Just Another Job

This article brought an issue into the spotlight that I hadn't given any thought to. Personally I feel there isn't a need to hire a nanny to raise your own children or help to clean your house. If you can't clean your own house because it is too big or for other reasons then you shouldn't have purchased something you can't handle. I don't feel it is good enough if the only reason these people hire help is so they can spend their time not raising their kids or doing a little cleaning. Your house and children are your responsibility to take care of. I would feel embarrassed to have someone cleaning up my messes, handling my laundry, or being in my household 24/7. It would be an invasion of my privacy. The fact that these women are having to resort to such horrible conditions to take care of their family is heartbreaking.

In one of the blogs someone said that they had two immigrant workers who were actually professionals back home. Why would they move all the way over here, where they are unable to use their degrees'? To go from being a engineer to being a housekeeper just seems so disappointing. I know that if I went to school to be an engineer, I would want to be working as an engineer. Instead they moved to the U.S. where their work cannot transfer? I feel bad that they are unable to use they skills in which they posses from years of schooling.

Just a Job

The house that I stayed at in Poland had a lady who came in and cleaned every week. It made me uncomfortable when I was informed we would have to be out of the house all day, and then arrived back to find all of my things moved and reorganized to where I couldn’t find things. I never got the chance to meet the woman, but I imagine she was treated very well and paid fairly by my host family who happen to be very nice people. The article had some very appalling examples of racism and abuse which I could never imagine happening. Unfortunately, these sorts of things do happen in the U.S. If parents are unable to raise their own children or clean their own house, they should take classes or something before having kids or owning their own house to learn how to make their house a home, rather than subjecting immigrants to such labor. I would never hire someone else to do housework for me. There is a big difference between having an underpaid, illegal immigrant do backbreaking work 24/7 and having your best friend baby-sit for one night.

Just Another Job

I truly think it is sad how some of these domestic workers are not being treated fairly or even abused because their employer does not value them. Or sometimes the immigration troubles an individual might be having may indeed be solved by working in a household, however some employers might take advantage of them through bribing or fear. To me, working in a domestic household would be an especially precarious situation, especially if I didn't check it out first and became comfortable with the family. However, these women do not have the choice. The racist statements in this article took me aback...especially when one of the employers was remarking on the different workers she had hired...like the race of an individual determined their character, or their personality. I think that is so wrong. In some ways these women become so close to the children that they help raise, that the child in turn becomes closer to the au pair or the nanny rather than their own mother. But then, when that nanny or au pair gets fired by the employer, what happens to the relationship between them and the child? This whole thing is riddled with sadness...so I hope that something comes about that resolves the issues that these women are facing.

Just Another Job?

This article nicely summarizes some of my primary reasons for being against illegal immigration. Effectively these people are modern day slaves, subjected to all sorts of abuses by the client/host relationship they are stuck in because they have no documentation and little to no recourse with the authorities when they are here illegally and there are abuses against them. I have personally seen this in the construction field, illegal undocumented workers are treated extremely poorly by the companies which they work for, low pay, no benefits, hazardous working conditions and the ever present fear of deportation. I was working on a medium-rise mixed use building one day inspecting rebar and some concrete, all of the ironworkers that were placing the rebar were illegal undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico. They were all great guys and as I was the only inspector that could communicate directly with them I always worked with them. The highest paid worker on the job was getting paid $12/hour with no overtime, 20 minutes for lunch, and no breaks. In contrast, a union ironworker at the journeyman level is paid $32/hour with excellent benefits, mandatory breaks, retirement and a union system to prevent hazardous and unsafe working conditions. The illegal workers that I worked with were all deported one day at the job site towards the end of construction and union labor was brought in to finish the job. There was a lot of speculation in the industry as to whom had reported to illegal workers, but I heard from a reliable source that the owner of the building owed the illegal workers company a lot of money in back wages and reported them himself to avoid having to pay them and also to be able to say that his building was union built.

Just another job

The Commodification of Domestic Labor written by Bridget Anderson addresses an issue that effects a large number of people; immigrant domestic workers. I used to have housekeepers come to my house once a week. They were both from Russia. Both professionals back at home. My first housekeeper was an engineer but couldn't transfer work to the states so, on the side she also taught piano lessons. Eventually she got so busy that she referred her friend to me to work. The new housekeeper was a teacher back home but said she could never teach American children because they are so misbehaved and disrespectful.

These women were close to our family because they came once a week for 6 hours. They did dishes, laundry, cleaned bathrooms, washed the floors, washed windows and dusted. I kept in touch with them until they moved away. I'm not wealthy by any means but they were charging so little it seemed crazy not to have them helping out.

I feel like this is no longer a luxury but a necessity because our life as it is now, with women and men working and women mainly responsible for all the domestic duties in addition to working outside the home, housekeeping can suffer and who wants to live in a dirty house?

What is so sad in this story is how people treat some domestic workers poorly. I was shocked by the large numbers of women being regularly abused. I just can't understand why some people think they are better than other simply because they have more money.

Adaptive value of religious ritual

I generally do not see a value in modern day life to organized religion. Most modern religions, in my opinion, use the ancient strictures that may have once been an adaptive value to survival as a group, for their own enrichment. A particular instance I was reminded of when reading this article is a local church where the pastor and his wife lease new Mercedes every year, really?! Is this necessary? If I were inclined to be religious, and also inclined to attend this church this would disgust me.

