Reference no: EM133252354
Post your discussion comments. Comment on any part of the readings that you found interesting. What did you find compelling? What did you agree or disagree with? What made the reading selection effective, or why did it fail?
Ying and Yang of Work:
Why is work important? A full time employee generally spends approximately 8-9 hours per day in the workplace. Getting ready for work and transit time to and from work can take from 1-2 hours per day or more, depending on how long it take you to reach work from your home. If you are fortunate enough to get 8 hours or so of sleep per night, this means that you can easily spend 18 hours of a 24 hour day working or sleeping, leaving you only six hours to spend doing household chores and whatever activities you enjoy. All this is to say that you will spend far more hours at work with your co-workers than you will spend with your families and friends.
Also keep in mind that you don t necessarily get paid for work. Depending on how much housework you have to do (child-rearing, house-cleaning, cooking and laundry), it s quite possible that you will have virtually no time that is not spent sleeping or working; this is particularly true of single parents. All this is to say that working matters. How we feel about our work matters and how other people feel about our work matters.
It s easy to think of work as something that is timeless and unchanging, but this is not the case. The time-clock, for instance, is a fairly recent development. For most of human history, work has been dictated by the immediate needs of food, shelter, and water, guided by the length of the day and the weather. Today this is usually not the case.
Just as the nature of work changes through time, so too do our feelings about labor continue to evolve. This week s readings introduce you to a small selection of literary excerpts dating from ancient world, modern Europe, and the contemporary United States. Consider the themes present in the readings like gender, class, and religion. For your message-board entries this week, select one of the readings and explain how one of the above themes presents itself in the text.