Discuss and explore some specific aspect of each reading that made an impact on you

Narrative as a form of Social Inequality Wake-up Call The articles written by Sanders, Ehrenreich and Eighner all make references to issues and gender, which are not only manifest in their writing, but because they are using a ‘ personal narrative’ writing style, reflect their own lives and thus, serve as a legitimization of their professed convictions. Sanders’ ‘ The Men we Carry in our Minds’ highlights the social inequalities that arise from inter gender relations, while in the same manner, Ehreinreich details out the ‘ slave natured’ context of the laborer’s workplace and how people are dehumanized from the processes that are involved in the corporate world. As opposed from the rather passionate and confrontational tone that can be felt in the two aforementioned writings, Eighner takes a more sarcastic approach to defining the material conditions of the working poor, using the connotations of words that are associated with his ‘ work’ as a dumpster diver, with the intention of surfacing out the undermined harshness of poverty.
One can easily imagine that such rhetoric targets both the middle and upper class reader, in that it strikes the message regarding the painful reality that the working class people have to deal with on a daily basis. A business man, in the pursuit of establishing his industry, might be troubled by certain things, such as profit maximization and high taxes, which are all integral to his operations, but such things are absurd, in the perspective of low wage earner, a homeless man, or a disadvantaged woman, as told in the authors’ respective stories. To put in simple terms, an upper class man’s trouble becomes irrelevant, when we realize that some person’s trouble is in fact whether he or she will, let’s say, eat dinner tonight. The poor man’s rhetoric as expressed in these texts is supposedly a wake up call, but the reality is, society has a tendency to define life in accordance to their material conditions, and this operating mindset becomes the precursor to the ‘ taken-for-grantedness’ of the injustice that occurs within the way different social classes clash and interact (Momsen, 2004).
For Ehrenreich, you can quote the working conditions in Jerrys found in page 143-144:
The break room summarizes the whole situation: there in none, because there are no breaks in Jerrys. For six to eight hours in a row, you never sit except to pee.
The paragraph goes on to put more detail in the situation, so Your can but you can just add this quote I provided.
For Eighners sarcastic approach, you can quote page 157:
Dumpster diving is outdoor work, often surprisingly pleasant.
and
I think scavenging is the most modern form of self-reliance,. In any event, after ten years of government service, where everything is geared to the lowest common denominator, I find work that rewards initiative and effort refreshing.
These quotes refer to dumpster diving in a sarcastic tone because it refers to it as a better job, considering its difficulties and hazards.
References
Momsen, J. H. (2004). Gender and Development. London and New York: Routledge.