Posted on 09/20/2014 6:09:16 AM PDT by rktman
Way back in about 1987, I was working as a projects coordinator for a male-dominated branch of a huge corporation. About twice a year the company would fly us down to Los Angeles for two days of meetings. Normally these were grave, serious sessions full of graphs and flowcharts and vocabulary words like “parameter” and “synergy.” But one year, in a move straight out of a Dilbert cartoon, we were required to sit through a motivational seminar on corporate leadership and team building.
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320 million Americans -- exactly how many of them are capable of providing really useful labor? And how much actual labor does society really need??
I think (like it or not) "work" is not going to be be an option for a large chunk of society. We really do need to think about social and psychological aspects of that. If nothing else, we should look to Ferguson and ask, "Are a lot of bored, angry people with nothing useful to do a good thing to have?"
I support the idea of exploring what to do with people who are flat-out unemployed. Forever.
When I was a kid in the mid-60’s I would wonder what people would do for a living when robots did everything, even building and maintaining the robots.
I figured out at around the turn of the century that THIS kind of stuff is what we would do. Basically, most of what people do for money is pointless and irrelevant, but at least they are doing SOMETHING to earn their pay. And the only people doing anything with real purpose are the self employed.
This is ignoring the spiritual implications, of course.
I also wonder what would happen if we had vastly improved education at the high school level and people instilled with a desire to work and make their own way in the world. Under current conditions there certainly would not be enough actual jobs to go around. But if we had freer markets, no Obamacare, less regulation and fewer incentives for idleness, would we be able to employ significantly more people? I have some doubts. How does it work in Hong Kong?
The Amish might be on the right path if we find our society had much less need for workers. Work is a good thing. Paper shuffling in a cubicle is one kind of work (but it's pointless). A bit of farming for your family is another kind of work (and much less pointless).
***When I was a kid in the mid-60’s***
My 1962 teachers said the future work week would be 35 hours or less so all people jobs.
I found there is not enough money working straight time. In the last 31 years of my work life I only missed two days of overtime.
My dad always said a man could get by on straight time, but he could live well on OVERTIME!
He was correct, but he didn’t take his own advice and moved to a low agricultural starvation wage area of the USA.
One of the benefits of retirement is that I’ll no longer have to sit through (maybe) boring sessions and break out sessions”, “team building”, “focus groups”, “diversity instructions”, inclusiveness training”, “gender focus”, “quality circles”, etc., etc., etc. That is unless social security somehow finds a way to implement such BS in order for you to receive your SS check. Glad to be retired? You betcha.”
Amen brother.
The only thing I miss re the above was the fun of throwing reality into these bs sessions/discussions.
The company, I spent close to 3 decades with, had a little over a 1,000 sales reps. The reality there was about 100 of us carried the rest of the reps/the company re actual sales.
Most of us in that 10% developed a hard skin and a sense of reality that let our supervisors and theirs and the top dogs, know that without us the company would go belly up. My private discussion with the flag raisers, was simple: Don’t po us/me nor make u/mes depressed. Leave us alone to do our jobs. If you don’t leave us alone, you will not have a job. That worked for close to 30 years, until I got a great early retirement offer. About half of the good 100 reps took the early retirement.
Shortly after the first batch of the good reps left, the home office got rid of the good people inside, who worked with the good reps. One day the good home office people showed up for work and were met at the security gate. Then they were told to drive to another parking lot, check in with guards at the gate and stay in their cars. Shortly after they checked in they were escorted by security guards into trailers, to receive a Kinko’ paper box with their personal belongings and sign papers that they were no longer with the company.
Then, they were escorted by the security people, back to their vehicles and led out of the parking lot. The local police had set up no parking zones 2-3 blocks from the entrances. So if they wanted to talk to a fellow fired peer, they had to drive down the street into a not very nice neighborhood.
All of those escorted off the property, had been to several if not dozens of the above require motivational training programs. It really helped them. (Sarcasm)
Several hundred of the remaining sales reps were terminated plus a division of about 200 reps, who never should have been hired. We joked that they were the inadequate PC sales division. They were the equal opportunity hires. Their training was basically the Rah/Rah bs.
More massive cuts in the sales force followed on a regular basis. The few good reps still there ended up with impossible quotas and bs from psycho managers. They either left or became depressed and worthless sales reps.
The company in spite of vast capital resources closed its doors in a little over a decade after many of us left. The good reps who stayed carried the losers until they had enough and left.
