By Holly the Assistant
I’ve been traveling a fair bit to conventions the last couple years with my elderly mother, and have gotten to see a fair bit of our great country from the non-local perspective. By and large, hotels have someone of Indian subcontinent ethnicity or some African ethnicity at the desk, and the rest of the staff is in the American Indian-to-Hispanic range, and very much NOT English speaking. Whether we’re in the Big Midwestern City, the Small Midwestern Town, the Western Resort Town . . . but last week we ended up in a Small Western University Town, and staffing was very different.
This particular university town is one I’m pretty familiar with. It runs about 20,000 people when school is in session, and half that when school is not. The university also hosts a very large and famous festival during the school year, now honoring one of the major contributors to the school, but during his life, he attended right up until the last year (and I got to meet him). For two weeks in the winter, the entire world shows up. The local hotels are definitely not resort quality, but they don’t belong in such a small town, either. Other than that event and graduation, they look to fill their rooms by hosting whatever conventions they can attract, and they’re pretty good at doing that.
The worker population at those hotels reflects exactly the local demographics. European ancestry, that American Indian-to-Hispanic–but these are all native English speakers level fluency–and a small smattering of other. Front Desk/Housekeeping the day we checked in said she was in the Large Animal Veterinary program.
Americans will take these jobs, if they are allowed to. American university students will take these jobs. Americans who have every expectation of rising far, both in social standing and in income bracket, beyond this work, will take these jobs. They won’t stay there for thirty years: the young lady I talked to would much rather treat sick calves, but they’ll take them and work at them. Hard. That hotel was as clean or cleaner than any of the others, the breakfast prep area was clean (and they had the door open so we could see them breaking the eggs to scramble, unlike the other hotels), their computer system at the front desk was no worse, and they were pleasant and hospitable.
Meanwhile, my own young adult children have been working, not in hotels, but in similar types of low paying low prestige jobs, while working on their own plans for life improvement. Food, mostly. They don’t intend to stay there for a career, but it gets their bills paid (because they know how to be frugal) and builds their savings for the next step.
But I’m noticing that a lot of American parents are trying to protect their kids from those low-paid and unpleasant jobs. Not so much in my region, where half the population farms or ranches, and young adults work on a family corporation owned farm or ranch, or if old enough legally for the neighbor’s ranch. But folks in other regions. And more here every year. “Well, Matt can’t get a job because he has travel soccer.” Don’t do that to your kids, please. My oldest had ballet (which was more hours than his travel sports friends per week) and got a grocery clerk job at sixteen. They worked with him on scheduling. Mostly. And when they didn’t, he learned how to leave a job and find another.
You learn something from those low level jobs that you can’t learn from sports, arts, and other paid-for activities, that you can’t learn from school. Some of the most wildly successful adults I know came from families so poor their parents took their income for the family when they worked as teens, decades ago. The scramble, the hustle, the knowledge that if one job fails another can be found, showing up on time, when they have to pay you and for what, you can’t learn that from an activity your parents pay for you to be part of, or that the government mandates you participate in.
American teens and early twenties are willing to do those jobs, if they’re allowed to. Don’t say “We need immigrants because Americans won’t work.” That’s blatantly untrue. When they’re allowed to, Americans will work. (Americans will insist on being paid fairly according to law, and on safety, and on breaks, and you can’t keep their passport so they can’t leave, but we DO have laws about those things.) If you want young adults to not get into illegal activities to make money, give them legal jobs. Let the high schoolers have jobs even when they’re failing class: not working won’t make them care more about school, working will. Let them work on non-family-owned farms, which is currently illegal in much if not all of the country. Let the junior high and middle schoolers work. Sure, limit their hours, but let them have actual show up to and get paid jobs after school a couple days a week and on weekends. There is not one thing about running a cash register that the average twelve year old cannot do successfully and safely.
Get the government out of the way of Americans working. Get social class out of the way of young Americans working.
We’ll all be better off for it in the long run, and the kids these days will be better off for it in the very short run.
According To Hoyt 
c4c
LikeLike
Absolutely. Working got me out of feeling sorry for myself while I was fighting cancer!
