Students in Bruce Orenstein’s fall 2015 course Video for Social Change captured the stories of men and women struggling to cope in today’s low-wage service economy. Challenged to think critically about how this socioeconomic structure has arisen, students placed a human face on one of the defining issues of our time and learned the skills to direct and produce original short-form videos that bring attention to it.
TRYING TO GET BY: [Not] Making Ends Meet In Our Low-wage Economy is their resulting multimedia documentary project. The project shares stories and analysis about the men and women who work in low-wage jobs, labor organizers, business owners, advocates, economists, and labor historians. Their stories give voice to the daily challenges men and women working low-wage jobs face in and outside of the workplace; how rapid growth in the low-wage job market is widening the inequality gap and diminishing opportunities to attain financial stability; and the organizing and advocacy efforts in North Carolina that are demanding higher wages, better schedules, and greater dignity in the workplace.
