What do I mean by "real work?" Work that sucks. Things like working at McDonalds. Working the late shift as a security guard. Perhaps you were a poo shoveler like me. Regardless, because of these jobs we not only learned the merits of getting an education, but also appreciated how the real world works. How you cannot have wealth without production. How you must produce something of value to get employed (and how most of us became capitalists and conservatives in the first place).
But what gets me is how "child labor," no matter how noble, no matter how helpful to form the ideological senses of a youth, is kind of frowned upon. How parents nowadays are having their kids join various charity organizations because it "looks better on a resume" than working at McDonalds (which is complete BS). How illegal immigrants are getting hired to do the jobs the youth of America used to do in the past. And if you hear "child labor" you think of some poor third world country kid working in the sulfur mines in Indonesia for 30 cents a day. Which is why I found this interesting;
I forget where I found it (National Geographic perhaps), but, seriously, I'm supposed to feel sorry for this kid? This kid has a cake job! This is not shoveling poo or pouring out grease bin or cleaning up cow remnants at a locker plant. This is taking apart electronics AND, might I speculate, a great way to learn about computers and electrical engineering. This kid is not only getting paid for a pretty easy job, but getting an education as well.
Now I know I will get a bunch of e-mails from leftists who never had to do work as dirty as shoveling poo. I know I will receive a bunch of e-mails from spoiled brats who never changed a diaper in their lives berating me about how dare I insult this poor kid. These intellectually inferior comments will be summarily ignored on the ground none of you got your fingers dirty or had a real job in your youth so go back to eating arugala (I don't even know how to spell it) whilst discussing your Amber Crombie and Fitch collection with Obama.
In the meantime I invite all the hardworking folk, left or right, who know the value of a work ethic to regale us with your-crappy-jobs-during-your-youth-stories.
18 comments:
He's, what, eleven? When I was twelve and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a paperboy for the St. Paul PiPress, which entailed getting up before the proverbial buttcrack of dawn, rain, snow, whatever, to hope that the papers were on the corner five blocks away. Then I had to collect the money every month, hope everyone paid in a timely fashion, and made my profit after the paper got paid their cut.
This kid's got it easy.
Detasseling corn. What a sucky job. You're out in the fields at 5 or 6 a.m. and you have to wear long sleeve shirts and long pants. By the time you're done, all the dew has soaked into your clothes and your jeans weigh about 100 pounds.
I grew up on a farm. 'nuff said?
Jim :)
I worked in the tank room of a meat packing plant in the late sixties. It's where all the otherwise unused parts are put into a cooker. These parts would come sliding down a chute from the kill floor above me. Every other minute or so an intestinal part would fly off the chute onto the floor. I would scoop it all into buckets and carry them up the steps and dump them in the cooker. As a farm kid I carried a lot of feed and water in buckets but that was nothing compared to the weight of a bucket of guts.
It's an industry known for its horrible odors that stick to the people who work there and go home with them at night. But they all smelled like roses compared to the guys in the tank room. When we went on break nobody wanted to get too close to us.
I'm glad I did it and even more glad I got out of there. It paid $3/hr, which was considered good money.
The problem with child labour in the third world isn't that it's necessarily difficult or demeaning. The problem is that for these kids, it's not a part-time or a summer job - many of them work much longer hours than what we would consider "full time" and as a result are unable to go to school.
Yes, when I was working as a security guard, the work sucked. But I had the opportunity to go to school and better myself. For many of these kids, that's not really an option. That's why I support a child through the "World Vision" program - if I can contribute $35 every month to keep that kid supplied, healthy, and going to school, then that's one more educated individual who will be able to do something more productive than just fixing shoes. In the long run, people like him will help boost their economy to a level where all kids can stay in school and work part-time instead of having to drop out to help their families.
Programs like that one, and the micro-lending ventures which are becoming increasingly more popular, will do more good for those nations than any amount of government charity or feel-good UN programs.
My first job was working as a bottle sorter. In Michigan, there's a $0.10 deposit on every bottle and can, and so people bring them back to stores for their refund.
Diet sodas weren't too bad. But old beer cans with used cigarette butts were pretty nasty. The worst, however, were the cans with some soda left inside. Bugs crawled in to have a little corn-syrup feast. Naturally, I'd find these as I lifted them out of paper and plastic bags that had best not be described.
Cockroaches were my constant friends.
Shoveling manure was a step up.
One of my first jobs was a "pooper-scooper" cleaning up the streets after the horses in the parade in my small hometown. After that I moved on to glamorous gigs like paper routes and washing dishes at the local restaurant. Consequently hard word is indeed a foundation everyone needs from early on in life.
That said, thinking that this kids is actually learning something about electronics by removing pieces from old computer parts is totally absurd. These kids are exposed to dangerous amounts of lead and mercury. It is pretty callous to think otherwise.
PS - Ambercrombie does s*ck
Nice Post!
My jobs:
For 4 summers in a row I worked as a lifeguard 6 days a week, eventually working my way up to pool manager. It wasn't that tough of a job, but you do have to do a bit of poo shoveling in the bathrooms every night. Plus I learned management skills such as scheduling, dealing with conflicting personalities, public relations, etc.
In college I waited tables for two years. Definitely gives you a perspective on how hard people in the service industry work (well at least most).
Getting tired of waiting my last year of college I worked as a tire tech at Discount Tire. Talk about manual labor. Its a job when your on your feet every minute while on the clock lifting, moving, changing, filling, fixing very heavy tires. It definitely made me value my education, as I worked along side some career tire changers.
