Social Issues in Las Vegas and New York City
Social issues are the challenges that affect the daily livelihoods of the people of both Las Vegas and New York cities. This paper covers the most common types of social issues that both New Yorkers and residents of Las Vegas go through. The injustices include social stratification, unemployment, sexual inequality as well as rape. However, the two cities have put up strategies that aim at reducing social inequities and the violation of human rights. The steps include offering unemployment insurance, allowing victims of rape and sexual inequality a chance for their voices to be heard as well as coming up with approaches to combat social stratification including offering equal education and voting rights.
Introduction
Social issues are challenges that affect a majority of people in a community set up (Graham, 2017). Social problems are sociological in the sense that they result from factors that go beyond the control of the members of the city. Social challenges often arise in different opinions that create moral conflicts disrupting the usual order of the society. As Graham (2017) illustrates, the inability of some human beings in the community to accord equal rights to their fellows' results in social challenges in the city.
Social issues involve the disruption of cultural values and norms
that affect relationships between different people (Graham, 2017). Various social problems in the United States of America affect the daily interaction of people of different races. According to Denzin and Giardana (2018), the increase in diversity in the county has brought about various sociological issues that change day to day operations in both socio-cultural as well as commercial settings. The social challenges in Las Vegas and New York City include unemployment, social stratification, discrimination, sexual inequality as well as racism and abortion.
Social Stratification
According to Rautman (2018), social stratification refers to differentiation in a society which results in socioeconomic groups basing on their types of professional activities, wealth as well as their social statuses. Hierarchies also relate to both social and political powers that exist in a region. As a result, social differentiation stands for the social position that an individual owns within a society. In both Las Vegas and New York City, social stratification has resulted in three social classes' upper, middle and lower level.
The action theory of sociology suggests that social stratification is most common in developed areas where there is the presence of a dominating power which oversees social order and defines societal structures (Raub, Basken & Assen, 2011). Majority of the sociologists criticize the fact that majority of the working class individuals are unlikely to grow socioeconomically while a majority of the wealthy people maintain their influential positions and use their views to manipulate the less fortunate.
Las Vegas is the main economic center Nevada, United States of America. As at 2010, the city had an approximate population of about two million people (Denzin & Giardana, 2018). The emergence of Las Vegas as a dance and tourist attraction city has seen a majority of the USA residents relocate to the area. However, the city is subdivided into two strata the wealthy and the poor. Downtown Las Vegas only hosts tourists while residential areas are far from the suburbs.
The ability of the wealthy people to tap the potential of Downtown has made Las Vegas an economic power in the USA (Rautman, 2018). However, the Western site of Las Vegas is meant explicitly for neighborhoods and churches. The residents of Las Vegas vary significantly regarding social classes. As per Graham (2017), the hierarchies range from the very wealthy people including Asian and European immigrants to the poor. The level of poverty in the city keeps rising due to immigrants from Mexico and Central America who can only handle casual jobs that do not pay well.
On the other hand, New York City consists of a much diverse population comprising of people from different states of the USA as well as outside the country (Denzin & Giardana, 2018). Currently, the majority of the residents of the city are individuals who were born in the state. However, a significant percentage of the New Yorkers are natives of continents such as Europe and Asia. Almost half of the people in the city are Roman Catholics while the remaining is Jewish.
Unlike Las Vegas, New York City does not have much cultural and social stratification (Rautman, 2018). The original cultural and social features still influence the kind of lifestyle in New York. During the colonial era, all high and middle-class white people migrated to the rural areas leaving the poor who were majorly Africans in the central cities. The relocation of the wealthy people to the suburbs resulted in the shifting of both people and economic activities as a result of the movement of manufacturing industries and headquarters of corporations (Ferraro, 2018). The evolution of the rich people in New York created the need for the government to come up with approaches to managing the ever-rising crime rates as well as poverty levels. However, a majority of the people have not managed to participate in making their lives better leading to an ever-rising percentage of poor people.
Unemployment
As per Carter et al., (2017), residents of Las Vegas vary across social hierarchies from the most wealthy to the poorest. Due to the high number of tourist attractions and the presence of a tremendous amount of manufacturing and corporate firms, the rate of unemployment has been significantly reducing in the past years. In May 2018, the rate of unemployment in Nevada was 4.8 percent (Ferraro, 2018). However, through the labor organization and union membership, the price of unemployment had reduced by 0.1 percent in June 2018. From the 1990s, Las Vegas has been one of the states in the USA with a growing employment base. The massive labor environment resulting from first economic activities has created a favorable image that entices all business people, unlike California which has a low labor pool (Denzin & Giardana, 2018). Also, the great wholesale, finance and banking and retail services in Las Vegas form the backbone of the fantastic economy in the city.