LikeLike
I wanted to get my kids working for a second cousin’s produce business but she couldn’t hire them because of no child labor provisions in her contract with a grocery store chain. They did work as receptionists at a local car dealership where their aunt worked. Funniest thing I heard about that was when #1 left for college, people at dealership said they knew what to expect from #2; no, no you didn’t.
LikeLike
I always wonder why some states, businesses, and counties define “child labor” as 18 and under, others 16 and under, one I saw was 21 and under [seriously?!?] without alcohol* being a consideration. Depending on the state, you can work on a direct relative’s** farm from age 12, but not on anyone else’s farm. Another well-meaning concept that results in a mess.
*Some places don’t allow under 21 to even carry booze from the bar to a customer’s table, so the restaurants and so on won’t hire under 21 because it makes staffing and service too complicated.
**Parent, grandparent, sibling, sometimes aunt/uncle.
LikeLike
I remember a comment in Freakonomics. They were interviewing drug dealers. A drug dealer found out they were connected to the University system and said that he had a cousin who was a janitor there and could they, the researchers hook him, the dealer up also because his cousin was doing great.
LikeLike
The average drug dealer still lives with his mother.
It’s like writing, acting, and academics: a very few superstars do very, very well, and the dream of being one draws all sorts of people to hold down the low-level ill-paid jobs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And, the average drug dealer makes about as much as a job at McDonald’s – this is known because many drug dealers actually do work in fast-food jobs. [Levitt & Venkatesh (2000)] Until those jobs are taken by AI, I suppose.
I went to boarding high school, so no jobs during the school year, and no connections to the 3 different places my parents lived while I was in HS, so no summer jobs, either.
Did have a couple of on-campus jobs as an undergrad the first time, and was a computer lab monitor/troubleshooter during my nursing degree.
LikeLike
I never worked fast food. I very briefly worked one job mostly in the back of a grocery store, though, and endeavored forever after to avoid stinky jobs.
LikeLike
I worked at MacD’s the summer of ’69. (Swing shift, so the Apollo 11 landing was radio only.) Learned a bit, learned to hate Big Macs, but could appreciate good fries. (We started from potatoes and did it all. Properly cooked and salted, perfection.)
When the school year started, I heard from the hardware store I previously applied for. Much better job. Did that senior year until it was time to go to college. Had a couple of different summer jobs (office-ish* in a steel supply outfit for two years, then an intern** at Big Electronics Firm before senior year, and over the Christmas/semester break).
(*) Had to mark steel in the warehouse (3/4″ plate overhead carried by traveling cranes got me twitchy), and once I had to deliver some custom “U” shapes to a job a few hundred miles away.
(**) Research lab. I did electronics assembly; die attach, wire bond and so on, plus “Hey, let’s have RC do this.” Winding a coil around a vacuum chamber bell jar was crazy…
LikeLike
I remember a comment in Freakonomics. They were interviewing drug dealers. A drug dealer found out they were connected to the University system and said that he had a cousin who was a janitor there and could they, the researchers hook him, the dealer up also because his cousin was doing great.
LikeLike
I remember a comment in Freakonomics. They were interviewing drug dealers. A drug dealer found out they were connected to the University system and said that he had a cousin who was a janitor there and could they, the researchers hook him, the dealer up also because his cousin was doing great.
LikeLike
Work is absolutely necessary to support civilization. Preventing people from working destroys civilization. So does punishing workers by taking their money, and rewarding the indolent by giving it to them.
Work teaches five important lessons:
* Show up for work
* On time
* Every day
* Sober, and
* DO THE JOB.
It’s depressing how many ‘adults’ can’t manage to meet those simple requirements.
LikeLiked by 3 people
You forgot #6, “they will in fact notice you took it.”
LikeLike
Even though I knew intellectually about it and expected it, that first paystub, with the withholding detailed, was still a shock.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And by the way, happy Juneteenth, the day we celebrate when the Republicans freed all the Democrat’s slaves, to everyone!
LikeLike
Child labor laws made sense when 8 year olds were working 12 hours a day in the ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ — or the fields or mines or freight yards. ‘Protecting’ 14 year olds from bagging groceries for a few hours after school is idiotic, insane or evil. Or all 3. Could be all 3.
LikeLike
There is a cultural problem/question of to whom the paycheck belongs.
LikeLike