(In honor of Labor Day, I decided re-run this post from Sept. 5, 2010.)
When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to earn money. Penny candy was only part of the reason. Working was a sign of being grown-up. I’d already figured out that being a kid was for losers. Adulthood was where it was at.
That’s why in elementary school I would pick and sell flowers and strawberries. It’s why I rejoiced when it snowed — the local doctor would pay a dollar to have his steps and sidewalk shoveled. It’s why I started baby-sitting at age 11, when I was hardly older than some of my charges.
It’s the only possible reason I could have enjoyed my first “real” job, at age 13: Picking tomatoes in a greenhouse that felt like an incinerator. It was a half-hour bike ride away, through temperature and humidity that raced each other into the high 90s. The plants were taller than I was and their leaves brushed me on all sides. I came home slimed with sap; the shampoo bubbled green when I washed my hair.
But oh, the joy of making $1.35 an hour.
Other kinds of work I’ve done: glass factory worker (another explosively hot job), housecleaner, newsroom clerk at The Philadelphia Inquirer, pet-sitter, secretary, movie theater employee, produce stand sales, freelance writer, doughnut seller, typesetter, proofreader, newspaper reporter (Anchorage Daily News, Chicago Tribune), MSN Money blogger and columnist. I’ve mystery-shopped, typed term papers, worked on a chicken farm, sold my blood, and participated in medical research.
Waiting for my ride to the glass factory one morning, I had a sudden thought: I don’t have to go to college. I can just work. I’m making good money. (And I was: As much as $4.36 an hour on the 11-to-7 shift. Sounds pitiful now, but to 18-year-old me it was a good living.)
That thought didn’t last. Factory work was loud, hard and exhausting. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but that wasn’t it. The point is, going straight to work in a factory – or a supermarket, or a car dealership – was acceptable back then.
These days, it’s considered financial suicide. Maybe social suicide, too.
A career, or just a job?
Making it on a service-industry paycheck is difficult. But even if you could, you’d quickly learn that in this allegedly class-free country, job choice does make a difference.
One of the ministers at my church spoke about her parents’ jobs at a restaurant. Her dad cooked hamburgers and her mom baked pies. If you took jobs like that today people would think you lacked ambition. You’d be told to go to school so you could make something of yourself.
But fry cook or pie baker isn’t what her parents were. It’s what they did. They held these jobs to support their large family, and they did these jobs with dignity.
Their minister daughter pointed out that we tend to ask our children “What do you want to be when you grow up?” vs. “What do you want to do?” We may think we’re encouraging them to dream; however, we want to make sure they choose the right kind of dream.
If your child replied, “I want to work at McDonald’s,” you’d think that was cute. But you’d promptly discourage this line of thinking. What’s the ultimate dead-end job in our culture? Flipping burgers.
As though fry cooks are invariably stupid or slow. As though architect, doctor, or lawyer were the only right answers.
As though work were only about the way others see us.
It’s true that job choice can mean the difference between comfort and insolvency. Our jobs may also reflect what we feel we can offer: An obstetrician loves bringing babies into the world, a public defender takes pride in fighting for justice for all.
Yet an orthotics saleswoman changed my life because my left foot no longer hurts with every step. The men and women who drive Seattle buses get me where I need to go. And what would I do without the folks who pick up the garbage, bring the mail or stock the market shelves?
That’s why they call it ‘work’
In my lifetime I’ve seen the concept of “work” change from something everyone wanted into something that’s to be minimized, if not avoided altogether. Everybody seems to want to be rich, to retire early, or not to have to work at all.
It’s almost a given that people will steal every possible minute from the workday to text, check e-mail and post on social media. Of course, they don’t really think of it as stealing; they think of it as a survival strategy.
Here’s the thing: It doesn’t matter whether you like your job or not. If you’re accepting a paycheck, then do the work.
Seem hard to you? Well, of course it’s hard. As my dad used to say, “That’s why they call it ‘work.’ If it were fun, they’d call it ‘fun’.” A thankless or low-paying job can be especially bitter when we see other people who seem to have had everything handed to them.
