Something we’ve talked about here since almost the beginning of the blog, as we’ll point out later. But we’re going to keep on till people start understanding. One who does is Paula Boyard writing on PJ Media, about a book by Rory Groves, called Durable Trades: Family-Centered Economies that Have Stood the Test of Time. It sounds very interesting.
Durable Trades is more than a career guide; it’s a treatise on why certain professions have always been necessary and what makes a career fulfilling. It is also an argument for a return to family-centered economies rather than a focus on climbing the career ladder. In the foreword to the book, Dr. Allan C. Carlson explains, “While almost every other ‘career book’ buys into the argument that workers will need to completely retrain every five to seven years just to keep a job, this author proves that there are many rich and rewarding forms of labor with astonishing records of durability.”
Groves, a computer scientist turned homesteader, changed professions mid-career out of a desire to spend more of his time “building things that will last.” As a former computer scientist, the author admits that he has seen his share of “obsolescence.”
“Nothing can be more temporary than what comes out of Silicon Valley,” he adds. “We live in a time when companies employ ‘planned obsolescence’ to make sure things they produce wear out and need to be replaced, so we need to keep earning money to buy the replacements.”
Sound familiar? It surely does to me. I recommend the article (and the book is now on my book list).
I sort of split the difference, my trade(s) are pretty durable, as an electrician, specializing in controls and agricultural work, and as a power lineman. Both careers that I learned from my dad as he learned them from his dad, but they do change almost constantly as technology develops. I’m sure dad couldn’t have coped with modern industrial controls, let alone grampa, and yet we apply the exact same principles and skills as they did, but computers are considerably more complex to work with than relays were, but they do the same thing in the last analysis.
So we’ve been playing with controlled lightning sin before the turn of the Twentieth Century. It ain’t killed us yet, although my family ended up in Iowa and then Indiana after my Uncle Sid got burned and burned a pole back in the early thirties. Well, the old rule was that if you lived, you got promoted, and so he did, eventually to district manager for Northern States Power. How it was in an industry where fully half of all lineman died on the job, something else that has changed.
The fly in the ointment was that meant dad had to find a new job. Life in the big city, so to speak, because it was probably the best thing that ever happened to dad. You see it became a rung as he too climbed into management, first as a project manager and then as a general manager. If he didn’t know the system and have the skills that would never have happened.
And that’s where our second story picks up. Mike Rowe was promoting his new Discovery Channel show, Six Degrees, on Fox Business. Margot Cleveland of The Federalist tells us that he said this.
I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder.
They are indeed. Margot talks about her first job, cleaning toilets for minimum wage ($3.35/hr in her case) Mine was as a rodman on dad’s company engineering crew (it was an even dollar an hour in those days), but in fact, in a lesson delayed gratification I got a bit of spending money, but other than that I didn’t get paid at all, but I would have no bills for college. A fair trade, I think.
But the thing is, I got my journeyman lineman card on my eighteenth birthday, it said I was qualified to work distribution ‘hot’. But it was a lot easier to get work back then as an electrician so I went into that business. In not too many years, as the steel mills closed, I was competing with laid-off mill electricians making spending money without insurance of any other overhead.
That didn’t work so well, so I hired on as a hot lineman with a line contractor, and that paid the bills for some years until after an ice storm I hired in to do ag controls. See how that progresses. when one avenue closed, I found another rung that was open. Gaps were filled with self-employment, which is always available if you do a good job at a reasonable price. Anything at all can be a rung and should be. Sure I spent a few years ‘booming’ as it’s called in my trade, but I was single and it was rather enjoyable to move around.
But back to what Margot writes:
My story is not an isolated one, but I also recognize it is not universal, which is why policy and policy debates should not focus on the anecdotal but the reality of economics and unintended consequences. Rowe raised those points, and he is correct.
Minimum-wage jobs are rungs, and if the government offers an “artificially high wage for unskilled jobs,” it takes away the incentives for “more people to learn a skill that’s actually in demand” and are careers that do support families. That reality is no less true just because Rowe once sang opera.
She is correct, of course.
And those early rungs are important, back when NEO was only a few months old, I talked about what a young person learned working at McDonald’s for minimum wages. here is a bit of it.
First, you’re going to learn to get to work on time, I know you should have learned that at home or in school but, you had best learn it somewhere and here you get paid to show up.
Then you are going to be part of a team, working towards a common goal.
You are going to learn how to handle food without contaminating it.
You might even learn how to make change.
You will learn how to deal with people, even the difficult ones. And be pleasant while doing so.
These are all life lessons, and there are others,that you will need throughout your life in our society. And you will probably learn to live within a budget, cause you surely aren’t going to get rich on this job.
But, if you’re good at it, you can get into management, which is not a bad career at all, it even pays pretty well.
That puts a whole different light on that despised job doesn’t it? I wish the people who apply for jobs with me, knew all that, as well as my social friends.
And another thing, you will learn the pride of earning your money instead of begging or stealing it. And that’s the best lesson of all.
And those are all lessons you need to function in society, that’s why Micky D’s was the first rung on the ladder for so many that have succeeded very well. And by the way, with a $15/hr minimum wage, those jobs are going to be scarce as hen’s teeth.
