So I have been doing some research for my thesis, ok, well, a lot of research. A good deal of it has been through looking through blogs, on-line journals, media coverage like N.P.R., documentaries, and old fashioned talking to people. The most concise and clearly stated info that I have gotten is from listening/reading N.P.R. casts and talking with people. People feel that they can open up and talk to you when you just ask them how they feel and what they have faced. Some of the info becomes downright personal. For instance, one man was telling me that he had gotten divorced from his wife and had to move out while having to pay child support for two kids as he worked as a mechanic during the last recession. I can only imagine how hard that must have been. He was telling me about how hard it was just make ends meet for himself let alone cover everyone else who was dependent on him. This same individual was telling me about how he worked in one mechanic shop that told him to take the next day off because the owner had to close shop for the day for business purposes. Then he came in the following day only to find that the shop had been cleaned out. All his tools and equipment was gone. Which is difficult for mechanics. Especially since to get the job in the first place you have to have all your own tools. Sure he was able to buy more, but that meant that he was only getting a fraction of his normal wages since a large amount of his pay had to go to tool purchases. I have also talked with another mechanic that got so low on his luck that he was sleeping in his vehicle with his tools. Can you imagine what that's like? You need your tools to work, yet if you can get rid of them, then you have money to survive but no tools for your trade to get pay. The only work he was able to find for the longest time was "day jobs", where he would work on a single project as hired out temp labor and then be let go. That's how he survived just enough to get bye for the longest time. Thank goodness he finally obtained a full time job recently, so now he should no longer be struggling. But 2 1/2 years of that is a lot of stress on the value of self worth.
Looking at the N.P.R. casts, it was interesting to see just how far on the opposite ends of the self worth people can hold themselves. Some people wallow in their self petty. Others will pull themselves up by their boot straps and do whatever it takes to get work done to survive. In the end that's what it comes down to, survival. Looking at what people do in self defeatism mode was really interesting and sad. People just give up, they no longer can handle functioning because they become so stressed and buried under the weight of living to work and not even being able to fulfill that need. A large part of their anxiety is in being able to create or even see a positive future for themselves or even for their children. Questions like, can I make it through this, what will I do if there is no work, how will I pay my bills, what will I do once the creditors start calling, how am I going to feed my kids, how are my kids going to view me, how are other people going to view me, how will I give my children better opportunities then what I have, how will I be able to cover hospital expenses? These questions and many more are common for people. But think about it, what would it be like to be in someones shoes that doesn't even know if they will have enough money to eat the following day? That's where the weight truly sinks in. Sure there is always a sense of economic growth, but from what I have read, the trend is that there is a slow squeeze on the working class. There is a marginal gap that is ever growing between the haves and the have not's. What I mean is in regards to the cost of health care, retirement, Housing costs, mortgage loans, or credit in general, and the dreaded college debt. These items are what some would say define middle class living as seen as part's to it. The other for the trend is that the middle class of the middle class (if that makes sense to you, if not just follow me here)make just under $50,000.00 a year. Upper middle class makes above that and lower middle class makes around $32,000.00 annually. That may seem like a descent amount to live on or not depending on your individual view point. I can see either as a comfortable income. My wife and I live on $10,800.00 things are tight for us sure, but we live within our means and can afford some of the comforts that label us as blue collard even though we sit in the poor classification. And we do it without any subsidization like food stamps or any of that. The problem it seems starts for the middle class where they fall into the consumer culture and what it is that is socially deemed necessary. Like having a large house 3+ bedroom for a couple and multiple vehicles, buying the best and latest tech gadgets to show off status. trying to live outside of the means. People like to establish a set of guidelines where they feel is necessary for them to survive. Then they have to take out loans or credit cards or over extend their banking to obtain these goals, and are blind to the facts and the realities that face them. The economic trend that I have seen through my research is that the economic system functions in bubbles, by bubbles I mean that there is a market established, then there is a boom of growth for a period of time, the most recent one was the housing market. So post WWII there was an establishment to jump start the growth and development of a post war America, there was large loans and economic stimulus offered to vets. This system has been on a steady growth since and was fostered with growth once the baby boomers came to age, now they have all moved to retirement, and there was still growth in development, but the growth to people and job percentage became unstable. Then the proverbial bubble burst and prices fell through the floor, the growth died, and now the repercussions are