Glengarry Glen Ross and the Cut-Throat American Workplace Environment

Name
Professor
Course
Date
David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross
Introduction
Glengarry Glen Ross is a play by David Mamet that shows sections of two days in the lives of four real estate agents in Chicago who are extremely desperate to make real estate sales. They are so desperate to the extent that they are willing to engage in unethical practices like threats, bribery, burglary, and intimidation to realize undesirable sales to unsuspecting and gullible buyers. The salesmen are under intense pressure to make sales or lose their jobs because Blake (Alec Baldwin) has come to their workplace to give them a chalk-talk and a warning that there is a sales contest in which the winner will receive a Cadillac, the second in place will receive a set of steak knives while those who come in third or below will be fired. This sets the play's stage that depicts the American workplace's dog-eat-dog world in a cut-throat capitalist country.
The Cut-Throat American Workplace Environment
The American workplace environment is a capitalist environment in which money is used to measure success and happiness. This is a characteristic of all workplaces in first-world nations, but it is most pronounced in the American workplace, where capitalism is the main building block on which the country runs. All American workplaces are permanently entrapped in an endless pursuit of the American Dream. In this ultimate capitalist ideal, money is equated to success and happiness, causing the entire American workforce to live in perpetual poverty while pursuing money. Additionally, the American workplace environment is mostly characterized by unethical practices. Unethical practices are allowed and entertained even by managers who are supposed to deter them. To them, the end justifies the means. As long as they make profits, they do not care about the strategies used to make money. Moreover, the American workplace is completely brutal to employees. Employers seek to milk maximum profits from their employees and customers at the minimum possible cost without caring about their welfare and coping with workplace challenges pressure. For example, employers will fire a non-performing salesperson without financial benefits or advice to help him cope. This is well demonstrated in David Mamet's play when the employer will fire non-performing employees. Before being fired, managers do not seek to know why the person has not been performing and if the reasons for non-performance are solvable.
The American Dream
Using Glengarry Glen Ross as the basis of my analysis, the American Dream is the cause of the inhumane conditions that salespeople have to go through. The American Dream is as old as the American foundation when innumerable immigrants tired of muffling limitations and tyrannies of the old world moved into the new continent, seeing it as a land of opportunities that would allow them to redeem their dreams. But from the beginning, inherent greed in humans began to consume the seeds of the American Dream, turning it into a nightmare to the hopefuls who had migrated into 'the new world.' Therefore, it is evident that the Dream has been corrupted from the onset. David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross incontrovertibly highlights the corruption using th...