Life on the Global Assembly Line

Analysis of Ehrenreich and Fuentes

Ehrenreich and Fuentes “Life on the Global Assembly Line”, World Views, Third Edition, is ineffective because the witness testimony cannot be validated, the use of illustrations is illogical, their examples are based on unfounded information and their statistical data is often not substantiated by scientific data.

Ehrenreich and Fuentes’ article is ineffective because witness testimony cannot be validated. Often Ehrenreich and Fuentes supply titles but no documentation. They present alleged experts with no names, disconnected assertives and carefully select only biased witnesses.

Ehrenreich and Fuentes quote “a Hewlett-Packard vice-president” who says “They live much differently here than we do…” (262). It is obvious that the Hewlett-Packard vice-president remains unidentifiable. Consequently, it is impossible to verify who the vice-president is or where and when his statement was made. Furthermore, the use of the ellipses in the quote, tells the reader there may have been more information contained in that statement and the writers chose only to include the part of the quote that suited their needs.

Ehrenreich and Fuentes continue their biased commentary with the use of statistics that fail to provide back up data to support their claims. The writers state that “A 1970 study of young woman factory workers in Hong Kong found that eighty-eight percent of them were turning more than half their earnings over to their parents”