Empoword

Additional Readings 451 “Our Town” from This American Life An inquiry-driven exploration of the effects of immigration on Albertville, Alabama. Listen to Part One of “Our Town” and Part Two of “Our Town” online. “The Unfinished Battle in the Capital of the Confederacy” from Code Switch A research-based investigation into the legacy of the confederacy, including monuments built in tribute 50 years after the Civil War. Listen to the podcast here. See pages 90-91 of Nickel and Dimed, book by Barbara Ehrenreich. 135 Excerpt: Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million- dollar condo … takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been “bleeding” onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the worldwide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall- themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat to clean it. Not that I … imagine that I am a member of that oppressed working class. My very ability to work tirelessly hour after hour is a product of decades of better-than- average medical care, a high-protein diet, and workouts in gyms that charge $400 or $500 a year. … But I will say this for myself: I have never employed a cleaning person or service.... [M]ostly I rejected the idea … because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being. ( In 1999, somewhere between 14 and 18 percent of households employed an outsider to do the cleaning and the numbers are rising dramatically. Mediamark research reports a 53 percent increase, between 1995 and 1999, in the number of households using a hired cleaner or service once a month or more…. )