Unlike Las Vegas, New York City has a slightly higher rate of unemployment. Joblessness in the city was at 4.6 percent (Ferraro, 2018). In June 2018, the jobs in the private sector rose up by 2.0 percent. The increase in employment opportunities is due to health and education as well as professional and business activities. However, in New York, the manufacturing sector does not contribute much of the labor in comparison with other industries such as the hospitality industry. As Ferraro (2018) indicates, New York's unemployment rate in June 2018 was 4.2 percent which was similar to the previous month. In the same month, only 58.3 percent of the working-age population starting from sixteen years.
Sexual Inequality
In the USA, debates revolving around sexual inequality and unfairness seem to determine the political route in which the country is taking (Carter et al, 2018). In both Las Vegas and New York cities, there have been serious discussions regarding the extent to the violation of the rights of LGBTQ Americans. Las Vegas is, for instance, one of the states in the US with an unusually high number of marriage and divorce rates. According to Brown (2017), in 2017, of the approximately 78,186 couples that got married, about 5.56 percent were gay marriages. Similarly, in New York City which is the most populated area in America has the highest number of gay marriages. As at March 2018, the total number of same-sex marriages in the city was about 13, 980 (Denzin & Giardana, 2018). Although the majority of the married gay couples are generally young and generate more income, there has been an issue in both cities to enable them to enjoy their freedom.
Rape
Rape is a social problem that affects a majority of the residents of both New York and Las Vegas (Brown, 2017). In the past decade, sexual survivors in the cities could undergo shame and distress since the community they lived in could not talk about sexual injustices. The two towns contribute to the total statistics of men and women who face sexual prejudice annually throughout the USA. According to Brown (2017), as of 2016, approximately one in three women and one in six men and half of the transgender population would experience sexual injustice at a young age. 83 percent of people with disabilities are undergoing sexual torture. Similarly, in both cities, American women are more likely to be victims of rape in comparison to other ethnic categories. Besides, about 81 percent of girls who are in the juvenile justice system are victims of sexual violence.
In conclusion, there have been various approaches by the United States government to solve social injustices in both Las Vegas and New York cities as well as other states. The methods include:
Offering unemployment insurance
Unemployment insurance is some social security that aims at compensating specific classes of workers in case of short-term or involuntary unemployment (Ferraro, 2018). The government of the United States of America came up with the unemployment insurance program to offer financial aid to casual workers who are laid off. The social security covers an individual up to a period when they secure a new employment position. However, in a majority of the states, individuals with a disability or who people who are not working do not receive the insurance. Also, the insurance does not cover self-employed individuals as well as civil servants.
As per Ferraro (2018), individuals who receive the unemployment insurance cover enjoy equal earnings regardless of your age or social status. As much as the insurance benefits can come for a short time, employers or employees undergo tax reductions for unemployment insurance. In some cases, the funding can come from public revenues.
Allowing citizens to enjoy their rights
Since both New York and Las Vegas have a very diverse population, the cities have managed to put into place regulations that give various people a chance to take advantage of their rights (Carter et al., 2017). Over the last couple of years, the cities have allowed more people to create awareness of the rights of the LGBTQ community as well as allowing victims of sexual violence to seek the necessary support from professional counselors and psychologists. Also, the law enforcement units in New York and Las Vegas have been focusing much on ensuring the just prosecution of perpetrators of rape criminals.
Also, the labor, education, and voting laws in place in New York and Las Vegas have enabled the country to reduce social stratification since every individual can access the necessary support to be able to contribute the country's economy. Equal rights to education and voting have significantly reduced the percentage of social stratification in the cities.
References
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Carter, P. L., Skiba, R., Arredondo, M. I., " Pollock, M. (2017). You can’t fix what you don’t look at: Acknowledging race in addressing racial discipline disparities. Urban education, 52(2), 207-235.
Denzin, N. K., " Giardina, M. D. (2018). Introduction. In Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere (pp. 9-22). Routledge.
Graham, M. (2017). Introduction. In Reflective Thinking in Social Work (pp. 15-41). Routledge.
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Raub, W., Buskens, V., " Van Assen, M. A. (2011). Micro-macro links and microfoundations in sociology. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 35(1-3), 1-25.
Rautman, A. E. (2018). Risk, reciprocity, and the operation of social networks. In Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest (pp. 197-222). CRC Press.