Guess what? Some people do have everything handed to them. If that’s you, well, congratulations – I think. In my opinion the only things we can truly claim are the ones we have worked to achieve.
The trust-fund babies of the world may never have to soil their hands. But they may also never know the satisfaction of an honest day’s work.
Great article, Donna! About the only thing I can add is…AMEN!!
My husband’s home town is still a lot like what you describe. Most kids don’t get college degrees, blue-collar jobs are not looked down on, though unemployment is. DH’s mom made him and his siblings work fast-food so that they would decide to go to college rather than flip burgers. (Unlike the rest of his extended family, she was from out of town.)
I’m not sure if work being something people want vs. not want has changed so much. DH’s family has plenty of older folks who never really grasped or wanted the concept of keeping a job and went for disability or pensions as soon as they were able to. I think most people have always wanted money, and work is generally the only way to get it. (On the other side, my father has been preaching financial independence probably since he was born back in 1938, in European poverty. He made it too… right around 2000.)
Also as I’ve lived in different parts of the country I’ve noticed strong differences in how much pride people take in their work. Where I live now and where I grew up, people take a lot of pride in their work. In Boston or in DH’s home-town, there isn’t very much of that. Around here any mechanic will do a stellar job on your car and with pride… Boston or DH’s home town you have to be very careful who you go to lest you end up with a hole in your gas tank. (And in Boston they’ll swear at you for the privilege of hurting your car.)
I don’t know how much of what seems like change over time is actually just changes in where we are living and who we are talking with.
It is true that factory jobs are no longer a ticket to the middle class. But where they exist there’s no shame in working one, at least among the people I know. I don’t know that we should mourn the demise of hard labor or celebrate the increase in occupations that have replaced it. It’s just too bad that the needed education often requires upfront investment. Partnering high school programs with associates degrees in fields in demand, such as nursing, might be a viable solution.
When people say that the retirement age can be increased because we live longer, etc. they’re forgetting we all don’t have desk jobs. Many people aren’t able to do physical labor even until 65 let alone 70 or older.
All to0 true. Anyone who’s job demanded being on their feet for 8-12 hrs. a day or involved lots of heavy lifting or maybe those things combined will tell you that 40 years of doing that & you just don’t have it in you to add another 10. My husband worked a job like that for 40 years and was more than ready to retire by 65. A body can only handle so much. The wonks in D.C. who mostly spend their time campaigning for the next election and lining their own pockets just don’t get that.
Amen, Linda, Amen!
You hit the nail on the head.
I once saw a TV news report, years ago, about some Congressmen (yes, they were all male) taking a field trip to a grocery store and following around some regular folks as the latter bought food. One politician was shown asking the woman shopper why she wasn’t buying the name brand product, and seemed greatly surprised when she told him the store/generic brands were cheaper. That’s how out of touch those guys are concerning how we live and what we go through.
Dang it, woman, you’ve done it again: Made me think “I wish I’d written that!” Awesome post.
You touch on such a wide variety of issues. One of them: we need to learn to appreciate the people in not-so-prestigious jobs who make our lives better from day to day. Big. Can it hurt to get off the phone in the grocery store check-out line, make eye contact with the cashier, and say something friendly? At a loss for words? How about “thank you”? And can we go back to the orthotics salesman or the lawn guy or the handyman or the car salesman who sold us that unbreakable Toyota and tell him what a difference he made?
My parents lived when work was something you did to put food on the table and a roof over your head. The idea that you did it for “fulfillment”…har har hardee har HAR! You did it because if you didn’t, you’d go hungry.
With the shift to the so-called “information economy,” we’ve seen a sea change in people’s attitudes toward work. Now young people are expected to go not only through high school (my father supported his wife and kid quite nicely without a high-school diploma) but also at least through the bachelor’s degree. And they’re imbued with the fiction that a decent job is a “meaningful” occupation.
It seems to me that’s why so many people in their 20s and 30s feel at loose ends and disappointed: those dead-end call center jobs and low-rent Barnes & Noble clerk gigs are no more meaningful than our parents’ assembly-line and typists’ jobs. It’s just that today’s workers expect more out of work, and that expectation, ultimately, is mistaken.
