WEBVTT

NOTE 34. What’s a Job Good For?

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What's a job good for?

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Most people say that a job is good for making money.

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So if you don't need money, what's the point?

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The fabled English aristocratic class of the late 19th and early 20th century apparently

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thought that way, if the caricatures painted by Jeeves and Wooster, Brideshead and the

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like have any truth to them.

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Their main job was getting dressed and undressed.

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It seems like young Americans are thinking the same way.

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Doug French drew my attention to some statistics from the Wall Street Journal on teenage employment

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that knocked me out.

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In 2000, slightly more than a third of 16 and 17-year-olds had jobs.

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Today, in 2011, it is 14 and 15 percent.

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These are shocking numbers.

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But in retrospect, I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to back them up.

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I was speaking for a group of 200 plus high school students, location I will not disclose,

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and I casually asked how many of them have worked in a retail environment, working directly

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with customers.

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Not a single hand went up.

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Shocked, I asked the question more broadly.

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How many have had a job that yielded a paycheck?

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What a hand went up!

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In talking to parents, it seems that a new attitude has taken hold among them.

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Their kids don't work.

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They are in school.

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They should spend their extra time doing sports and studying.

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Work is for the lower classes.

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What's to be gained?

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Putting the kids to work implies that the breadwinners in the household can't provide

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for their offspring.

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What are they going to do with the money they earn anyway?

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by more iPhone apps, and there's also the problem of legal restrictions.

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Hardly any 16-year-old is worth the prevailing minimum wage, which has risen dramatically

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over the last five years.

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No employer would choose a teen over an adult willing to do the same job for $7.25 an hour.

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Also, schools require all kinds of permission slips because of ghastly child labour laws

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and what employer wants to jump through those hoops?

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And it is ever harder to fire people you hire, so few are willing to take the risk of hiring

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kids in the first place.

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Faced with all these barriers, the culture has adapted.

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Since, as we know, no parent has ever made a bad choice for the life of their own beloved

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offspring, parents have just decided that working is for other people's kids, not theirs.

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And so fewer and fewer people know anything about the workplace.

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They will sit in desks and run around on fields until they are 24 years old, and then present

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themselves fully formed to waiting employers who will proceed to cough up as a reward for

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staying in school.

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Well, what's the loss?

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Let's talk about the loss by talking about what might be learned from a job that will

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go unlearned.

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There is the work ethic – a phrase that is battered around all the time, but what

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does it really mean?

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You have to actually work to acquire one.

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As innumerable titans of the Gilded Age attempted to tell us, no young person is born wanting

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to work, how do you learn to come to thrive on it?

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To have a work ethic means the willingness to experience discomfort on the way toward

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the completion of a job done with excellence.

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This doesn't come naturally.

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The natural thing is to stop doing what you are doing when it becomes something discomforting,

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or when more is expected than you want to give.

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But this approach goes nowhere.

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In fact, if this is your approach, you trim more and more until the point that you become

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a sofa slug, which pretty much describes a whole generation.

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I recall when I was ten or so working on a roofing job with my great uncle.

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It was in the middle of a boiling hot summer.

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We were balancing ourselves on a black slanted roof, banging nails into things.

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For about 30 minutes, I thought I was going to die.

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We continued working up there for hours and hours.

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Finally, he said, it was time to take a break.

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I shoved the garden hose in my mouth and swallowed what must have been a gallon.

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He went inside and drank a cup of coffee.

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Now that was inspiring.

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I have an early memory of my brother's first job on a construction crew.

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He came home the first day looking like a zombie.

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We spoke to him, but he could not speak back.

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He held onto the wall as he found his way to his room and collapsed.

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It was this way every day for weeks, and then suddenly he got the hang of it.

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He became a machine.

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This was one summer that gave him a lifetime work ethic.

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Other memories of my early jobs include repairing organ pipes in a high loft, crunching pigeon

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bones underfoot and wearing a protective mask, drilling water wells in the blazing sun, scrubbing

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honey off tables in a fish restaurant for which I served as a busboy, collecting paper

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plates from 500 tables after a lunch catered by the company that hired me as a gopher,

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Fighting off mobs of people who were trying to buy the $10 pants that went viral in a

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retail outlet.

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Feeling terror that the piano I was moving up a flight of stairs would double back and

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crush me.

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Picking up tiny pins on dressing room floors in a department store.

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Learning to run the floor-waxing machine in the China department and having later nightmares

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that I hit an entire shelf of fine crystal.

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You quickly learn, in any job, and especially low-paying ones, that it hurts to work, physically

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and mentally.

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You must focus intensely, for longer than you really want to.

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You do things you don't like.

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You can find every excuse to drift off, but you can't, because there are tasks that must

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be done.

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And if it is the right kind of job, if you don't do the task, it doesn't get done, and

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And then everyone up and down the line that depends on that task finds their tasks are

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harder, and so everyone hates you.

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If you are cleaning bathrooms, you must make sure there is toilet paper there, else customers

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are going to be very unhappy.

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If you are frying fish, you have to change the grease, or else you will destroy the whole

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business.

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If you are moving a fence, you have to dig deep holes, or it will fall down in six months,

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and so on.

