When you slack off and withhold your human capital, you steal from everyone.

You hear these all the time now. “I want a career with a purpose,” which usually means an activist. Or “I need a good work-life balance,” which suggests someone doesn’t want to work very hard. Gimme a break. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company told me he recently spent an entire afternoon discussing his company’s pet-bereavement policy. He asked the human-resources folks, “Let me get this right, someone’s goldfish dies, and they get a week off from work?”

Work has become a dirty word. Cyber bohemians just want to dream and stream. And now this: The New York Times ran an opinion piece titled “How to Fight Back Against the Inhumanity of Modern Work.” What? Paper cuts are a bigger risk these days than losing an arm in a loom. Still, I thought the piece would be about dirty jobs—the hardships of coal miners, the plight of burnt-out nurses or the inhumanity of waking up at 5 a.m. to milk cows. Nope. The author complained about digital monitoring—coders, cashiers and others being tracked by evil bosses, who are measuring productivity. Gasp! Has society become that spoiled? Apparently so. The prevailing thinking is we’re all Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz wrapping chocolates on a conveyor belt.

Only 8.4% of U.S. nonfarm payroll positions are in manufacturing. Many of those jobs were exported long ago to cheaper labor markets such as China. Even if some of those jobs return to the U.S., many workers aren’t qualified. Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame said, “We are lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist.” So they are underemployed. Or quit. Or seek purpose and balance.

We rightly encourage STEM jobs—science, technology, engineering and math. I recently learned of HEAL jobs. Dog walkers? No, jobs in health, education, administration and literacy. These are the growing jobs of a vibrant service economy.



It isn’t news that the U.S. is a service economy, yet too often the focus is on labor vs. capital, as if we still make widgets. Unions want to arm-wrestle value from capital and force higher wage payouts than is economically sound. This blatantly disregards human capital—what workers learn on the job is theirs to keep. We increase productivity and wealth by having workers figure out how to do more with less from the bottom up. So please stop paying people not to work. The best antipoverty program is a job because a job’s value comes from this increase in human capital. One-time payments are a waste.



I’ve written often that profits are a measure of the societal wealth created by corporations, and that the price paid for products and services is the minimum amount of value created. If that weren’t true, we could all grow our own food or assemble our own iPhones. But we can’t. Jobs are very much like profits. All jobs, from the machine-learning coder to the oil-rig worker to the Safeway bagger, increase societal wealth. Why? Because we don’t have to do those jobs ourselves. Think of pay as personal profits. Every (legal) job adds value, and if you slack off or don’t deploy your human capital and live up to your potential, you’re stealing societal wealth from the rest of us. That’s selfish.

People generally are paid what they are worth. Well, except for jobs with artificial shortages such as doctors, lawyers and those requiring occupational licensing. Or those bumped up by minimum-wage laws. Or public-sector-union jobs such as teachers. OK, that’s a lot of skewed salaries! Higher pay comes from productivity and education, not government scheming.

Unions are on the rise again, attempting to organize Starbucks stores (more money for barista body piercings?), Amazon warehouses and every other service-economy job. It’s wealth destruction. And now there is a call for pandemic amnesty, perhaps for teacher unions that kept schools closed with their selfish demands. Should they get a mulligan? Only if students get the same for that C-plus on the Dickens test or not knowing the word “avarice” on the SAT.

Interest rates are rising. Though it is still hard to find cashiers or construction workers, layoffs are rampant in overbuilt Silicon Valley, a canary in the coal mine. Half of Twitter, 11,000 at Meta, plus Stripe, Zillow, Snapchat, Netflix, Coinbase, Robinhood, Salesforce, Lyft, even Virgin Hyperloop—and more to come. The purpose of a job may go back to being a paycheck again.

Advice from Mike Rowe: “Stop looking for the ‘right’ career, and start looking for a job. Any job. Forget about what you like. Focus on what’s available. Get yourself hired. Show up early. Stay late. Volunteer for the scut work. Become indispensable.” He’s right—and build human capital. A job already has a purpose. And please don’t ask for pet-bereavement benefits.


link; https://www.wsj.com/articles/w..._opin_pos_5#cxrecs_s

Interesting, but I think he greatly over estimates the barriers licensing imposes. Passing the bar is an irritation, not a serious barrier to competently practicing law - I do think returning to an apprenticeship requirement for law would make sense.

Very few engineers are licensed, yet there’s also a shortage of them.

If he is referring to prohibiting law from being outsourced, I can’t imagine a competent person hiring Indians or Nigerians to be lawyers.

