creator: Cammarota, Julio Juan
description- – This paper examines the cases of five fast-food managers, focusing on the challenges of mobility in the secondary job market and how the weekly time commitment of fifty to sixty hours of management work, which often extends workweeks to six days, places pressure on family life. Despite these challenges and time pressures, the fast-food managers remain positive about the firm and advancement possibilities within it. This paper takes up the question of why these managers would tolerate unfair labor conditions and remain reluctant to challenge the family/work "time bind" and money squeeze in which the firm has placed them (Hochschild 1997). Their primary responsibilities of making customers and workers happy and advocating the potential for advancement tend to repress grievances against the firm's intention of getting the most labor out of them for as little cost as possible. Bounded by the possibility of a promotion, managers are also averse to blaming the firm for exacting significant time costs in exchange for their higher salaries. The wait for potential possibilities urges them to offer present sacrifices for a future still unknown to them. They may talk about various financial challenges or time constraints and the toll these take on family life, but they fail to identify that the firm's low cost labor strategy is responsible for their difficulties and the delay in achieving a better life.
collectiondatepublishercreatorformat description- – This paper focuses on Latino youth who work as a way to participate in and contribute to the family economy. Based on forty in-depth interviews conducted with Latino youth in Oakland, California, this discussion examines working children in Latino immigrant families and the cultural and social aspects of their decision to help support the family. Research findings reveal children's participation in the family economy that contradicts the perception of children as totally dependent subjects and the ultimate objects of family care. Working children in immigrant families were active agents, earning and contributing to the family's welfare and wellbeing. Although the financial need was evident, parents in Latino immigrant families never directly required or demanded that their children work for the family's sake. Rather, the youths' motivations to work derived from a general culture of concern practiced and understood by many Latino families in this study. This culture of concern was based on a tradition of respect and reciprocity central to the collective survival strategies that Latinos have relied upon for generations. Although many families studied did cohere collectively for survival, there were critical gender differences among the youths' meanings for their financial contributions. Finances were a concern for both male and female youth in my research, but Latina (female) youth recognized that family financial problems were considerably weightier for their mothers because cultural traditions and social conditions tended to shift the burden of child rearing as well as financial support in their direction. Latino (male) youth were as tuned into financial problems, but rarely indicated how sexist oppression intensified the pressure their mothers endured while addressing these problems. Finally, because of a decrease in state support and increase in economic pressure, many children in these Latino immigrant families were participating in a "multiple earner" strategy necessary to remain at a basic subsistence level. Without an increase in state support and a general improvement in wages, immigrant children will continue to work for the family's survival instead of devoting this time and energy to studying or saving for college and ascending into the middle class.
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