Sometimes our judgment is clouded by money. Sometimes we want money so bad that we're willing to degrade ourselves just to get it. The selection I've chosen was an excerpt from the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and in this excerpt my eyes were opened to all the wrong doings in corporate America. The concepts that this section touch on are conflict theory, functionalism and feminism theory. Reading this, I've found many concepts that can correlate but the main concepts I'll touch on are listed above. .
Conflict theory is an approach that examines how and why groups disagree, struggle over power, and compete for scarce resources (such as property, wealth and prestige). Day by day citizens of the United States of America go and try to obtain what they think is the American dream. Every day they work, work just to make an honest living or in some cases work to provide and do the very best they can to take care and maintain for their family. People at the top of corporations will always have the power because they have the money and they know that people need money. In the excerpt, she mentioned something about Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a privately owned company worth billions of dollars, yet they pay their employees minimum wage. "Wal-Mart has a number of more impersonal and probably more effective ways of getting its workers to feel like "associates." There was the profit-sharing plan with Walmart's stock prices posted daily in a prominent spot near the break room" (Ehrenreich,208).
Although they have "effective ways" of making their employees feel like "associates", they've found a way to subliminally make their employees "new slaves" by making sure that they did not reach the 40 hours mark so that they won't have to supply benefits. If you're nearing the 40 hour mark, they'll send you home and you won't be able to come in until the next pay period.
