The value of a job

“There is no job that’s better than another job,” he continued. “It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper, but actually it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable, and if we have a kind of a rethinking about that because of what’s happened to me, that would be great, but no one should feel sorry for me, either from a positive or a negative perspective. I’ve had a great life, I’ve had a great career, and I’ve had a career that most actors would die for.”

Spoken by Geoffrey Owens who played Bill Cosby's son-in-law in an interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, after he was "job-shamed" on social media for working at Trader Joe's between acting jobs. It was just a little blip in 2018 which I ran across today. Let people go back to work and stop shaming them, stop bullying them if they see dignity in work

Toxic masculinity and white supremacy

There was a huge semi parked in front of Marc's today--full of potted mums. All had been unloaded by the time I walked in. There must have been hundreds, every color and size. I kept thinking about the time and physical effort to drive that massive truck, and to load and unload. When I came out I saw the truck had moved ahead a little so as not to block the store entrance. I could see someone moving around inside, so I stood by the truck's tail gate for the driver (and I assumed a helper) to come out. He finally appeared. Only guy on the truck. He was white, fair skin, about 20, slight build, with a huge smile, blue eyes, and neatly dressed. "Can I help you," he asked. "Did you do all that by yourself?" I asked, motioning to the racks and racks of mums. He still had a load of flowers inside the truck and was moving them. "Oh yeah, it's not hard, and now I have another stop for the rest of the load."

Maybe there's a slender woman out there who could have wrestled this load and driven the truck and still be pleasant and polite to a stranger, but I haven't met her.

Practicing a craft

As we traveled between Lakeside and Columbus today I was struck by the beauty of the mid-July green hues. From forest to farm to lawn.  Often this time of year, the vegetation begins to have a dusty, straw color. Heavy storms the past few weeks through central and northern Ohio have taken care of that! We drove through small towns and past farms with 19th century homes, shared the road with construction crews, and passed over railway yards.  Everywhere I looked I saw not just God’s handiwork, but man’s--or hundreds of men. Real work, real hands, real products that lasted well beyond their life times. Even the heavily laden trucks that rolled past us were packed with produce from the farms as we noticed the tallest corn we’d ever seen.  “I hope that’s for feed and not ethanol,” I said.

I settled in for the ride and opened my magazine First Things, August/September 2017.  Whether it was a message or a coincidence, who knows, but the article I turned to was “Back to work,” pp. 33-37, by John Waters, an Irish playwright, writer and author of nine books. I had been thinking about the many useful skills and talents my grandmothers who were 20 years apart in age (born in 1876 and 1896) had and which my generation doesn’t.  Not only do I not know how to use a smart phone as many my age do, but I don’t know how to harness a carriage horse, gut and pluck a chicken, milk a cow, trim a kerosene wick or bank the stove with corn cobs to heat water for a weekly bath.  And there in my lap, author Waters laments the triumph of several generations who have no talent except to manipulate technology. I was shocked to see my own thoughts of the moment in an article drafted months before by an Irishman I’d never heard of until I saw him on Route 4 in rural Ohio.

“I often look at rows of buildings on a streetscape or motorway and think that all this, one way or another, is the outcome of interventions by other men.  Each piece--building, bridge, or flyover--is perhaps the conception of one or two men, but has been executed by dozens or hundreds of other men working together toward a common goal.  Sometimes, walking down a street, I am overcome by shame that there is no place on the face of the earth, aside from the occasional library shelf, which contains any analogous contribution of mine.”

. . . Most of the people I meet in my work these days resemble me in this respect.  We live in cities and judge ourselves superior to those who get their hands dirty out in the sticks.  But really we are slaves of a new kind: indentured to technologies that steal our time, creativity, and imagination.  Technology is actually the “new religion,” not least I the sense that it compels us to believe in things we do not understand.  . . I look around and realize that all those present, male and female, make their livings from secondary or tertiary economic activities, unproductive in any fundamental sense--you might even say parasitical on the main business of wealth creation.”

Waters looks back to July 13, 2012, when President Obama told people who actually do real work and produce real products that “you didn’t build that.”  Even taken out of context, as Waters think it was in the 2012 campaign, he sensed it was the tipping point in the creation of Brexit and the victory for President Trump, a man who represents people who relate to the world in concrete ways, but no longer recognize the world that is presented to them. “They are being discounted when the big decisions are being made.”  For up to half the country, Obama was attacking the very essence of their humanity. 

