Response To Rose S Ideas On Blue Collar Work

Respond to Rose’s ideas on blue-collar work. I read the article, “Blue-Collar Brilliance”, by Mike Rose, last night before going to sleep, and woke up thinking about it, which is why I chose this article out of all of the ones we have read so far. The author states how his mother “shaped her adult identity as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants” (Rose 202). This quote is what hit me the most because it shows how some people don’t have the opportunity to get a formal education, and as a result, they have to turn their identity into various jobs that they do throughout their lives. In fact, this is true for many people around the whole world who could not manage to get a degree, or in some cases, a High School diploma. Another component of the Rose reading which stood out to me was the fact that after Mike Rose watched his mother work; he “[understood] how much [his] mother’s kind of work demands of both body and brain” (Rose 203). Although his mother was a waitress, that quote can also be related to my job at Sears. A cashier at sears requires physical work because she/he has to go around to each department and make sure there are enough cashiers at each department as well as making sure no one needs a break. In addition, the body is needed to ring up the merchandise and press the buttons on the register. However, more importantly, a cashier has to use the brain even more in that he/she has to understand how cashiers respond and act. This is because each cashier at sears is expected to ask each customer if they would like to sign up for a Sears credit card. The way the customer responds to the question is what influences the way the casher asks the question next time. For instance, if the cashier brings up the interest rate of the credit card and the customer says “no” to the question right away, then next time, the cashier would ask the question a different way, make this time including the fact that there’s no annual fees to the card into the