#ground-up

鄧詩慧/ Children Reclaiming the City

From the Ground Up

It isn’t always blue sky and rainbows. Sometimes our day consists of grinding it out only to look up at the clock and see its been 10 minutes since the last time we looked. I’m not sure how many clocks have been replaced over the years by people who are convinced theirs have stopped working. It must be either a time warp or a clock manufacturer’s conspiracy to keep us guessing. Well, maybe not.

Erin E. O’Brien. The Politics of Identity: Solidarity Building Among America’s Working Poor. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008.

It does not show the entire article, but what is shown is a preview in which the article is about.

The author talks about solidarity in relation to politics and also maps out what is going to be talked about in each chapter. In chapter one he talks about solidarity and how the working poor developed it. The next chapter is about the difficulties this working class faces and chapter three talks about the bond formed between these workers due to coalition solidarity. In this chapter the author say coalition solidarity happens because, “the workplace is the means by which one group discovers the struggles and obstacles faced by another group” (185). And the fourth chapter talks about people who aren’t coalitional solidarity. The author brings up his next point, collective work solidarity in the next four chapters where he goes into great depth about people who take political stances and relate that to their own lives, how some people don’t do this, and how this could help or not help people. The author also relates America to other countries to see how solidarity may differ or be the same.

O’Brien brings up a good point about different types of solidarity there is and that it isn’t just one type. I find that to be important because politics, just like people, have their own ways of doing things and solidarity is definitely an aspect of that. At one point he had said, “being a worker doesn’t mean a thing” (185), and I could not agree more because he is saying just because you are a working poor this doesn’t mean you can relate to either collective or coalitional solidarities, it depends on if you want to partake in that act.