The homesteading you describe is great as a hobby, but if it actually replaces those pointless paper shuffling jobs, you can expect a precipitous drop in at least our traditional standard of living.
That's John Galt and the Twentieth Centiry Motor Company right there. Only, in "Atlas Shrugged", the unproductive people were not fired. They were kept on the payroll (as a kindness) and the few productive people had to work harder to support them. Bit by bit the productive people decided to be just as unproductive as the rest. John Galt was one of the few who actually "quit".
We already have a vastly improved education at the high school level - if the students wanted to take advantage of it. Compare the resources of a one-room schoolhouse with the resources of a single computer.
What we don't have is a majority of the population with a desire to learn and make their own way in the world. Granted, some of them don't have the intellectual ability but mainly it's lack of motivation. Why work when the government will take care of you.
There are a LOT of people "working" who are not really contributing to our traditional standard of living.
The conspicuous consumption of the Kardashian Age is not a good thing. We consume more than we produce.
So, yes, I'm not at all opposed to some change in our current way of life. Much of the work that people do is barely work at all.
I see overtime as slavery. I work it from time to time, but only from time to time. I’m an IT contractor so straight time is more than enough to live comfortably, but we all want more.
Sadly...
Sales and marketing is only pointless for someone who doesn’t believe in or understand our free enterprise system at all.
Sure, we’ve got loads of counterproductive government-created bureaucracy, but that’s a different issue.
I’m not in favor of conspicuous consumption, but I want my fellow countrymen to have the freedom to so indulge if that’s what they want to do.
And, of course, cutting productivity is not a great way to narrow the divide between consumption and production.
All of you have good questions and suggestions. Hopefully, your innate wisdom and common sense has been passed on to your younger clan members.
We may be beyond salvaging 50% more or less of the non workers in America, after decades of lousy schools from Jr High to High, to community Colleges and regular Universities.
For decades they haven’t taught our children the basic math, history, English and problem solving processes and have pushed new math, second languages not English and zip re problem solving. Few if any high school grads and college grads have the ability to work, learn and earn a living. This will get worse as the Core bs becomes more entrenched like a deadly cancer.
The hi tech companies out here in N Californicator land, if a person isn’t a Stanford honors grad aren’t really looking for people with instant unemployment degrees. They are sending their recruiters to identify middle and high school students good in math, English and the ability to think attending events like ‘Oddessey of the Mind’and the Math Olympics. Then, they will offer them internships and modified work programs to check them out. Stanford recruiters are at these events with other Silicon valley companies.
Even NSA/CIA has its spooks at these events to identify the good students. These scouts also attend middle school and high school honor student events to identify future hires.
Actually, in the Bay area, these techniques by the tech companies to identify future hires before they are out of high school has been going on for decades. We know several 30-40 something people who interned in high school with a tech company and later went to work for them. A couple of them got advanced degrees while working as the companies brought in the professors for them and a few peers.
Google execs have basically said that high SAT’s scores and degrees are not necessary for their top people.
My wife has a 40 something relative without a college degree, who is excellent in math, computer use and automobiles. He has worked off an on with a Japanese/American auto company. For decades he spends about as much time going to “learn” about how to improve, fix and remove bugs from the vehicles his company makes. He is basically on his own and really works for himself not some ah. The ah’s are why he has quit work with this company a few times. The ah’s have been fired after he quit, and he got hired back at a high wage and better working conditions. He could be a proto type or a role model for future hands on techies in the real world.
So we may end up with about 50% of our people permanently unemployed, using their EBT cards to buy food, I phones and dope to keep them happy. Many will be failures to launch and will live with their parents or other relatives. Others will find themselves in small so called apartments if they are lucky.
Hey! We’re back to THE PURPOSE OF LIFE AND WORK DEBATE.
And I guarantee some foreign despot will look at America, full of lazy doped up losers, and realize that America is there for the taking.
Thanks to mucho, mucho overtime which I invested, I was able to retire a 50 instead of 65. It took me three years to convince my wife to retire also. She loved her job. A year later she was glad that she retired too.
” I guarantee some foreign despot will look at America, full of lazy doped up losers, and realize that America is there for the taking.”
They made that mistake after 8 years of the Clintoons and gave us 9/11.
One can only imagine what they have planned for us now after 6 years of Obozo.
No need to explore the idea...Royal Meeker under Woodrow Wilson already determined what to do with them and why we (the elites) need a minimum wage...neither have anything to do with teaching people the value of a work ethic/creativity.
“It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work… better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.” - Royal Meeker, U.S. Commissioner of Labor, under Woodrow Wilson
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