Being a licensed professional I agree with you on that point.

The entire process is broken from hiring to working to firing.

People don't want to work 60 hours a week for a fixed salary making someone else rich. I don't see why some people think that's okay and if you don't want to do that, you are lazy.

Can't apply and get a job these days. You have to network and get referred in.

During the trucking strike in Canada a year ago someone posted a link to an article that talked about this. Talked about how much we still need actual workers. Garbage truck drives, plumbers, drywallers, etc. Those that work with their hands and actually do something. Even in a society that is overrun by those who sit and actually accomplish very little. It is very true.

It is also a sad fact that we wish to pay actual workers very little and offer them no benefits.

Brings to mind God saying those with the least, will receive the most. Not an exact quote. But I do believe what he said.

I want to know how all these non-working people are paying their bills. We all see the help wanted signs and shorter business hours due to low staffing. How do these people get by? UI doesn't last forever. Stimulus payments are long gone. Eviction moratoriums have to be done with by now. I don't get it.

Almost the entirety of my IT team is comprised of guys that shuffle work around but never actually roll up their sleeves and do anything. Ticket deflection, support call excuses and hand-offs, meeting cancellations, and outright inaccessibility thanks to soft work-from-home policies, has made life miserable for guys like me that actually lift a finger to pull users to the finish line.

It's pretty insane.

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Volunteer for the scut work. Become indispensable.” He’s right—and build human capital.

Indispensable doesn't seem to matter much in IT. Bean counters higher up frequently decide to cut costs and tend to start with whoever is most senior or highest paid and work down the list. Or it may be something illogical like 'who on the team is Salesforce certified?' and lay off everyone who isn't. Or entire departments may be whacked.

Employees are human capital now to be valued, traded, and disposed of just like equipment. An employee's value is what they do versus their cost. Politics and networking affects that too, of course. If someone can be replaced with a younger candidate that will accept lower pay or outsourced , it happens a lot. One needs to constantly be updating their skills and networking to be desired as an employee.

Does anyone remember when High School Junior and Senior years gave you the option to go to the vo-tech school and learn any of the "hand" skills for a good job in everything from bricklaying, carpentry, cosmetology, Heating A/C, electrical, etc.

You could get the training to go out and work at a "skilled" career instead of being told college was the only option?

Geuss that went out the window with the baby and common sense.

I used to have far more employees than I do now. It is mostly because the pool from which I can choose has been polluted with a short sighted and selfish attitude. Gone are the days of the hungry hard charger. Seems all that is left are entitled and unmotivated slugs. As my career draws to a close, I have let attrition do the reaping and will one day soon just close the door and turn out the lights. Could have been another way had the young not been spoiled.

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Or “I need a good work-life balance,” which suggests someone doesn’t want to work very hard. Gimme a break.

I've worked for fortune 500 companies. They only pay lip service to "work-life balance" if you happen to be in a particular job.

I was a manager reporting to a director reporting to the second in command of a billion dollar division. They paid well but I was working 12 to 14 hours days except for a week every month when I was putting in 14 to 18 hours. I also was working every other weekend from home. On vacation, I had to find a mcdonalds so I can go on the internet to make sure reports went out.

I tried looking for another job but couldn't until 8 years passed. I couldn't just up and quit because it was just after the housing and market crash.

It was the nature of the job and the people.

Mike Rowe needs to run for office.

There's good points on both sides of the argument.

Sure, there are a lot of worthless, entitled, employees. They can ruin a job for the good workers.

But, for a while, there were lots of companies that screwed over their good employees and "killed the mood" so to speak.

I remember one of my college jobs. I worked there over the summers and winter break. It was for min wage, about $5.15 per hour. Retail at a mall CD store. I worked for ten cents an hour more at a video game store as well... needed hours so had two jobs, often going from one to the other on the same day.

I remember the manager of the CD store when it came time for employee reviews, which determined if we would get a raise, ranging from $0.00 per hour to $0.50 per hour.

This dolt PRIDED herself on finding reasons not to give raises. I never called in sick, never was late, and frequently stayed late or came in to cover those that did. I didnt complain and got my work done.

When it came time for my review, she mentioned a joke I had made a few months back with another co worker. She (the same rank as me, sales peon) asked me to alphabetize one section of CD's while she did the other section. The way she worded it was "Do you want to go alphabetize whatever section?" I cheekily responded "No, but I will." (as in I didn't WANT to, but would.)

