Work
I got my first job when I was in the third grade . . . as a janitor. I really wanted a bike. Since mom and I were on welfare (a skimpy benefit in those distant days), my choices were to steal one or earn some money to buy one. Since I was a slow runt, working seemed the better alternative. Prior to getting my first full time, permanent job after graduate school, I worked at delivering papers, carrying golf clubs, stocking paint stores, repairing bikes, putting up hay, fighting forest fires, cutting brush for a survey party, selling used cars, cleaning irrigation ditches, digging wells, and sanding cars in preparation for painting in a body shop. For a few weeks, I worked at cleaning out trucks that were used to haul livestock. I actually shoveled shit for a living. Some of the other jobs I’ve had were metaphorical versions of shoveling shit.
What good was all that work experience? When I arrived at my first career type job, I had job skills. I knew how to show up on time, dressed to play. I knew how to deal with autocratic bosses and irate customers. I knew how to collect from deadbeats. I knew a lot about the infinite vagaries of organizational behavior. In short, I was prepared to bring value to the table.
I also learned the value of a dollar. Instead of looking at the price of any good or service in terms of the joys of ownership, my default is to calculate how many hours of work are required to generate the money needed to obtain the product. That sort of thinking tends to prevent debt slavery.
In middle class and upper middle class families today, kids are not often required to work, or even encouraged to do so. Kids don’t work their way thru college; they borrow their way thru. With the exception of STEM students, who actually have to learn something, most of today’s higher education experience consists of four (or more) years of drinking, drugging, and fornicating, punctuated by occasional class attendance. At the end of the process, the kids have an inflated transcript, a load of debt, and no discernible job skills.
Government regulations and the trolling trial bar also conspire to limit youth employment. Hiring a kid can mean taking on a lot of liability, a lot of cost, and a lot of regulatory compliance.
Adding insult to injury, student debt regulations and graduation speakers are directing graduates to public service and non-profit work. Private sector work is no longer held in esteem by the great and good. There is certainly public service work that is vital to our health and well being, but a great deal of activity in the public sector is a waste of time, and almost all of it adds little or nothing to our economic health. In some cases, it inhibits productive growth. In an era when a shrinking work force will have to support 80 million retiring baby boomers, that is a luxury we can’t afford. Work needs to create value. Government needs to go on a diet. Lots of non-profits do good work, but most of them have excessive overhead, and the participants spend more time virtue signaling than working. In many cases, the main effort is spent raising funds to support the bloated overhead.
The other major work problems are summarized by a depressing interview I heard a few years ago. The interviewee was the plant manager of a factory in the Mid-West, owned by an international conglomerate. His bosses had requested that he double production. His response was that he would have a hard time doing so because he couldn’t find enough employees who were literate enough to understand the machinery and/or could pass a drug test. That interview took place during a period of high unemployment.
Our primary and secondary education systems are clearly failing to prepare kids for a productive place in the work force. We have inadequate apprenticeship and continuing education programs to train workers and retrain them to deal with rapid change in work processes. If we don’t improve productivity, our prosperous lifestyle will vanish.
We are currently talking a bit about the danger of drug use because thousands of people are killing themselves abruptly by over dosing. We are not talking about the 50 million or so people in our country who are killing themselves slowly with alcohol, marijuana, pills, heroin, meth, cocaine and some designer stuff. In addition to the tragedy of their own lives, there is the ugly impact on families, friends, employers, law enforcement and the justice system. It is, far and away, our most serious public health problem. The response of the great and good is to feed and house the addicts who sink to street level, so they can go on killing themselves in peace. Government and non-profits are spending billions of dollars a year that isn’t just wasted; it’s destructive. For the majority of addicts who don’t make it to the street, and who are a huge drag on productivity, the response is to ignore the problem.
Our version of a capitalist economy has worked miracles. Most human beings who ever inhabited the planet spent their short lives struggling to get enough to eat. We have created an economy that provides physical comforts and safety beyond the imagination of people living even 50 years ago. If we don’t relearn the value of productive work, and prepare our kids to be useful participants in the work force, we stand a good chance of snuffing out that miracle.
I can’t speak for the rest of you, but one of my great satisfactions in life, one of the things that makes life worth living, is the successful accomplishment of a task. If I can produce a quality product or service that someone is willing to pay for, I am filled with a sense of worth. Lots of our society’s social and economic problems would be ameliorated if we conveyed that sense to the vast majority of our citizens.