He concludes: “I cannot be the only man who feels less at home in the world than his father did.  Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of Trump’s election:  the back answer of the dispirited men of America who still want to build and fix things but have gotten on the wrong side of a cultural wrecking ball."

Belmont and Fishtown, fictional cities of Charles Murray

“To represent the classes at the two ends of the continuum, I give you two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been white working class since the Revolution). To be assigned to Belmont, the people in my databases must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor, or in content-production jobs in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma. If they work, their job must be in a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.

Here’s what happened to the founding virtues in Belmont and Fishtown from 1960 to 2010:

The text covers marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity.

http://www.aei.org/publication/belmont-fishtown/

In 1960 9% of the men in Fishtown were not in the labor force; by 2000 it was 30%.  But the unemployment rate was about the same.  The men just didn’t work.  They might get some cash under the table, or work minimally for awhile to qualify for benefits, but then would quit.

Combine men who don’t work with single women raising children, and things don’t look good for Fishtown. Low church attendance and very low civic involvement. Even the men whose income is above poverty level do not participate in the community to make it better and stronger.

Mike Rowe—dirty jobs pay well—where are the workers?

I’ve seen Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame on Fox and Friends and on Glenn Beck talk about the importance of training our young people for jobs that are going begging.  Today he mentioned Tulsa Welding School to which he offers scholarships—it has 800 jobs it could fill, if it had the students. He has a foundation to support scholarships and has published a book, Profoundly disconnected.

He said that at the height of the recession in 2008, he was filming at locations that had “help wanted” signs.  There were not enough trained American workers to do the “dirty jobs.”

Meanwhile, Rowe is being attacked for making an ad for WalMart (he did the voice over) which talks about the value of hard work, and that Wal-Mart will be investing $250 billion in the American economy and American made products in the next decade.  On his Rowe’s FB page Sean Murray says, “I thought you were good person. But I just saw your AD that WAL-MART paid for. Your a corporate suck, Rowe.” And that’s mild compared to some I read.

So those who griped that Wal-Mart had too many foreign made products and didn’t pay their workers enough, who picketed their construction sites, are now complaining that Wal-Mart is helping the U.S. economy.  This means it was never about American jobs or American workers, but about trying to destroy a very successful business.

If you want to see hate in action from the ridiculously uninformed anti-capitalists, just read the comments submitted to these videos.  You wonder if they even watched them, or only saw it was about Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart haters have their own Facebook page.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-wal-mart.html

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703960004575427143390869962?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052748703960004575427143390869962.html

http://digiday.com/brands/walmart-social-media/

The speech at Knox College

I have rarely heard or seen such a tepid audience.  Even hand picked they’ve heard it all before.

The March job numbers

663,000 people left the workforce in March and only 88,000 jobs were added, but somehow the Obama administration paints a happy face on this because by destroying the will to work in so many Americans, Obama somehow wins. It's too late to blame Bush so I suppose now it will be the sequester he agreed to in order to raise taxes.

Obama's former economic advisor Austan Goolsbee called it a "punch in the gut." The stock market agreed. I call it another failure of his policies. The "recession" was over before the first stimulus dollar was out the door in 2009, and still he can't make the formula of higher taxes + more regulation + more government take overs work. That's why he's dancing on the Sandy Hook graves--it's all he's got.

It's EMS Week

It used to be (in the old days of the 1970s or 1980s) that if you did a good job, you got something called a paycheck. If not, a pink slip. Then came the merit raises, and the occasional departmental party hosted by the boss or pot-luck which were supposed to cover it. But today's gen-x and gen-y workers need so many hugs and warm fuzzies, that entire businesses have grown up to create appreciation gifts and events. I noticed this item in the OSU Medical College newsletter.

"May 18-24 is National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Week. OSUMC will provide refreshments and information to EMS crews at both emergency departments, deliver gifts to fire departments and provide educational seminars throughout the week. Look for our "Thank you, EMS" billboards around town and join us in thanking EMS for the lifesaving work they provide."

When I retired in 2000, I had FIVE retirement parties, one in the vet library, one in the main library, two in restaurants and one at the faculty club. The university must have either been very happy to see me go, or very sad.