Price of Progress

This reminds me of the same theme in the work by Jared Diamond and others in regards to our modern lifestyle vs a tribal and traditional lifestyle. So we can see that the foods we consider normal are just as bad for people who are not used to them as they are for people who are habituated to them. Is it right or wrong? Of course we wil all agree that doing these things to groups is wrong, yet what can we do about it? Not much. These multinational corporations are beholden to no one (ostensibly they are responsible to their stockholders) except the CEO's who are paid 1000 times the amount of the lowest paid worker, and this is in the USA! SO these multinational corporations are effectively becoming their own countries which are not bound by the same laws as the regular companies in a country and hold no allegance to any country.

Price of Progress

Would we be here if progress didn't happen? well probably but we would be living in the woods and forging for berries. Instead of reading about how humans have messed up everything, and blogging about it. With out progress we would not have IPhones or the Internet but we also would not have a hole in the ozone layer or global warming. The thing that amazed me about this article is that our health has gotten worse and we have bad teeth because of progress and the invention of agriculture. This article also ties into the movie we just watched on Africa and how most of Europe just crapped on its native people. I as a ignorant American had no idea what African history was about. I guess this is the price of progress, and I guess it is up to us and future generations to make progress a positive thing.

The Price is Right? Wrong!

Ok. Let me get this straight. Europeans have gone into tribal lands, taken away their traditions, changed their diets, introduced new diseases and cut down their forrests and now they are not better off?? NO WAY!! I would have no idea!
Hello. Obviously anytime you overtake a people (traditions, land, rituals, food, resources, etc.) you are practicing ethnocentrism at its finest. Nothing good can ever come of this. Wait, let me rephrase this. Nothing good for the majority of the world can come from this. For the power elite few, however, this is a dream come true for several reasons. First, they have drawn more people into their capitalism slavery machine. More people working their asses off to bring them more money while practically starving, trying to eek out a living off their weager wages. Second, they are driving tribal people off their lands to gain more property. Third, they are stealing their resources to use as they desire, in whatever way will suit them best. Lastly, they are simply killing them off with diseases previously unknown to them before the Europeans took over.
So, what we learn is this model:
1. Use your power to take over entire tribes.
2. Teach them how to make money for you.
3. Tax them to take back some of the money you have to give them for working for you.
4. Take their land for yourself.
5. Take their resources to do with as you wish.
6. Destroy their traditions at their very core so that it will be impossible in the future for them to band together and rise up against you.
7. After you have taken absolutely everything you can from them, rendering them useless, unleash some deadly diseases on them and get rid of them altogether.
8. Welcome any survivors to the world of progress.
Sound familiar?

Jennifer Lucero

Going along with someone else said about the killer disease, this is pretty scary stuff. With all the precautions we take to prevent illness, it could actually making things worse for us in the long run. What if there comes a point in time when all of our hand washing and whatnot doesn't work anymore? What if we all become immune to the vaccinations in which work now? This is all serious stuff that is a concern in our reality.

Price of Progress

Progress has a price. Personally, I would rather live in a jungle and forage for food without access to electronics. I hate how our society is dependant on technology to do everything these days. You can’t even register for college without creating about 15 different accounts and passwords and filling out hundreds of forms online. Whatever happened to in-person meetings? Another thing about progress that bothers me is how many different gadgets people have these days. It’s like everybody has to have an ipod and a laptop and 3 emails and an iphone, etc. ipods are nice, but a live concert is so much more valuable. Are standards of civilization are going down, and with it our health, because of agriculture. Easy access to food doesn’t mean access to quality food. Most of the stuff we get is processed junk. As regards the decline of our health, I can testify to that. My grandpa has about two real teeth left. The rest have fallen out or decayed because of the food he has had access to. If we were expected to gather our own food, we would take more care in eating healthy and natural food. We should have left Africa alone. They have got the idea on how to live. Why don’t we learn from them instead of trying to teach them our ways, which are clearly wrong?

The Price of Progress

I find articles like this one and the previous article about how we automatically assume that certain events in history were the best thing to happen to us while we ignore the negative effects. I find it interesting when people challenge what we believe to be common sense and have a real argument that makes clear sense. I may not agree with the authors, but I do admit to being entertained by what they have to say. This article like the article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" talked about things that I am familiar with and have heard of before. This makes it easier for me to understand and see their point. I am the most familiar with the argument about disease. I've heard that there are supervirus being created with all the chemicals we use to kill germs and disease. By using more and stronger antibacterial handwash we force bad germs to evolve into things that are resistant. Soon there will be supergerms that can't be killed by anything. Also I've heard that eventually obsesive handwashing with chemicals can lead to a weakening in a person's immune system. That can also lead to people being able to get sick easier even if they are infected by just a normal germ that a normal person would not be affected by. I'm not saying that its bad to wash your hands, but just don't go overboard.

Price of Progress

I think that no matter how you try to rationalize the progress of something it will always have its downfalls. This article show that very well. What is progress for one person is a disadvantage for another, its all perspective. With the growth of a society diseases will also grow and become more hazardous. People do not want to accept the fact that their idea of progress can harm others instead of bringing them a higher “standard of living”. Its like they all just forgot that there cant be a higher or upper class with a high standard of living without a lower class with a lower standard of living. Some places are indeed better off without our standards being imposed upon them.

The Price of Progress

I thought this article a very interesting read, especially considering all of the discussions we've been having about the affects progress has had on human kind. I think the most interesting part about this article was its description of the diseases; how migration of people and the progress made by modern medicine has actually created harsher, deadlier diseases than in the past. But I suppose that it also falls into the debate of the evolutionary processes or not. If you believe in uniformitarianism, then the same natural processes that went on millions of years ago, are going on today. So I guess you could say that those diseases would have grown and evolved anyway, except that they were fueled to an even faster rate of growth by industry and the progress of production.