Posted: February 25th, 2016

• Employers treat workers unfairly in order to increase profits, and constantly look for and find new ways to cut labor costs. (Marx)

Attached are five articles from the New York Times reporting on corporate/employer treatment of factory and low pay workers, the workers’ responses to how they are treated, and the impact on their lives. The first two articles discuss a strike at Mott’s Apple Juice Co. (a division of Dr. Pepper); the third article reports on “temporary” warehouse workers; the fourth details findings on employers cheating workers in various ways; the fifth documents the working conditions of Mexican workers in New York City.
The assignment is to analyze the information and evidence in the articles according to either Marx’s or Durkheim’s theory, or some relevant part of it, and write a 5 page essay explaining your analysis – both the theory you are drawing on, and how it is applied to the evidence.

For your analysis, you should develop a thesis around a central problem/question you identify and make explicit.

Examples of Problem or Question:
• Why do profitable corporations/employers treat workers unfairly, and how are they able to do so?
• What are the broad social consequences of increasing worker degradation?
• What role has the recession played in the increasing exploitation of workers, and how might the latter prolong the recession and possibly lead to type of crisis Marx predicted?

Examples of Thesis:
• Employers treat workers unfairly in order to increase profits, and constantly look for and find new ways to cut labor costs. (Marx)
• The recession is a major social event that has led to widespread anomie. With a weak normative structure (values and norms) and concerned only with profits, employers are unrestrained in how they treat workers. (Durkheim).
• The recession, caused by major corporations, led to major increase in unemployment. The surplus labor market allows employers to buy labor power at much reduced costs, which will eventually lead to further economic crisis. (Marx)

These are examples only. Your reading of the articles may present other questions and theses that you want to investigate theoretically and address in your analysis.

Relevant Concepts: this is not an exhaustive list; there are other concepts that can be brought to into your theoretical framework and analysis.

Marx
Class Conflict
Contradiction between Social Relations of Production and Forces of Production
Mode of Production
Capital
Alienation
Exploitation
Division of Labor
Commodity, Commodity Form

Durkheim
Collective Consciousness
Beliefs, Values and Norms
Moral Order
Social Order
Regulatory Function
Integration
Division of Labor
Anomie