My kids will defintely be getting jobs once old enough.
I've worked at a video store, a Chuck E Cheese, and as a custodian at Disney World.
Those last two are true nightmare jobs, lemme tell you - I was the freakin' giant rat at Chuck's.
Couldn't agree more :D
Bad jobs during my youth? Ha!
How about working as a laborer in a cabinet shop after graduating from college?
That's right, a college degree (in the laughable liberal arts) got me a job making seven buck an hour stacking, sanding, staining, buffing, carrying, stacking, lifting, sanding, stacking and sealing load after load of wood.
And now, even that job would be a help. The construction business dissappeared in my area because of, well, those people in Aaron's book, so there's no more work to be had at the cabinet shop.
If I ever own a home (which is unlikely unless the market continues to tumble to the point where I can by a house with the few thousand bucks I have saved up) I made a promise to myself there'd be no wood in it. Aluminum, diamond plate, steel, whatever, just no wood.
I agree with a lot of what you say here. I actually had a job where I emptied toilets on a boat, so "pooh shoveling" is pretty close. I think the issue with the kid in the picture, though, is whether he is allowed to quit if he wants to and whether he is being treated fairly. I know "fairly" is a subjective term, but I was able to chose my pooh shoveling job and my boss treated me fairly - paid me well, provided a safe working environment, was not physically abusive, etc. The discussion changes quite a bit if the kid is not being treated fairly.
Actually, on a further note...
I think it's a bit of a misconception to believe that working hard or actually for something will automatically instill any sort of value on ..well, values. I've known too many liberal arts majors who put themselves through college through grit teeth and hard work, but who managed to do so with the belief that their employer was exploiting them and that there is such a thing as a "wage slave."
Understanding values, the value of work, and economics / capitalism (in as much as I understand them) seems to require a great deal of mental commitment to thought and to, most importantly, intellectual honesty.
I can tell you that back when I had strongly liberal ideas, I was more interested in being more intelligent than others (and demonstrating this) than I was about truth or honesty. I also did not believe in absolutes and had strong ideas about relativism.
It wasn't work that sorted this out - it was the act of studying economics and capitalism. Atlas Shrugged probably did the best job there - as many others have put it, "she (Ayn Rand) utterly and completely destroyed the foundations of my beliefs and rebuilt them on solid ground."
I'm sitting in an office at the DoJ right now. I took this job so I could pay my rent on my off campus apartment (I'm in college), despite the fact my dad said he had 0 problem paying for my apartment. I decided I didn't think it was appropriate to take a handout when I could fit a 20 hour a week, part-time job as a clerk, into my schedule.
My job isn't as bad as shoveling poo, but I take pride in the fact that I avoid taking welfare (from my father) when I have the ability to pay my own way. Even if it means I don't have time to do my school work during the school week and have to do it on Friday nights.
JR stole my line. I too grew up on a farm. When I decided I'd had enough of that I took a job at a printing plant. From 12 to 8 AM I picked up stacks of magazines out of a binding machine and stacked them on a pallet. Suddenly farming sounded great.
As for the kid in the picture: I too hope that he doesn't have to do it for the rest of his life. If his parents can get good jobs maybe he can afford to go to school. We are spoiled in America where the right to an education is taken for granted. In many parts of the world the future that concerns them is supper.
Ah yes, shoveling well rotten pig manure wasn't at all fun, especially on a hot day without any breeze - the methane, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia were awful. Fortunately that was a small barn with a handful of pigs.
Walking beans, picking rocks - so much fun. Picking sweet corn, peaches and apples. Never did detassel corn, but both of my kids did.
These days around here you can't even get immigrants (legal or otherwise) to do field work.
I moved up in the world to become a dishwasher/busboy, then a rent-a-cop security guard.
I too see the value of doing undesirable, menial work - we have so many kids that think society owes them a nice, clean job that pays $60K a year and have no concept of actually doing work or actually producing something.
Well, i guess i had it easy - i worked at my parents' shop when i was young - serving customers, making sandwiches, washing up, sweeping and mopping. Easier than shovelling s#$t for a living.
I still don't like child labour though - especially in the film and TV industries. They employ children so that they can make movies and TV shows like E.T., Harry Potter, and Two and a Half Men.
I mean, they even put babies to work in Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too! That's just obscene...
Age makes a big difference. I don't think kids younger than 10 or so should be expected to work for pay. Getting paid by your parents for doing exrra chores when you're younger than that is okay, but I don't think they should be expected to do real work.
And third world countries are a completely different issue. Often, children (and adults) are working under unsafe conditions, not learning anything, and working to the exculsion of school.
Junam
Junam
I complain about the fact that you mix "job" with "work" and that you want to force work into the job market and you would want to force people into providing value for an employer before they can work for themselves.
What if the kid went in the city dumb and sorted out metal parts and sold them at the recycling center ?
What if some kid goes into the wood and hunts squirrels and cooks them ?
Why must the value be supplied to others ? Why can't you work for yourself without being an employee, without a job, without earning money. Just produce value for yourself and by yourself that you will consume for yourself and by yourself.
That way, you keep 100% of the value that you create because you are the one consuming it directly. No taxation nor profit structure. No hierarchy, no HR, no management.
Really. Self production for self consumption is where we should go.
The market, because it is based on private property rights, requires that you first obtain permission before you can be productive and then it profits from your production.
I'd rather self production for self consumption.
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