Purpose – This assignment will develop further students’ abilities to assess and use the scholarship on the working-class, and will particularly challenge them to explore key questions in labour studies. To provide students with some direction in their research, the essay questions deal with subjects that are discussed at length in one of the articles in the coursepack. Hence doing an intensive examination of the arguments of labour scholars is also a key part of the assignment.
Assignment – Write an essay that answers one of the questions below. Your essay should draw upon the relevant material in your coursepack, plus THREE (3) other sources. Part of the evaluation will be the quality of the material you find, ie. its relevance, whether it is sufficiently scholarly, etc. Your essay will also be judged on how effectively you build and argument by taking a position and supporting it with the material from your research. You may bring American examples and scholars into your essay, if and when appropriate, but be aware that the American context is different that the Canadian one!
- “Pop culture pieces such as “Born in the U.S.A.” get a lot of attention, but in the end they tell us little about the problems of the working class in the 1970s and 1980s.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain your position.
- Choose one or two kinds of work that are good illustrations of emotional labour and the toll it takes on workers. Explain why you chose them.
- “What matters most about a job is how well workers are paid – focusing on precarious labour will tell us little.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain why or why not.
- Is it fair to say that the Duty to Accommodate offers effective protection to some groups of workers but not others? Explain your answer.
Citations: Citations and a bibliography are required. You can use either footnotes (numbers in the text) or references in brackets. If you use the latter, include the author, publication year, and page number– eg. (Carson, 2017, 214).
Plagiarism is a serious offence. Be sure that you know what it is. For your own protection, retain your rough work and a copy of your essay.
Length: 4 to 6 pages double-spaced (not including bibliography)
Those are the requirements, but I want to add that English is my second language, my English level is not high, so please write a little bit simple, not too complicated, college freshman level is good enough. Thx.
The “Cowie – Dead Man’s Town.pdf” might be helpful.