Upper class versus working class

Upper class versus working class

Jonathan and Libia discuss the upper class and working class in this podcast.

Immigrants have a hard time getting jobs, too

Immigrants have a hard time getting jobs, too

In this podcast, Julio and Danny discuss their relatives' difficulty in getting jobs in the United States because they are immigrants.

Working at Home Depot

Christian and Jessie interview a worker at Home Depot.

Hellen's future

Hellen's future
In this podcast, Hellen discusses her hypothetical financial future after she graduates from college.

Hard times with only a high school diploma

Hard times with only a high school diploma
In this podcast, Henry F. and Robert C. interview Christopher, who has a high school diploma and is struggling to find a better-paying job.

The 99%

Jairo Zarate

         There has always been three demographics from which people in the United States are placed upon. The rich, poor, and middle class. Many people come to the United States to follow their dreams, and for a better tomorrow. But as time has past the American Dream has slowly been diminished and seems as though it is unreachable. The middle class is slowly being diminished from existence. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate.        

         Many people risk their lives to come to the United States, only to find that in the United States you must work twice as harder. Sure there is liberty and free of chaos, but when one comes to the United States, its nearly impossible to find a stable job. Especially now since corporations have been hiring people from third world countries that work just for a few dollars all day. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor workers over the last several decades, and the middle class Americans have greatly been impacted.

         Today 99% of all people in the United States, are either poor or in the middle class. And the rest, the 1%  of the United States are rich and manage more money that the 99% of people that work so hard to achieve the American Dream. Working class Americans hardly ever reach the 1%, all we can do is see them bathe in the riches that the working class worked so hard for them to acquire.

          As the middle class once was a stepping stone to get to the riches, now seems impossible to just walk across. One must now work extremely hard to even earn a quarter of what the 1% do. Everyday that passes by the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; eventually the middle class will merely be a memory of what once people thought was a fair living. 

Life of a low wage worker

By Jerry Reyes   

            Lately it’s been hard to find work in California. It’s even harder for immigrants to find work. Their lack of knowledge of this country and inexperience of many businesses forces them to look for low-wage work. Unfortunately a young man named Tomas Reyes, had to learn to live with these conditions.

            Tomas came here from a small town in Mexico with his brother Erasto. Their first few days didn’t go so well because they were lost for many hours with no food or rest. When they finally found their way to their friend’s apartment they found out that his apartment was more crowded than they thought. The small, two bedroom apartment housed an old lady named Dona Amelia, three of her sons (all over 30), and two of Tomas’s sisters. It was really crowded and many of the people had to sleep in the living room.

            After a couple days of rest, Tomas set out to find work. Unfortunately he didn’t find any work for two months. He did not have any papers so he couldn’t ask for work in places that required them. He was forced to wait in street corners with his brother and wait for work to come to him. Eventually an old white man came asking for help on finishing tiling his roof. Many of the people there ran at the opportunity for work. To Tomas’s surprise his brother and he were chosen to work. The man brought them to his house and explained what they needed to do. They worked for three days for five hours each day. The man fed them and gave them drinks each day that they worked for him. He paid Tomas and his brother $175 each.  This was his first pay in the United States.

            After a while he got tired of waiting for work to come to him, so he started looking for work somewhere else. He found a small laundry mat owned by an Asian lady. He was hired almost immediately. The work was simple and straightforward. All he had to do is iron suits but he to iron 25 of them every hour. He soon learned to hate the job, especially because the owner exploited him because he didn’t have any papers. He was only paid $3 an hour and was forced to do extra work for no pay. He decided to quit and look for another job with his brother.

Fortunately his brother had already made friends with a man who owned an auto shop and he convinced the owner to hire Tomas. Tomas was the new car painter’s assistant, but Tomas didn’t know the first thing about painting cars. This soon got on the others’ nerves and they began to dislike Tomas. Tomas did eventually learn the basics of car painting but that didn’t change the fact that his co-workers disliked him. Tomas was soon fired after his brother went back to Mexico.

Tomas didn’t find what he wanted in the United States so he returned to Mexico. He wasn’t ready to quit though. He vowed to himself that he would return soon.

Stealing From the Poor

By Ivan Guerrero

            Being poor is difficult. Having to live life from paycheck to paycheck with an unsteady job. especially in today’s economy where the unemployment rate is in an obscenely high state. The working poor have been targeted as a business by people whose intent is to become wealthy at the expense of those less fortunate.  With the invention of the payday loan, rent to own and other clever hidden taxes. It has become very expensive to stay broke.

Corporations created poverty taxes in which thousands of dollars can be made in extra fees. There are about twenty million Americans without bank accounts today, to cash their checks, they are force to attend small businesses and pay eight to three percent of their paycheck in the exchange. These people have ruined their credit by writing checks without funds. As a result, banks denied them checking accounts or loans. This created an opportunity for small businesses to increase their revenue by taking advantage of the lower class. It is like stealing from the poor.

Another way corporations steal from the poor is rent to own. Rent to own is an advertise scam that claims to be a great opportunity to buy commodities above your social status. It works by allowing people to take home big flat screen TV’s or Lazy Boy furniture as you pay it in small amounts over a few months. However, you end up paying $1,800 in weekly installments for the same television you could have bought for $900 if only you had a credit card. Cant afforded a TV? No problem, the rent to own store has many types from wide to flat screen, but you will end up paying an extra $900 for it.  

A small solution is to persuading people to save a small amount of money every week and wait until they saved enough to pay for the item they want in full. In this manner, they would save hundreds of dollars from interest. But ours is a fast-paced society that wants everything in a hurry and is unwilling to weight for it. That is great news for the rent to own businesses and for the payday lenders.

The payday lenders is a large business that is into making large and expensive loans against a person’s next social security check, unemployment check, and if employed paycheck. According to the LA Times people in Tennessee and Kentucky are charge “400 percent interest, but lenders in Missouri are allowed to charge a rate of 652 percent interest on the money they loan out. “ Currently there are not laws setting limits to the amount of interest they are allowed to charge. If a single mother of two kids takes out a loan of $1,000 she will be required to pay $5,000 back, four times more amount she borrowed.

When our founding fathers imagined this country, they did not imagine big corporations designing scams to rob money from the less fortunately. They imagined fairness and equality for all Americans. Payday loan, rent to own, and hidden taxes, are tools corporation used to rob money from poor people, who are not fully awarded they are being robed. On the other hand, they believed these options are convenient and helpful.