Dr. Jasso's TED Talk: "The Voices of China’s Workers"

 

Written by Estefania Zavela

 

On February 24, Professor Jasso hosted a TED Talk entitled “The Voices of China’s Workers” and framed it with his recent experiences in China. The talk, given by Leslie T. Chang, was insolently triumphant--it derided the pity Americans often feel for factory workers earning small wages and asserted these factory workers’ new found economic mobility. Essentially, this talk argued that the factory workers did not need the developed worlds’ useless empathy because their jobs were providing them with new opportunities. Jasso took themes from this talk and shaped them into one provocative question: Do Americans have a similar work ethic to these factory workers? No one was able to find any consensus. Certainly it is difficult to imagine working twelve hours a day on a factory floor--but the uniting characteristics these workers shared was desperation for knowledge and bettering their quality of lives. And these characteristics, gratefully, are not unique to Chinese factory workers. They exist in every struggling, diverse student in universities like UC Riverside.