You'll often hear folks bemoaning the lack of good technical skills and skilled labor workers to fill skilled labor jobs. This comes up every now and again, and always there's this romantic picture of the hardworking and dignified laborer with his lunch in a metal box and the punch clock and the good old American spirit, and gosh darn it to heck these new workers are just too lazy to understand that sometimes you have to do hard work to support your family and life. They just don't understand, as the new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once quipped, the "Dignity of Work."
That's because there is very little dignity left in it. And it is not the fault of the workers.
While there is a wonderful feeling at the end of the day for a job well done, that feeling evaporates very quickly when your paycheck can't cover the basic costs of life. Far be it for executives to take a cut in pay to allow their workers a decent life (unless you work at Costco or a few others) and most corporations are too terrified of angering stockholders to attempt to help their workers. Working for eight or nine dollars an hour is a no-go for many people,
unless they want to start running in the red permanently, which leads to
more scorn from the maniacal conservative media saying they are
responsible for getting themselves in this situation to begin with. Now, companies are starting to hire "financial consultants" for pennies on the dollar for what a wage hike would cost in order to properly school their workers on how to properly use their money.
Not only is it your fault I don't pay you enough, they say, it's also your fault for not handling the money properly.
But it is not the fault of the workers.
Today's laborers are widely overworked, underpaid, and underrepresented by unions. Before you go and call them lazy, please keep in mind that they are often working 3-4 jobs because one labor job, no matter how dignified, won't pay them enough to survive and will leave them too tired for other jobs they need to help them survive. Through starvation wages and outright contempt for their workers, business leaders have robbed whatever dignity was once in low-skill and even skilled-labor positions.
There's a lot of talk about a "skills gap," and one of the very, very strong lines coming out of this turgid recovery has been that we only need to train for the different jobs of the new economy and things will get back on track. We have to go back to school, go to tech school, and maybe find a scholarship to help us along the way. However, this places an unbelievable burden on people people who are already convinced that the larger world does not care about them, and that they will never have now-considered luxuries like their own home, or retirement. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal has recently admitted that simply gumption and bootstraps is not enough to pull many American workers out of their collective doldrums. What's to stop another crisis, again engineered by the golden parachute crowd, from suddenly crushing tomorrow what is a promising job today? How can you ask millions of Americans who went to school to be teachers, when it was said that job had the most growth potential pre-crisis, to go back to school and wager their own money all over again in a rigged career roulette game?
I understand what Mike Rowe is trying to do and, problems with funding aside, it is incredibly admirable, but it is only a band-aid on a gaping wound. It is mortgaging the future for today's survival, and we can do better. Simply telling someone to go and study or train for yet another job is like breaking the axle on your car and, instead of fixing it, grafting a fifth wheel onto it that works pretty well, but you still have that fourth wheel flopping uselessly as you go down the road. If this situation doesn't get fixed at the top, we might have entire generations with vestigial skills and talents going to waste, and your next Great American Thinkers might very well be stifled or outright throttled into intellectual death while they flip burgers and staple cardboard boxes together, just to make enough money to survive.
We can't keep living like this. This is not good enough. It has now been said that private donation alone is not enough to fix all of this. We need top-down reform of the financial systems, education systems, and labor systems to return this country to where it needs to be. What is being advocated in the small-batch private-run gumption and bootstraps approach is literally the same approach Herbert Hoover tried in the wake of the Great Depression. It is simply not enough. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. We need government action, we need serious reform, or else we're weakening the nation and twiddling our fingers until the next crisis hits.
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup.
