Introduction
Waving a Living is a documentary that illustrates how four homes owned by low wage earners. They all try to sustain their families wit the low wage employments and with little or without benefits. This portrays how various people go hard times on paying the bills despite the fact that they are full-time employed. People employed in various sectors such as security guard, waitress, elder care and CAN face difficulties in utilizing their minimum wage to improve their living standards.
In my point of view, this documentary portrays how low income earners undergo struggles with the bureaucratic schemes, rising cost of living, apathetic society and feel solutions in the societies. This is due to its ability to go beyond the snapshots that are usually broadcasted in the nightly news. It goes to the extent where the four people are followed for few years of their lifetime so that the audience can be able to derive the solid stream of occurring problems along with the slower measures such as unionization, education, and patient persistence. This make the audiences feel overflowing with the mixture of gratitude for their current circumstances and insecurity since they know they are on their move from living paycheck to paycheck themselves.
My major concern about the documentary is the fact that the movies is appreciated due to its focus on the external roots of the situation of the four employees but does not mention the choices they made in past. The documentary should illustrate how the four made the decisions that delivered them in the current situation. For example, the documentary does not illustrate how one person lost his job, why disability states were not considered earlier, or why the respondents have many children. The main challenge for the improved standard of the living would therefore due to some of these constraints rather than the low wages.
In addition, the documentary presents two of the four people as the members of one union despite the fact that they live on distinct coasts, and two of them are illustrated as the active members of the union. This raises a question of how these people came to be selected to feature in the documentary, and if the notion of being in one union was related to the shooting and making of the documentary.
However, the community may argue that the documentary has excelled in the perfect selection of the contributors, and the cherished profiles. Weisberg is able to provide a close rational look at the lives of the participants in the documentary. By the end of the documentary, the film solemnly delivers affection to the audiences for each of the four. The film also makes the audience feel frustrated by the tight spot of the participants, astonished at the labor market inefficiency, keep them in a net of poverty cycle.
In conclusion, the society cannot wholly rely on the move to improve their living standard by avoiding the constraints illustrated in it. This is because most people especially youth loose their track in life due to the poor decision they make in the past. Thus, the movies should have illustrated the causes of the current situation of the four and the decisions that delivered them into such situations.
