Reading "The Displaced Person": O’Connor’s Commentary on Displaced People and Displaced Workers Anonymous College

The working class often describes those who work blue-collar jobs with low wages. Those who belong to the working class often face job insecurity because they do not have the same rights and safeguards for their jobs, unlike their employers, who have the power to establish wages and hire or fire workers. The working class has minimal rights and has barely any job security because they are often in the lower echelons of the social hierarchy. They desperately need to work in any way so that they can earn enough money to survive. The lack of job security for the working class is especially true in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Displaced Person,” where the working people belong to the lower levels in the American social hierarchy when social hierarchy meant everything to Americans. Set in the South during the early 50s, O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” depicts insecurity in farmwork as a new, Polish refugee worker is pitted against the other low-class workers by their miserly employer Mrs. McIntyre, who has a higher social status than that of her workers. Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” conveys that working people are treated as easily dispensable even though their work is invaluable because of their low standing...