I think every teen should have to spend a summer working at McDonalds. I worked at McDonalds on weekends during my last year of high school. They taught me to develop a good work ethic. Their motto was “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean”. I don’t think they teach this anymore because I frequent McDonalds several times a week and have actually been SCREAMED at by the drive-thru clerk because SHE couldn’t hear my order and had it all wrong on the screen so when I repeated what I wanted in a louder voice, she got all nasty with me and said I’m not deaf, DON”T scream at me. I said well you must be otherwise I wouldn’t have to repeat my order.
I wish some of my coworkers had worked at McDonald’s in the early 90’s because some of them clearly lack a work ethic.
I spend half of my shift(I’m an RN) cleaning up after them because they leave messes for others to clean up and then get mad when I call them on their laziness.
The assembly line type(factory) jobs are hard to come by anymore. My husband has been laid off now from his “assembly line” job for almost two years now with a period of re-employment of about two months this past summer. He’s an unskilled laborer. No college degree to speak of because his parents didn’t encourage him to go for post-high school education. It’s just not possible to support a family in today’s society without at least high school diploma…times are different. If I didn’t have my good paying job(which I got by going to college and then passing a national licensing exam which is necessary to be legally able to perform my job), my family would be out on the streets in no time.
@Nicole, I am an RN(nurse)….there is no longer a nursing shortage in most areas of the country…check out allnurses dot com to see some of the new graduates from the class of 2009 who are still searching for ANY job. In this current economy, nurses who might have otherwise retired by now are holding on to their hospital jobs. Moms who were once at the bedside but ‘retired’ to raise their children are also returning to the bedside to make ends meet. I stay in my job at my place(which I HATE–I LOVE being a nurse, I do NOT love the management at my current place of employment) because with my husband being one of the many laid-off factory workers we NEED my salary and benefits to survive.
Not everyone is cut out to be a nurse. I’ve worked with some pretty bad ones who are in it just for the paycheck and could care less about their clinical abilities and it shows.
The govt seems to want us to work until we die. I’ve already got a bad back from my 20 some years in the health care field. Lifting people who are >200lbs without proper equipment…lots of nurses have back injuries and disc problems in their spine. I don’t think I’ll physically be able to do this job when I’m in my late 60’s-70’s.
Donna, I really enjoyed your article. It’s great to read a PF blogger who’s from a working class background.
I don’t tweet, text or check email at work so much as log onto MSN Money to read the articles and message boards. If I’m stealing from my employer when I do this, so be it. The corporation I work for treats us like like they own us and that we aren’t worthy of the privelege. The previous corporation who “owned” me didn’t treat me any better. Why don’t I go work someplace else? I don’t have any college education (my working class family didn’t think college was necessary), I’m not young and my energy level just ain’t what it used to be. Also, jobs were scarce in this state BEFORE the economy went down the toilet, so even if I had that diploma, it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference.
This is 2010 and I’m living on 2005 wages. That’s right, 2005. I’ve only had one raise in 5 1/2 years and when the new company took over our old one, they cut my and my co-workers pay by 5%. There are no raises or bonuses in sight. In fact, if the company doesn’t get the contract renewed this year, I may be looking for work this time next year. So excuse me if I’m not concerned about ripping off my massah, uh, employer.
But thanks to you and other MSN Money writers, I’m managing to keep my head above water. I just don’t know how much longer I can do so.
@Bucksome Boomer
One of the Social Security’s main focuses is the fact that although on average people are living longer and are healthier, a subset of the population still needs to retire at age 62 (and will probably not be living until their 90s, or even 80s). That means that the Early Retirement Age will probably not increase even if Normal Retirement Age does. That subset of the population (on average) does not have as high an income as average and their SS replacement rate is larger as a percentage of their income than for the average worker because of their lower incomes. (Though the higher likelihood of death means that a higher replacement rate doesn’t hurt SS balances as much as if everybody took up at age 62.)