To ANYONE it was a joke, a play on words. We had a chuckle about it. There would be no mistake about it if anyone heard it. It was a lame dad joke that has been made about 4 million times this past year.

That was her justification for not giving me a raise, of even ten cents per hour.

She smiled as she ended with my review and her explanation with "And that's why there is no raise for you"

What she didn't know is I had already found a job with Best Buy for over two dollars an hour more and had accepted it. I wasn't due to start for 3 weeks, because I wanted to give them good notice.

Her jaw about hit the floor when I responded (professionally) "OK, well I'm giving you my two weeks notice, I found another job."

She got pissy and told me to just leave and not come back.

I called Best Buy and told them I could move up my start date.

(Of course, Best Buy would end poorly as well, when years later when I was almost done with college a new manager came in and made it his mission to fire pretty much the entire staff and replace them with workers who got starting wages, as opposed to those there for a while who had gotten raises, but that's a whole other story involving him lying to a judge and me luckily having written, signed proof that he was lying)

Companies hopefully are learning a lesson that they can't view good employees as cogs that can be replaced. Maybe this labor shortage is a good thing where managers will learn that not ALL employees are the same, and certainly wont give you the same quality of work and dedication. It's a two way street though. You want dedicated employees great, then be dedicated to them as well.

I see this as a bit of a two way street.

There is a generation of people who simply don't want to work. They either appear to believe everything should be free and given to them, or they want to be social media influencers, YouTube stars, or whatever. It is more and more difficult to find people to work in warehouses, factories, or other jobs along those lines. When you do, they work for about 90 days and you never hear from them again.

This started a decade or so ago when people started the 2 year jump. Instead of paying their dues and working hard for a promotion they work somewhere for 2 years then jump to another company for a higher level or more money. Multiple jobs on a resume used to be a bad thing, now it is the norm.

The flip side of that has to do with businesses. They don't value employees like they used to in the past. Part of that is tied to the 2 year jump I cited earlier but part is tied to the horrible business concept a few noted about not being worried about retention as you'll hire the replacement at lower pay. The issue is you're losing all that experience you paid that employee to gain. Many managers have elevated themselves with cost cutting but reducing staff and turning departments into revolving doors, when higher managers allow it, a dangerous culture is set in place.

Why do employees want to stay where they don't feel valued or can easily be replaced and why would an employer waste time and effort making employees feel valued when they will likely be gone in 23 months?

We are definitely in strange times employment wise.

When I was in high school and at the start of college I had at least two jobs every summer. One was full time working for the local university on their grounds crew. Shortly after I started, our foreman sent me and a farm kid to go clean out the weeds and crap by a building that hadn’t had anything done to it for years. He told us it would take us a week. We got it done in 1/2 day.

Same place, but a different year I was on the lawnmower crew. There were four of us and we had heavy commercial push mowers. But we worked hard and got things done quickly. Almost immediately, they told us we were to far ahead of the power mowers and we needed to go hide behind building “ABC” until they could catch up. Sometimes it was only a few hours but many times it was over a day.

I then applied for a position with the landscape crew because they made $3.70 an hour (I was making $3.40 and hour). I was 5’9” and 120 lbs and they thought I was too small so they said they would let me try out for a week. I did that for two years.

I finally decided, I didn’t like preparing and laying sod and digging holes in rocky ground for trees and shrubs in 100 degree weather. So I went and found a different job in town. I got a nice pay raise as a haberdasher. I quickly became a favorite of the owners because I would do things without having to be asked.

After a few weeks of working from home during C19, one of my colleagues and I started coming in because you just weren’t as productive with all the distractions going on in our homes. I see that with my staff, still today. I call them, they don’t answer and when they do, I can hear kids playing, crying, TV’s etc.

I have a government job and people ask me about my banking hours all the time. You mean coming in at 7:30 taking a 30 minute lunch and leaving to come home around 6.30-6:45 almost every night. What about all the Saturdays I go in and work for part of the day?

My neighbors are always amazed at how we get all our kids out to do yard work and cleanup. Why shouldn’t they? I’m not going to pay some crew to mow, till, week, fertilize my yard, etc. We can do that thank you very much. But, so many people have someone else do it instead of doing it with their kids.

I really think people can work, they just don’t know how to work because they never learned how to work as a kid. My Dad grew up on a farm during the depression. Trust me, yard work and house work was a way of life growing up. We were also expected to have summer jobs to pay for things. Today, kids expect everything to be handed to them. It’s probably a common complaint of each older generation. But, there has never been a generation that has had so much with so little effort. It’s concerning.

