Questions on Worker Problems

Reading Questions

What's the sociological imagination and how does it relate to work>

What's the cultural division of labor? Which groups get which jobs?

How extensively have affirmative action plans been? What's the evidence for this?

Which blacks have benefitted the most from this policy? Which the least?

What accounts for the white backlash against affirmative action?

What's an example of an informal form of recruitment? Why could this be considered discriminatory?

In general, what are subjective screening criteria? Examples?

What's the "Catch 22" faced by women in some managerial and professional occupations?

Given certain stereotypical assumptions about women (your text refers to this as "statistical discrimination"), why could being a married or single woman both be construed as an impediment to promotion (see the box on page 122)?

Why is the gender-typing of occupations a disadvantage to women?

What are the reasons for the kind of gender-based occupational segregation that typically operates as a disadvantage to women workers?

How much less do blacks and women make when compared to whites and men?

Why do raises, promotions, and job opportunities that rest on seniority often represent a disadvantage to minorities?

Although minorities and women both experience work-related discrimination, what special problems confront women?

What's comparable worth discrimination and its remedy?

What criteria are used in these job evaluations?

What percentage of pay difference between men and women would be eliminated with the general application of comparable worth evaluations and abutments.

What percentage of all women workers experience either moderate or severe levels of sexual harassment?

Which women are the most likely to be targets os sexual harassment?

What does the unemployment rate measure? More specifically, what's frictional, structural, and cyclical unemployment?

18. Why is the official unemployment rate an underestimate? How much of an underestimate?

What are the health/behavioral consequences of layoffs? What consequences for the larger community?

Approximately what percentage of unemployed workers receive unemployment compensation at any one given time?

What's inadequate work, and what are some of its sources?

What's the biggest factor contributing to inadequate work? What percentage of jobs are full time? What percentage of jobs are full-time?

What's the current status of safety at the work place?

What are some common work-related injuries?

In what industry are workers least protected legally?

Why are occupational diseases so under-reported? How many go unreported?

Why is the high technology-electronic work place so hazardous?

How effective is OSHA in preventing work place injury and illness?

What are some sources of work place stress? What are some consequences of this stress?

What's the estimated yearly cost of job stress?

Class Questions

29. What kind of jobs would be considered semi-and unskilled?

30. In what ways are these jobs "hard"?

31. What are some examples of the authoritarian supervisory styles these workers are regular

ly subjected to? What's a direct order?

32. How has OSHA enforcement changed in recent years?

What's de-industrialization, its historical development, and its causes?

What's contingent work, its incidence, and its effect?

35. Why do young, working class high school graduates (or dropouts) find these jobs hard to resist? To escape? To be "promoted" from?

36. What's the high school tracking system and what are the consequences for insecure and problematic work?

37. With reference to Marx's view of alienation:

a. What's the difference between work and labor?

b. What's: expropriation, ideology, false consciousness?

38. In terms of Blauner's revision of Marx's view of alienation, What are, examples of, and findings about:

a. Powerlessness?

b. Meaninglessness?

c. Social isolation?

d. Self estrangement?

39. If work is so bad, how and why do workers put up with it as well as they do? More specifically, what of:

a. The work group

b. The instrumental approach to work

c. The "ivory tower bias"?

What's institutional discrimination? Examples?

What's affirmative action? (see reading question #3)? What are some of the arguments for and against affirmative action?

Questions on the Video, "Minimum Wages"

1. What's been Milwaukee's recent experience with job creation? What are the problems associated with these jobs?

2. Where have the manufacturing jobs gone? What are someof the specific kinds of jobs in the service sector that have replace them?

3. Why was Steve happy that he hadn't started a family? What relevance, if any, does this have for high rates of illegitimacy in this country?

4. What's so ironic about Fred Stratton being such a big promoter of the Milwaukee community?

5. How did Tony's successful retraining course help?

6. Keeping Tony and Terry in mind, what kinds of strains on marriage does de-industrialization bring?

7. What percent of the population receive food aid

8. As indicated above, why are unemployment rates potentially misleading? since 1980, what has been the change in median income in the Milwaukee area?

9. What's the argument that de-ndustrialization is necessary for reasons of economic competition? What's a counter to the argument made by one Milwaukee employer that what's needed is simply more productivity?

10. What were the strengths of the Black family that helped them manage the long term underemployment of both spouses?

11. What about the idea that if you simply work hard enough you can make it in this land of opportunity?

12. What's happened to the health benefits of American workers?

13. In that portion of the tape that describe the program of re-training minority workers for the Steeltech plant, what can be said about the effectiveness of this training program?

14. What's the general picture of working society provided by this tape?