In her book In the Country, Mia Alvar takes on topics such as labor and the need for some workers to find employment abroad and send money to their families back home as remittance. This is common of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), and Alvar’s stories, particularly “The Miracle Worker” and “A Contract Overseas”, successfully depict the life of an OFW. OFWs challenge Marx’s argument that workers are alienated by labor, living to work instead of working to live. Though Marx believes money to further alienate workers, OFWs counter his argument by offering the possibility of reversing the process of alienation by making money for others, consequently staying in the mindset of working to live. Marx does not leave room for an exception such as OFWs in his argument that labor leads to the desire to live to work.
To Marx, labor alienates workers by making them live to work rather than work to live. In the piece “Estranged Labour” …show more content…
Minnie’s story is rather lacking in events: now 40 years old, she started working in Saudi Arabia at 18 years old. As she puts it, she has “never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses”. Life as a Filipino maid embodies Marx’s views and understanding of labor exquisitely. Minnie has worked for others for 22 years, exchanging her labor for money. Though Marx suggests that labor alienates workers by taking a piece of them in a more abstract sense, in this line of work, she quite literally loses a bit of her humanity by being physically lowered to the level of the floor, exhausting herself by “dust[ing], mop[ping], scrub[bing], sweep[ing], and wax[ing] the house to perfection” every day. Already, the labor itself proves to alienate her; the additional emphasis on working for rich Arabs demonstrates that she is motivated by money and the prospect of wealth. Thus, Marx’s argument stands that her thirst for money only furthers her alienation as a
To Marx, labor alienates workers by making them live to work rather than work to live. In the piece “Estranged Labour” …show more content…
Minnie’s story is rather lacking in events: now 40 years old, she started working in Saudi Arabia at 18 years old. As she puts it, she has “never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses”. Life as a Filipino maid embodies Marx’s views and understanding of labor exquisitely. Minnie has worked for others for 22 years, exchanging her labor for money. Though Marx suggests that labor alienates workers by taking a piece of them in a more abstract sense, in this line of work, she quite literally loses a bit of her humanity by being physically lowered to the level of the floor, exhausting herself by “dust[ing], mop[ping], scrub[bing], sweep[ing], and wax[ing] the house to perfection” every day. Already, the labor itself proves to alienate her; the additional emphasis on working for rich Arabs demonstrates that she is motivated by money and the prospect of wealth. Thus, Marx’s argument stands that her thirst for money only furthers her alienation as a