I remember the Vocational option. I took it for auto mechanics since I was into cars then. A local Chrysler dealer donated a Duster (dating myself) and the class took it apart down to a bare body and frame and reassembled it. About 3 months before I graduated that same dealer offered me a good paying mechanic job in the service dept. But I had signed up for deferred enlistment about a week before the dealer made the offer. My life would have been much different if I had gone with the Chrysler dealer.

A lot of good stories. One I particularly liked was quitting the dairy in 1979. I had been there 3 years and without a raise. I'd worked out a schedule that had me coming to work at mid morning. The final straw was our IBM CE coming in Christmas Eve with 3 bottles of booze. He gave one to me, one to the owners son, and one for the owner. The owner came to work just before noon. He saw my bottle and asked about it, when he heard who it was from, he snatched it. Said it was his money that bought the computer, his booze.

A little while later the owners son came in and demanded to know where his booze was. I told him to ask his father. Man was he pissed. ( me too). So in 2 months I asked for a raise. After all, it had been over 3 years. He just said he couldn't do it. I told him I understood, but I was giving him 2 weeks notice. The company only lasted 6 more months. Guess it partly had to do with the computer not running. Not my fault. Treat people like shit and they quit. No more 60 hour weeks for Dick. To my credit, I didn't shoot anyone.

I don't work these days. I retired. I no longer have any kind of work ethic. And I don't care.

The ugly little sister to occupational licensing is the growing emphasis on certifications. I am most familiar with this in the IT industry. Where you used to have to demonstrate knowledge and competence to a knowledgeable and competent hiring manager, now it suffices and requires a certified credential issued by some third party, often a product vendor. It is entirely possible, and seems commonplace, to be able to pass a certification exam without acquiring a deep, or even basic understanding of the underlying technology. In a growing number of situations, it doesn't matter how much experience you have, or how good you are at doing the job, you won't even be considered for hire if you don't have the right certification. I suspect it is no different in other specialties.

This is why your IT support guy, or customer service representative can't even understand the problem you are having, much less helping you fix it.

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
I see this as a bit of a two way street.

There is a generation of people who simply don't want to work. They either appear to believe everything should be free and given to them, or they want to be social media influencers, YouTube stars, or whatever. It is more and more difficult to find people to work in warehouses, factories, or other jobs along those lines. When you do, they work for about 90 days and you never hear from them again.

This started a decade or so ago when people started the 2 year jump. Instead of paying their dues and working hard for a promotion they work somewhere for 2 years then jump to another company for a higher level or more money. Multiple jobs on a resume used to be a bad thing, now it is the norm.

The flip side of that has to do with businesses. They don't value employees like they used to in the past. Part of that is tied to the 2 year jump I cited earlier but part is tied to the horrible business concept a few noted about not being worried about retention as you'll hire the replacement at lower pay. The issue is you're losing all that experience you paid that employee to gain. Many managers have elevated themselves with cost cutting but reducing staff and turning departments into revolving doors, when higher managers allow it, a dangerous culture is set in place.

Why do employees want to stay where they don't feel valued or can easily be replaced and why would an employer waste time and effort making employees feel valued when they will likely be gone in 23 months?

We are definitely in strange times employment wise.

Remember too that many of the hiring managers today that are doing these stupid things are prob younger people who aren't aware of this problem or never learned it from their own bosses or more senior counterparts. Most of the time I think when people are promoted into supervisory or management positions, they don't receive training about the difference between their old job and their new job, that the people that work under them are depend on them to provide competent leadership, but that's not possible if those newly promoted people aren't smart enough to see the gap or fail to backfill that knowledge. I know it was true for me many years ago when I got promoted into a Managerial and P/L position in the tech industry. I had some awareness of the situation based on my MBA training, but was pretty much flapping in the wind as I was a pure tech by nature, so it was difficult. I was smart enough to see that I wasn't wired for that type of work, and was lucky enough to escape back to the keyboard where I naturally belonged. But it's true when people get promoted, based on their good performance at their CURRENT job, they lack the tools to do their NEW job, and can screw things up while still trying their best.

Work ethic is a thing of the past. Young, old, in between, it’s pathetic. Had a guy in his 50s wanted the set hours and increased pay over his current job to be my closer. He had already applied them changed his mind. Told someone he didn’t like the idea of worklists being emailed each day. Another idiot in my area is 42, lives with his mother, won’t do anything he’s not told to do. Company policy says you’re on time/in the clear to punch in and out 5 minutes either way before your shift start and finish. He’s in a 5 after and out at 5 til every single day.