Sweat blog

  Prompt #3: The New Yorker describes Lynn Nottage as having “built a career on making invisible people visible.” How does Sweat accomplish this and do you think enabling visibility is important? Why or why not?

 

 This meme shows the exploitation of workers as they live impoverished lives at the expensive of the greedy companies. 

The New Yorker is parsing Lynn Nottage for making invisible people visible, because she helps set the stage for the hard-working people on the rust belt. These workers are the backbone to society, yet they are treated like slaves, large corporations value profit over their well being, meaning that their work conditions are terrible, their pay is terrible, and just every single aspect of the job is appalling. However, to this day not many people know the hardships of these very important people because most people don’t care about the lower class, so Nottage does an exceptional job of bringing attention to the conditions these workers faced, and still face to this day. Nottage follows a few characters that have worked for a plant named Olmstead, through these characters we can see how the plant/ large greedy corporations treat their workers. Nottage first shows us the physical damage on the worker, they can “feel their body slowing down”, their “hands are frozen”, and they have “bunions the size of apples” (Nottage 25). This company is physically tearing down its workers who sacrifice so much to work in unstable and inhumane conditions, while barley even rewarding them for their efforts. Then NAFTA gets passed, allowing free trade between Mexico, Canada, and USA, meaning countries can move their plants to Mexico for a larger profit. This is exactly Olmstead did they first enforced a “sixty percent paycheck… concessions on your benefits … ask for more hours” (74-75 Nottage). Olmstead saw an opportunity to earn more money and decided to take it, completely cutting off their experienced workers of almost 30 years leaving canceling their pensions, taking their jobs, and basically abandoning them. Olmstead then moves its company posting a job opening for Olmstead in the “Latino community center” (47 Nottage) and complete moved all the machines over a long weekend secretly cutting off every single worker that worked there “management is saying it’s too expensive for them to operate here” (Nottage 74). This shows how Nottage used sweat to shine a light on the corrupted things the upper class does the lower class, they practically step all over the lower class without regarding them at all. However most of us are lucky enough to be born into middle class so we really don’t pay to much attention to this, however this play was made for the sole purpose of brining attention to all the working class people that are being treated like dirt.