@Kelly
The nursing shortage is still real. I do know there’s some problems in California because they recently changed the state rules on staffing which has caused the LPN/RN ratio to go out of whack. (Jordon Matsuida is the expert on that issue.) But if people are willing to move, there are still plenty of jobs for nurses and will be even more as the baby boom goes into retirement, along with other health care positions. http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media/FactSheets/NursingShortage.htm (My MIL is a nursing professor/dept chair active in her state legislature, and my aunt is an NP who runs a hospital system in another state.) Given that the unemployment rate nationally is over 10%, even an unemployment rate of 5 or 6% would be a huge improvement. http://www.nursezone.com/nursing-news-events/more-news/The-Recession%E2%80%99s-Effect-on-Jobs-for-New-Nurses_28968.aspx
There’s an even greater shortage of nursing professors. My MIL got her PhD about the same time my husband graduated from college. If you want guaranteed employment for life, there are not enough degreed nurses to keep schools accredited. And no heavy lifting. (The big mystery being why nursing professors don’t make as much as pharmacy professors given the same supply shortage.)
@Nicole,
I’m just going by what I read regularly on allnurses.com website. New nursing graduates are not finding jobs. Hospitals only want experienced RN’s. Not everyone can just pack up and move to California, one of the most expensive places to live.Check out the General Discussions forum of that website if you don’t believe me.
There is also no nursing shortage in my town. We have 4 colleges that have RN programs and 4 business schools that are running LPN programs. Our market is pretty saturated.
There is a big shortage of nursing professors because you have to have a MINIMUM of a Masters degree for colleges to even consider hiring you as a professor. Right now, I’m not able to afford to go back to school for that( I already possess a Bachelor’s degree) as I’d be taking a HUGE salary cut over my position as a bedside staff RN. With my husband still laid off, I can’t afford that large of a pay cut.
Wow, this is an article I want everyone I KNOW to read.
Great article and it makes me wonder what I’ll be when I grow up.
Take care!
You’ve put to words an inkling I’ve had for a while, and you did it so well! I was raised being told I could find the cure for cancer, or be the next Sandra Day O’Connor, or start a hugely successful international law firm, or be anything else I wanted to be. I often felt intimidated by these ideas, though. I’m sure my mom just wanted to know how much she believed in me and supported me, but I often felt an aversion to ‘being’ whatever my career was. I wanted to do an honest day’s work, make enough (whatever enough was) and still have the energy to go and BE what I AM – a wife, a friend, a whatever. I never wanted to define myself by a ‘career’ and as a result, I haven’t yet ‘reached my potential.’ I am ‘wasting’ a bachelor’s degree in journalism from a top university because I am ‘just’ an administrative assistant…and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve got to chime in here to say that this was a great post! In my last job, I was the HR Director at a Federal agency. I would always tell a young, new employee in their entry interview that the secret to moving up the ladder was to work hard. “Nobody,” I would tell them, “will benefit more from your hard work than you will.”
Not many of them took my advice. I could tell in relatively short-order who would advance up the ladder and who would not; the future was written in their work ethic for the most part.
It has been my experience that the willingness to work hard, or lack thereof, is reflected throughout one’s life, not just in the workplace. And it reflects a lack of direction that almost always extends into one’s financial life, as well. I can get into someone’s car and tell you what shape their finances are in!
I don’t think the basic nature of the human species has changed or ever will. People are the same and always will be. Those aspects of personality and character that most determine success in life will always hold true. But the landscape in which we live our lives has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades!
The society and culture have changed, I think, driven by the advent of the all- pervasive and all-persuasive media. Consumption is simply out of hand and people buy what they can’t really afford and fail to manage their finances prudently driven by the same lack of self-discipline that has always been a part of the nature of most of us.
It takes strong willed individual, indeed, to step away from the allure of instant gratification and a special person to understand that by their actions today they are crafting their future. The other bit of advice I would give new employees was this: If you want to see the future, look at what you are doing today.
This is an oldie but a goodie, Donna. I hope you had a lovely Labor Day. I had to work. ;o)
Appropriate!
I picked peaches before I could legally work. I babysat and had a paper route which I subcontracted.
Technically I wasn’t legally allowed to work in the greenhouse, I guess…? I was only 14. But the owners didn’t care and at the time I didn’t know any better.