system of slavery because it meant that enslaved people could be seen merely as labor, not as human beings. 3. The labor of enslaved people was attached to specific economic value. In the scene I have asked you to watch, the men and women who pick cotton are evaluated in terms of the number of pounds they have picked. They are in a terrible situation. If they pick more than their usual amount, the overseers will expect them to keep picking that same amount. If they pick less, they will be whipped. While Harvey suggests that we see the romantic, idealized view of agricultural labor, McQueen reminds us that agriculture is a business. Hamlin Garland also called attention to the exploitation of farm labor in "Under The Lion's Paw," in which he depicts a young family who work hard to improve the farm they rent. Unfortunately, they are victimized by a land speculator who has taken advantage of their labor to increase his own wealth. The Measuring of Time In the opening pages of Studs Terkel’s Working, there is an epigram from William Faulkner who wrote, “You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day- all you can do for eight hours is work” (qtd. in Terkel x). Time and work are always linked, and that link is an important element of the some work literature. These time images allow us to understand more completely various visions of work and how the worker finds his or her place in the working hours of the working day. Industrial work is arduous eight-hour shift work that segments the day. Given the difficult hours of work and because some writers are returning to those hours over a lifetime of distance, it is important to understand how time functions in his work memories. The use of the language of time allows the reader to appreciate the aspects of that working life. Historians have often traced the importance of the rise of the clock for the modern world. Daniel Boorstin narrates its evolution, in The Discoverers, from “sun time to clock time” (26) with the important moments emerging in the seventeenth century, when the clock’s function moved from religious functions to public ones (26-78). From then, the rise of industrialization enhanced the use of “the artificial hour, the clock-marked hour,” which “became the constant regimen for everyone” (73). Sebastian de Grazia further explains that “[o]ver the span of […] several centuries, the seventeenth to the nineteenth, a new conception of time developed and spread over the industrial world, going hand in hand with the modern idea of work” (305). Jeremy Rifkin, author of Time Wars, comments, “Without the clock, industrial life would not have been possible. The clock conditioned the human mind to perceive time as external, autonomous, continuous […] Time was snatched away from its biological and environmental moorings and locked up inside the gears of an automated machine that now parceled it out in steady, nondescript beats” (103). Making time measurable led to “the idea that one was selling time as well as, or rather than, skill” (de Grazia 305). The quantifiable nature of time put the clock in a central place of factory life. The Story So Far I feel as though I've been telling you a story throughout this course, and we're getting to the end of one arc. The first part of the course focused on a very simple idea that most, if not all of us share: that if you work hard, you will find success. The movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" epitomizes this belief. I wanted to explore where that idea comes from, and I hope you realize that it comes from a lot of complicated background, including religious beliefs and the rise of industrial capitalism. The second part of the arc is about the upsides and downsides of the Industrial Revolution. The positives are clear: a booming American economy and the rise of cities. Unfortunately, industrial capitalism came with some downsides. In the rush to make money and find financial success, a lot of people who benefited exploited people who did not. How did that exploitation manifest itself? · In chattel slavery of African Americans · In scientific management practices that sped up work processes to the point that they increased stress on workers and made for dangerous conditions. · In assembly lines that reduced the pleasure of doing good work and instead promoted repetition and mindless unskilled labor. The final part of the arc is about resistance and change. Workers have resisted their managers for a long time, but what we know as strikes became more prominent in American history in the late 1800s. See, there's a problem with bringing workers together to do industrial work: They get to know each other. They depend on each other. They talk to each other. It is inevitable that collection action results. We saw this with the Mill Girls in the 1830s and 1840s. And we saw it in factories, mines, steel mills, construction sites, Pullman cars on trains, and many other workplaces in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was the era of increased unionization. You can look at any newspaper in a big city in the early 1900s and see articles about strikes. In fact, go to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and look at the headlines of this newspaper 100 years ago. You will see several articles just about every week on strikes happening throughout New York City and throughout the country. As noted in the cartoon portion of "Mill Times," workers realized that collectively they had more power than they did as individuals. The first national union was formed in the US in 1866. Several other groups of workers also organized: miners, railroad workers, iron and steel workers, textile workers in the north and the south, and so on. Socialists, influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, came to the United States and organized labor, the most prominent of which was Eugene Debs. Why did workers strike? We generally think of workers as striking for higher wages and benefits, and this is often and has often been the case. But the case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire calls attention to another aspect of collective action/strikes/unions: workplace safety. Workplace safety was a significant motivation for many workers who went on strike. Miners were among the most active workforces to go on strike. Mining is dangerous work, and safety measures are often expensive to the employers. As we saw from Taylor's work on scientific management, the faster the workers work, the more product they produce, and the higher the profits. Another issue on the table was the role of the government. Imagine the process of labor relations as a power struggle. One worker vs one owner is not a fair fight; the owner has the power over one worker. But several/all workers have power, and their power can provide them with enough power to negotiate with the owner. What happened is that rather than working within this balance of power, the owners called upon the government to step in and shift the power back to the owners. The government didn't just use laws and courts; they provided muscle from law enforcement. Police were called in to bust up strikes and make sure workers went back to work. Interestingly, this was the case with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Workers in the years before the fire. The Triangle workers, mainly immigrant women, would go on