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I respect everyone who works.
I debated on where to post this, in this forum or in the Club forum. But
since Wal-Mart and McDonalds seems to hit the nerve on all the Socialist,
I thought, nah, this is politics.
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Dead-end jobs
By Walter E. Williams
Nov 30, 2005
Certain jobs are derisively referred to as "burger flipper" or "dead-end" jobs. I'd like someone to define a dead-end job. For example, I started out as a professor of economics at California State University, Los Angeles and then at Temple University and for the past 25 years at George Mason University. It seems as though my employment might qualify as a dead-end job, for all I'll ever be is a professor of economics.
Those who demean so-called dead-end jobs probably aren't talking about my job. They're mockingly referring to jobs such as clerks at Wal-Mart, hotel workers, and food handlers and counter clerks at McDonald's. McJobs is the term applied to these positions. The term has even found its way into Merriam-Webster and the encyclopedia Wikipedia. Putting down so-called dead-end jobs is a destructive insult to honest work.
How dead-end is a McDonald's job? Jim Glassman, an American Enterprise Ins ute scholar, wrote an article in the Ins ute's June 2005 On The Issues bulletin led "Even Workers with 'McJobs' Deserve Respect." He listed some well-known former McDonald's workers. Among them: Andy Card, White House chief of staff; Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com; Jay Leno, "Tonight Show" host; Carl Lewis, Olympic gold medalist; Joe Kernan, former Indiana governor; and Robert Cornog, retired CEO of Snap-On Tools. According to Glassman, some 1,200 McDonald's restaurant owners began as crew members, and so did 20 of McDonald's 50 top worldwide managers. These people and millions of others hardly qualify as dead-enders.
The primary beneficiaries of so-called McJobs are people who enter the workforce with modest or absent work skills in areas such as: being able to show up for work on time, operating a machine, counting change, greeting customers with decorum and courtesy, cooperating with fellow workers and accepting orders from supervisors. Very often the people who need these job skills, which some of us might trivialize, are youngsters who grew up in dysfunctional homes and attended rotten schools. It's a bottom rung on the economic ladder that provides them an opportunity to move up. For many, the financial component of a low-pay, low-skill job is not nearly as important as what they learn on the job that can make them more valuable workers in the future.
Some demagogues charge that jobs at Wal-Mart and McDonald's only pay the minimum wage. That's plain wrong, as are many other things said about jobs that start at the minimum wage. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Sixty-three percent of minimum wage workers receive raises within one year of employment, and only 15 percent still earn the minimum wage after three years. Moreover, only three percent of all hourly workers and two percent of wage and salary earners earn minimum wages. Most minimum wage earners are young -- 53 percent are between the ages of 16 and 24.
Furthermore, only 5.3 percent of minimum wage earners are from households below the official poverty line; 40 percent of minimum wage earners live in households with incomes of $60,000 and higher, and over 82 percent of minimum wage earners do not have dependents. My stepfather used to tell me that any honest work was better than begging and stealing. As a young person, I worked many jobs from shining shoes and picking blueberries to delivering packages and washing dishes. Today's tragedy for many a poor youngster is that the opportunities I had for learning the world of work and moving up the economic ladder have either been destroyed through legislation or demeaned by today's do-gooders.
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Anyhow, gives you something to think about.
I respect everyone who works.
Ditto.
(after seeing the thread le I was hoping this could be a debate on what Wal-Mart means to our economy and country, oh well)
It could be, I think he made the point that Wal-Mart and McD jobs are
worthwhile if a person applys themselves. I know of a couple of managers
with Wal-Mart who started at the bottom. Making big bucks now.
Wal-Mart is a well oiled, capitilist machine, to be sure. Your friends (assumption) must be good to work their way up. Promotions are not handed out willy-nilly their (which is appropriate).
"It boggles my mind how many people"
got any numbers?
I am not a huge fan of wal-mart per se, but I read a very good bit in the paper the other day that points out that walmart's ability to bring prices down for it's shoppers FAR outweighs it's effect on lower wages.
Simply put: The amount of money saved by the generally poorer people who shop there FAR outweighs the lower pay that walmart offers.
End result is simple economics:
Walmarts net effect on "the poor" and their standard of living is overwhelmingly positive.
They may be bas s, but they are efficient bas s at selling stuff cheaply.
^^^ Yeah, but an unfortunate side effect of low-ball pricing is the effect on the small business owner.
Local hardware stores, craft stores, bait and tackle shops, tire shops, and many others get blasted by Wal-Mart.
It's not that Wal-Mart does everything all of those stores do, they just take away the "bread and butter" sales, leaving a small, elite niche in whatever market they were in - which isn't enough to make a living on. The small guy goes out of business - at which point that elite level is gone and unavailable. This is really evident now that I live in a small town.
Everybody has the same stuff, kids wearing the same clothes, etc...
Not really anything you can do about, the market has defined a need for something like the big box stores - I can only hope it swings back (and thank god for the internet).