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You learn to avoid these bad results in the only possible way – complete the task.

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We are not born into this world of plenty, understanding that there is a direct relationship

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between what we do and what the consequences are.

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Quite the opposite, the very definition of immaturity is failing to take responsibility,

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as our mother has always said.

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Well, how do we learn about this connection between our actions and the results?

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There is no better place than the workplace, or commerce generally.

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We work, we see the results, and we are paid.

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This is direct.

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It is beautiful.

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It emblazons on the brain the relationship between actions and results.

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School doesn't always teach us this.

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And besides, the action in school is pretty limited.

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It is about studying, which too often means mimicking what the assigned authority says.

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In real work, you have to be creative.

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You exercise volitional control over your body and what it does, and you see the results.

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And the results are not abstractions like A's, B's and C's, but very material – dollars

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and Sense that can be used to acquire anything. And this reward comes from using the whole

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of yourself in a productive activity. As John Wanamaker, the pioneer of marketing,

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said, a well-ordered modern retail store is the means of education in spelling, writing,

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English language, system and method. Thus, it becomes to the ambitious and serious employees

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in a small way, a university, in which character is broadened by intelligent instruction, practically

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applied.

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That's it.

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Work is like university, a real university that builds up a person and makes him or her

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better than he or she would otherwise be.

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What you get out of a job is all about what you bring to the job, and what you bring must

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must be more valuable to the employer than what you take out.

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I recall some bum who once worked with me who snarled once, no way am I straightening

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ties for minimum wage.

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Very interesting perspective.

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He wanted more money to do more work.

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But that's not the way it works.

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You have to do more work in order to get more money.

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You must provide more value than you extract in order to advance.

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Work, and I should specify that I mean private sector work, is the best way to learn this

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hugely valuable lesson and carry it with you your entire life.

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This is surely a feature of what we call the work ethic.

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A part of this means acquiring a sense of the need to serve others in order to gain

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for your service.

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This is the very essence of a job, whether it is frying up potatoes, crushing boxes out

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back or planting shrubbery.

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You are always doing something for someone else.

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If you do enough of this, you begin to make this need to serve part of your mental outlook.

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I've never understood the celebration of volunteering for a soup kitchen or whatever.

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Most of the customers are not grateful, and the employees are mostly self-congratulatory

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about their wonderful, pious deeds.

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Far better would be, for example, a fast food restaurant where people pay and the workers

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are truly serving others in their own self-interest.

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This is the ideal.

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This is the setting where true virtues are learned.

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You might say, oh, this whole world of commercial life is the big phony.

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The service providers pretend to like customers because the business wants money and the customer

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is faking it too.

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You could say that, but then there is this.

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If we behave a certain way all the time for years, we might eventually find that our minds

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conform.

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We become sincere.

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We begin to value others for what they do and give.

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We learn how to get along, how to appreciate differences among people, how to look for

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unique qualities in others and see their merit.

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Someone once said that a capitalist society is a friendly society.

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This is not surprising at all, since the essence of capitalism is mutual service, cooperation

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and trade to the betterment of the whole.

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To take part in that reshapes who we are.

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It makes us better people.

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Contrast this with the blasé existence of desk sitting, couch potatoing or working in

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the public sector.

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They don't call it going postal for nothing.

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It's the private sector and its commercial ethos that can give us that thing we need

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Need Most, Self-Improvement

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What strikes you immediately, about jobs and commerce especially, is how forward-looking

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they are.

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It takes some getting used to.

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If you had a bad day without many customers and sales, there is always another day.

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If you had a good day, there is another day coming, and you can never be sure of how it

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will go.

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So you learn to live in a world in which bygones are bygones, and the future is always uncertain

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In commerce, there are no grudges, because today's seeming enemy could be tomorrow's

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customer, co-worker or business partner.

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The past is merely an assembly of passing data, it is the future where the action and

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excitement are.

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And in this way, a job in commerce is completely different from the world of sloth, in which

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Neither past nor future matter or school where the past is stockpiled and never goes away.

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With a job in commerce, you have your finger on the pulse of life itself, the thing that

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is active, moving, growing and reflective of changing social values and interests.

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You have something that becomes you, something that gives you bragging rights, something

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that connects you to others.

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You become defined, skilled, useful, experienced.

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You have stories.

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You are in some measure liberated from the authority structures you inherit from birth

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and growing up and adopt new ones of your own choosing.

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Now, consider all of this and imagine whether teens really are better off not working.

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Research has demonstrated that retirement in general leads to a 5-16% increase in difficulties

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associated with mobility and daily activities, a 5-6% increase in illness conditions, and

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6-9% decline in mental health over an average post-retirement period of six years.

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And this is after a lifetime of work.

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The effects on the mind are much worse with the young who have never developed the mental

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habits that come with working.

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Do we really want to deny all of this to an entire generation, and then expect these people

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to just leap into the real world at the age of 24 or so, fully formed?

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They will not be formed.

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They will not be ready.

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They will be less useful, less skilled, less productive, less shaped in their character,

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less ready to be free and responsible.

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Sorry, but languishing and pretending to study aren't substitutes.