Website owner: James Miller
“Dead-End” Jobs
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 42 - 44
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“Dead-End” Jobs
When was the last time you were in a fast food restaurant, without seeing a "help wanted" sign?
The fast food places I go into, around the country, always seem to be trying to hire somebody. Yet our deep thinkers and moral leaders tell us that people are in soup lines because they just can't find a job.
Working in a fast food restaurant is supposed to be a "dead-end" job. But that's not how the people who work there see it.
A recent study of more than 7,000 people who worked in fast food restaurants showed that most of them saw it as a step toward something better. Most of these people were young (under 20) and worked part-time.
Typically they had worked in fast food places less than two years, so this was not their career. But 90 percent of them said that the job helped them learn how to deal with people and improved their ability to work with others.
Blacks and Hispanics constituted about one-fifth of those fast food employees. These were precisely the people who most felt that the job helped them to become punctual, to improve their grooming, and gave them a sense of the importance of taking care of their money.
Blacks and Hispanics were also more likely than whites to think in terms of wanting to become a manager of a fast food restaurant.
Apparently they don't buy the "dead-end" talk that is so fashionable among intellectuals.
Watching some of the minority youngsters behind the counter at a fast food place near me is an upbeat experience. They are all business. They speak straight English. They are not the kind of wisecracking smart Alecks so popular on television.
The great majority of these youngsters will not stay in fast food places the rest of their lives. But what these jobs give them is a foundation of work habits, experience, and references.
In the long run, these are far more important than the paychecks they receive today.
The positive effects of these kinds of jobs are in sharp contrast with the disastrous effects of government job training programs and make-work projects. Youngsters from these programs often fail to get jobs or to hold on to them when they do.
Why the difference?
Government make-work programs are phoney. They teach people to be hustlers, not workers. They accept standards of behavior—and misbehavior—that no employer can accept, if he intends to run his business like a business.
The main thrust of many governmental programs for minorities seems to be to reach the hoodlum, the drug addict, the teenage mother. What happens to the decent people who are struggling to better themselves doesn't seem to matter very much.
We have so overdosed on sociology and media images that it is easy to forget that most people are decent people, even in high-crime neighborhoods. Moreover, these are the kinds of people who are the hope of the future. They are routinely ignored by the government and by deep thinkers.
A couple of years ago, an elderly member of my family passed out on the street in the Bronx. It happened to be a Puerto Rican neighborhood. As she lay there unconscious, her pocket book lying open beside her, people in the neighborhood came to her rescue.
Some directed the traffic around her. Others went to get water. Someone else called an ambulance. Another person held her pocket book and then returned it to her. Not a penny was missing.
Why not build on the decency that is there, instead of pouring money down a rathole trying to "rehabilitate" hoodlums? Why not make it easier for ghetto youngsters to get jobs instead of easier for hustlers to get handouts?
It is slowly beginning to dawn on people that minimum wage laws price many youngsters out of a job—and lenient judges make crime a more attractive alternative. Add the irresponsible talk disdaining "menial" and "dead-end" jobs, and it is almost a miracle that there are still large numbers of minority youngsters out there playing it straight and making money the old-fashioned way.
Those hard-working youngsters are not headed for any dead-end. They are going to make it.
But our society may be headed for a dead-end in the long run if we don't start backing up the decent people, of all ages and races, instead of embracing the punks and bums who seem to fascinate deep thinkers in the media and academia.
—May 20, 1985
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