chapter 1

After reading Brown's chapter 1, I found many of the statistics to be fairly interesting and some surprising as well. When he talked about the different wages among the many countries it was hard to believe that some people are working to feed their families for $.61 an hour whereas here people are making $24 an hour doing practically the same job. It made me think about how lucky we are to have labor laws in place so that we are able to make a decent living wage in some jobs. Also when touching on the topic of economic equity, it amazes me how much of a separation there between minorities and whites. After the civil rights movement one would think that there would be more progression after so many years, but based on the numbers it does not appear to be that way.

I also found the history of work to be insightful as well. I had never heard of the theological meaning of work being used as punishment, but in many households we see certain household jobs used as punishment. I had also never been familiar with the fact that Christians were against working for profit. I would be interested to see what life would have been like today if there was no work for profit.

One last part that stuck out to me were the many definitions used to define career. When I define career I thought of it as something you enjoy doing and are able to earn a living from it. The definition used by Sears (1982) defines career as: "The totality of work one does in a lifetime." The only problem with this definition is that I would not consider my high school jobs as careers. To me they were just a way to earn money to use towards things I wanted. This chapter definitely made me rethink a few things in regards to career development.