So there are welfare cheats. Happens in every country there is welfare, and govts have been and keep trying to reduce cheating.
There are also $500K year doctors claimng Medicare funds they shouldn't.
CA estimated there was $2.5B fraud/year in CA medicare/caid a couple years ago, and not all of it, or even most of it, was by the poor.
Look at the multi-$B settlements/fraud on Wall St under Spitzer, Enron, Adelphia, etc, etc, etc, probably 99% of them heavy Republican contributors and hard-ass conservatives.
But we only hear the Repubs going after programs for the poor. All-out class warfare. Has NOTHING to do with morality or actually fixing problems or improving govt efficiency, but everything to do with less "transfer/en lemnt payments" for the poor meaning more govt $$$ available to be given to the rich and corps.
But white collar crime isn't a big deal is it? Bull . Just like the list of former McDonalds workers. Oh boy, successful guys who used to work at McDonalds. It's not like it helped them succeed, other than minimal monetary support. Bush used to be a drunk, did that help him become president? No.
What about the fact that almost all of the items in WalMart are made at slave wages in other countries. Surely if workers here or overseas were paid a living wage, people would be better off.
I'd love to see some numbers to back that up.What about the fact that almost all of the items in WalMart are made at slave wages in other countries.
Out of the massive array of products that Walmart carries, I'm sure we could find a few that were made by American workers, too.
I would also love to see those numbers. Good luck with that.
So you admit that you just said something you completely pulled out of your ass.
Cool.
How do you know they should not be receiving disability? Just curious.
Is that necessarily Walmart's fault? Or does the blame fall on the shareholders of those companies?
I read books. I don't retain every bit of information from these books. The numbers would be dated anyway. If that means I pulled it out of my ass, okay.So you admit that you just said something you completely pulled out of your ass.
Cool.
What books?
I have many leather-bound books and my office smells of mahogany.
Mmmmm....I love the smell of mahogany. And old books.
Capitalism requires reducing costs to maximize profits, so buying products cheaper outside the USA is perfectly good practice (or firing employees as soon as possible, and hiring as few employees as possible), no matter what the social costs are to US citizens.
Capitalism is completely amoral, inhuman, ruthless system. Any restraints, like laws and regulations protecting employees, consumers, and the environment, are hated by "good" businessmen only because they see laws (govt) as increasing their costs.
When people boycotted companies or withdrew investments from companies doing business with apartheid S. Africa, some companies reacted by stopping (overt) business with South Africa, NOT because it was the moral thing to do, but only because it was the best business thing to do.
I remember a S. American cocaine kingpin saying a few years ago:
"I'm just a businessman meeting a demand for my products. I'll stop selling my products when the demand isn't there."
I bet tons of US businessmen would agree enthusiastically with the above esp knowing the tax-free profits on cocaine, just as their wet dreams are to run an abusive, price-gouging monopoly like Bill Gates.
Pros utes and other sex industry works are entrepreneurial business people, too, with an eternal demand to meet.
If the purpose of a business is to make money and these restraints prevent businesses from making as much money as possible, then of course they are detested by the owners of the business. I don't think this necessarily makes them evil, it just makes them businessmen.
Still waiting on the numbers of welfare cheats/queens vs legit.
Also waiting on the %age of college students who pocket their loan money and quit school, which is the basis for dubya cutting federally backed student loans. The philosohpy here is not to improve management of the fed student loan program to reduce cheating by, what?, 2% cheating, but just blindly to cut it for all 100%.
An optometrist told me that he could do nothing for my mother, blind in one eye and 50%+ blind in the other. Didn't stop him from having his office girls "tele-market" me, A YEAR LATER, to bring my mother in for an eye checkup. I said she was immoblized with Alzheimers in a nursing home, nearing ho e care, and having no eye discomfort.
I asked how much the checkup would cost? "$200, but don't worry, Medicare would pay it all, and also for the amubulance transport". I consider that tactic to be fraudulent ripoff of Medicare by an optometrist probably making well over $100K/year, and voting conservative/Repub. Anybody wanna claim this optometrist is the only doctor/hospital/HMO/medical_service in the USA abusing medicare/caid?
You think Republicans are the only ones out to make a quick buck off the ignorance of others or by questionable methods?? *ahem*MichaelMoore*ahem*an optometrist probably making well over $100K/year, and voting conservative/Repub
Come on, now.
Does MM cheat on welfare?
Like TV evangelists, he's in the entertainment business.
Does the fed govt subsidize buying of tickets to MM films?
going to films is discretionary, getting medical care isn't.
making money off stupidity is one thing, the "medical system" defrauding Medicare/Medicaid (and then buying congressman to keep it that way) is totally different.
But it's interesting/amusing that you say a doctor's medicare/caid fraud is no worse than, and is equivalent to what you think MM does.
Dishonesty is dishonesty is dishonesty.
But whatever, if you think greed is exclusive to the Republican party you are seriously deluded.
Last edited by SpursWoman; 11-30-2005 at 07:02 PM.
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