The Luxuries of OUR world

I started working when I was seventeen as a hostess at Max n’ Erma’s, and still currently work there as a server. I started working because I had to. Had to because I wanted to enjoy having a cell phone and extra money to go shopping or any other carefree activity of my choosing. At times I thought life was so unfair because my parents wouldn’t pay for these things for me. I didn’t work as a means of survival or to escape my life. It seems petty to look at the things I viewed as misfortunes when comparing my life to other working-women around the world.

After reading the story of Claudia and her job in the factory, I could not imagine living that life. She was a teenage girl—typically thought to have no cares (in America at least), but doing all she could to get away. She works, hardly making a living to survive on, all so she can get away—to America perhaps. And why? Because all of the specialties and promises America offers.

When informing the reader of Gema, Claudia’s sister, Kirshner writes that living “poor, illegal, surrounded by gangs, with a boyfriend who writes to her from prison. Unable to cross into Mexico even to touch her mother’s hands, even for a funeral” is all worth it just to be in America (Kirshner, “Ciudad Juarez,” I Live Here). This is the strived for life and living conditions. The starting place is unfathomable if this is the dream.

This is only one insight to the awful treatments that some women face. I can’t imagine how some people live off of the earnings they make. A statistic that blew my mind while reading the IWS book was regarding a woman who worked for Nike. It is said that “Sadisah earns about fourteen cents an hour, raking in just under forty dollars each month by laboring sixty-plus-hour workweeks. Sadisah would only have to work an estimated 44,492 years to earn the twenty million dollars” Michael Jordan earned from his Nike endorsement (Ballinger, pp. 46-47, Harper’s). I can’t grasp that these stories aren’t uncommon. Everyone has heard this, but it still persists. It is a continuing pattern, in this case, of an athletics’ monopoly restricting the growth of a poorer group of women.

Women are different in America, and different around the world. Therefore, their needs and wants are different. This salary may or may not be acceptable, but the work is endured for a reason. It is a never-ending cycle where companies and classes put limits on an economically underdeveloped group.
These stories are all linked in that they are about women of color. These do not tell the stories of white, American women. It is the “unfit”, the poor, the mothers, and the labor intensive that continue to be held down. We enjoy the benefits that hold down these victims, because after all, they are but mere, dispensable lives. This is the harsh reality we are living in. How can you make a difference?