Posted on 07/04/2014 11:33:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
While being interviewed by Parade magazine, President and Mrs. Obama said that they would like for their daughters to have the experience of working at minimum wage jobs. Hear! Hear!
In his wise book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide for Getting Ahead, Charles Murray advises the gilded youth of today, more isolated from what Episcopalians used to call “all sorts and conditions of men” than their counterparts in previous generations, to seek out summer jobs that will introduce them to people they might not ordinarily get to know. Such jobs can be transformative. “Once you have been a server in a restaurant,” Murray writes, “you will never again look at dining in a restaurant as you did before you were a server.”
The target audience for Murray’s book is the kind of young person who has excellent educational credentials and is more likely to land a summer job in a think tank or on Capitol Hill or as personal assistant to a Hollywood mogul than at a McDonald’s—in other words, the Obama daughters a few years hence.
It must be noted that Sasha and Malia's Dad has a very limited view of people who work at jobs outside his own golden orbit. “Every little girl I meet out there,” President Obama told Parade, “I think about Malia and Sasha, and the notion that they’d be treated differently, trapped, not paid enough, having to settle for a raw deal on the job, having to scramble between taking care of kids, taking care of an aging parent, being single moms like my mom was and going to school and work at the same time, then having to come home and cook.”
If Malia and Sasha go into their minimum wage jobs with open hearts and minds, they can learn a great deal and maybe even help Dad get a better picture of life in these United States.
First, I hope Sasha and Malia will notice that most workers the Obama daughters meet are glad to have their jobs, which are becoming scarcer and scarcer thanks to Dad’s economic policies. Many of their colleagues will use the skills acquired at these jobs to move up the ladder to a better paying job.
These low-skilled workers may not deliver homilies on the dignity of work, but, if the Obama girls are observant, they will see that these jobs do confer dignity. Some of their colleagues could probably do just as well financially going on disability, but they know that dependence is a dead end, while work is a path to a better future, no matter how onerous and often tedious the job is on a daily basis. One of the refrains when welfare was being reformed in the 1990s, was this from disgruntled people who frankly preferred welfare to work: What do you expect me to do, work at McDonald’s?
Well, yeah—as did Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who likes to brag that he learned to crack eggs with one hand while working at McDonald's, singer Macy Gray, who called the McDonald’s gig her “first big break,” according a CBS News report, and Jay Leno. Not everybody who works a minimum wage job at McDonald’s is going to scale the heights but all have the opportunity to move onto something that pays more, if they work hard, show up, and apply themselves. Oh, and if they don’t view themselves as “trapped, not paid enough, having to settle for a raw deal on the job,” as Sasha and Malia’s father described his take on the minimum wage job.
While raising the minimum wage is generally portrayed as a way to help low-skilled workers, Malia and Sasha, if they get real minimum wage jobs, might recognize that some of the people they meet would face unemployment if the minimum wage is hiked. It will be good that these people aren’t just statistics to Malia and Sasha but rather living and breathing people who were getting a toehold in the world of work and had the opportunity to come to work every day and build their skills.
Some of Sasha's and Malia's minimum wage coworkers, of course, would benefit from a minimum wage hike, but let’s hope that Malia and Sasha notice that these men and women are the employees who have honed their skills and thus were likely to move up anyway, and it’s those without skills who are the most likely to be harmed. That includes many of their contemporaries in age. Fewer and fewer young Americans have the opportunity to work. That’s a big set back for those teens, who will have a harder time getting a job without such critical skill-building opportunities.
That’s the real problem, especially since what creates poverty is not working full-time at a low-paying job, but not working at all. As my colleague Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum, recently has pointed out, researchers using twenty years of Census date found that among workers sixteen and older who are living in poverty, the problem isn’t the minimum wage—it was no wage. Only 9 percent of those living in poverty had full-time work year around, while 67 percent didn’t work at all. If Sasha and Malia talk to their coworkers, they’ll no doubt hear personal stories that, if the girls are open to new ideas, show them that a job—almost any job—is the best way out of poverty.
Life is unfair and, yes, some people do get stuck in minimum wage jobs. I know that Malia and Sasha will be able to see these people sympathetically and I hope they will view them not as unfortunates, but as people who are working heroically to support their families in tough situations. You can learn lots more than how to crack an egg with one hand if you mingle with your fellow Americans on the job. Who knows? Maybe the Obama girls will build a business one day and chalk it all up to the halcyon days at McDonald's.
Minimum wages jobs for their little plants! That’s really funny.
Along with Hillary “Nobody Seen The Trubbles I Seen” Clinton, the Obamas are the biggest phonies in America.
What a bunch of horse manure.
Question — will Hobby Lobby be praised by the liberals, for literally putting their money where their mouth is, by raising the minimum wages they pay to their hired help?????
Or will the liberals continue the screed that Hobby Lobby is evil because of the Supreme Court case?
I’ve heard that liberals plan to give Hobby Lobby the Chick Fil A treatment. We’ll see what happens. Chick Fil A is still doing well, from what I hear. Perhaps a liberal boycott against Hobby Lobby will also falter.
Do liberals even do arts and crafts projects, where they would go to a store such as Hobby Lobby in the first place?
Realistically would have to happen after their White House years are over. Presidential kids don’t have Secret Service protection after the presidential term is over, do they?
The Obama’s intentions behind this choice are good... much better than having a talentless daughter make $600,000 a year working for NBC....
$14.50 for full-time employees, IIRC.
Hell, I did work around the house and for my family for free. My dad thought Labor Day meant you put in 16 hours instead of 8 or it would have been called No Labor Day.
Commie thought through and through.
It’s like Mao making all the urban students go to the country to learn how the peasants lived.
I sure wouldn’t want them working in my establishment!!!! This of the political correctness of all involved and the pressure the Feds would bring to your world - it would be like living under an electron microscope.
sure. send them to the US southern border to change diapers. Or they can stay in DC and do that in the Senate.
Any day spent in honest work is a day more than their parents have done.
Not sure. Maybe for X number of years after the parent is out of office. Think they even repealed lifetime for POTI (during Klinton’s term, I think).
Hahahaha, as if they will ever work a day in their lives!
The average hourly wage for Walmart employees is $12.00 p/h. I read that on their web site some time ago and don’t think they’d open themselves up to public scrutiny and doubt by advertising it if it weren’t true.
Yes, they could learn those are the only jobs available.
The oldest one is working with Steven Spielberg this summer. Probably living with his family too! Those poor people you know!!
Send them to Alabama and sign them up as field hands.
It will never happen unless every single thing done, every person encountered and action performed is pre-scripted and pre-approved by Moms Mabley and Valery G. Even if the girls want to ‘try it rough’, they may have to wait till 2017, then go under assumed names, with Lo-Fo hairstyles like Sheila Jackson Lee’s hair turban. They may like and accept their lot of being treated like royalty (for now).
GAYTUS and TRANNUS using their kids in the DC Kabuki theater.
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