maddening in looking at their long term effects. People had forgotten the old adage, "What goes up, must come down". So now people around the country are struggling with this reality, and everyone is saying to themselves, I should have seen this coming. It is amazing what people will do when they feel desperate to get the status of living that they want. People take out the balloon rates on houses thinking that they will be able to get their houses refinanced in the next 5 years of purchase, then when they are not able to, they end up crying wondering how this has happened to them. The thirst of pushing beyond our current status and trying to be more then what we are is the American Dream though. To move ever higher in the wealth ladder and be able to give to your children what you were not able to have yourself is the embodiment of this dream. But the price that has to be paid at times for this dream are sometimes over looked. It is a gamble for sure, and each individual has to weigh the value of that gamble for themselves. The fact tat I have read about people killing themselves over this gamble saddens me tremendously. I remember in high school being taught about balancing my checkbook and how to keep my living balanced, I wonder how so many people can quickly forget these ideas and work to live. I would think that the greater amount of the populous would not wish to classify themselves as the working poor. yet there is a sense of belonging that people have of being labeled as Blue Collard. It gives so much to the majority in terms of shared experience that creates a comfort that is good and bad all in the same breadth of time. From stories that I have that have a positive view on things. One of the most rewarding to see if people taking all these factors is of the Donnell family. They have a story on N.P.R. where they chose not only to live within their means but live within their needs(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130403866). That is a brilliant way of putting it I think. There does seem to be a large resurgence of the low wage work force. It can be seen as a bad thing, or it can be viewed as a good thing. We have moved away as a society from the traditional 1950's nuclear family where the mom stays home to take care of the families domicile needs, and the father works tirelessly and firmly for the family. Now it seems that more and more people are working part-time equally so that they can spend more time together and with their families. Jokingly this could be why the divorce rates are up, since you actually have to see your spouse more often then dinner time and sleep. But that aside it also develops a healthy communicative lifestyle. The downside is that most employers don't offer benefits to part-time employees, and a lot of employers like this idea since it limits their out of pocket spending on hiring packages. To boot, a lot of these part time jobs are low wage. So these low wage workforces it turns out have a 90% denial rate for workman's compensation (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130644732), denied overtime, and don't even make minimum wage. To think those that don't get the comp. are threatened with being fired if they try to get health assistance for work related injury. That is painful for someone that is struggling. Can't give up the job because you need it to survive, and you have to go to the doctor so you can physically survive. The violations of minimum wage comes from the aspect of flat rate pay jobs. So say you work as a salary manager for $30,000.00 annually, that's about $16 an hour at 40 hrs a week. Now I know people that make salary. I can tell you for a fact that every single one of those people that I know do not work only 40 hrs a week. Most of them can end up working double that time. When that happens they end up under the minimum wage. When you take into account the fact that they are salary and are not making overtime on those over hours, that's a loss of wages that is twice as much as they are making salary wise. Yet still people do it because they are hoping that they will move up the proverbial ladder. What a painstaking thought. I am just glad that in my industry even though there is a flat rate fee of pay for 12 hrs. if you go over those 12 hrs, no matter what, you are getting overtime. I like to feel safe in that notion. Yet I can see where people can like the flat rate of pay for salary for if they don't work the 40 hrs they still get pad as if they did. But the fact is companies don't like that idea. They want to get the most of their moneys worth out of every employee in an effort to squeeze every pennies worth of growth for stocks out of you. I guess though that if people wanted to really protest the system and change it they would, but people are to worried about loosing their jobs to act on their complaints about the working system here. They would rather put up with it then change and upset the status quo.
There is so much that we are afraid of and that we are faced with, it is beyond my ability to put it all in my thesis. But it is nice to see what is there in front of me as a reality so that I have a thorough understanding of what is there for a relation that is actual for my characters as apposed to plowing through a falsity that is unrelatable for the audience and the characters situations. I do not wish to make this a piece about pointing out each flaw that is in the system. I merely wish to show how the different sides of the most common shared experiences can and probably have been lived through. To shoot this in almost a documentary style to lend credibility to the false reality I am presenting is integral in conveying the stories and situations. If I can succeed in giving this info through the story and situations. Then I feel that the piece is successful. Already in what I have written I feel that the situations have succeeded.
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