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Employers will always keep the ones who produce the best work and trim from the ones who don't 'try as hard'.

I don't normally agree with gbaji, but on this particular issue he's kind of right. I have sympathy for struggling Americans who are trying to make ends meet, but to suggest that there are absolutely no opportunities for them to get out of their plight is disingenuous at best.

It's anecdotal and my experience isn't representative of the entire population, but I was a high school dropout, having been kicked out of my house when I was 14 after I came out of the closet. It was a rough life, being an emancipated adult working at a restaurant as a dishwasher and trying to get by.

However, I am now 35, with a college education, sitting on a mountain of technical certifications, in charge of a hardware department, and it all started with a 50 hours of night school training at the local votech for three hundred bucks and getting my foot in the door at a company looking for temp workers for a big project. I don't buy a lot of the sob stories people have about not being able to do ANYTHING to improve their lives. You can study a couple hours a week and spend a hundred bucks on a basic technical cert, and then get out of that McDonald's job and into some temp work with minimal effort, and no need for a steady work schedule.

In fact, with the internet and the amount of free information at one's disposal (and everyone has access to a library) it's easier than ever to self-educate.

That's not to say I agree with the spirit of this thread and the attempt to pay workers less and justify it with the notion that adding kids will somehow magically fix our economic woes, because that's just stupid... but we can't just take a position that there is a certain subset of people who have absolutely no chance in this world and base all of our economic strategies around that.


Edited, Dec 5th 2013 10:03am by Torrence

Really?

The example I always go back to, because I grew up in the region and had a chance to observe it, is coal mining. The coal companies made sweetheart deals with Congress and were able to pay their workers below-poverty wages

the body of a man who had (I guess) tried to jump the train and fallen underneath.

Jumping in front of a train is the most @#%^ish way to kill yourself. Not only are you giving the train driver a trauma, there will also be people who have to scrape you off the track, your family isn't going to be able to see any of your remains to get closure and hundreds or thousands of people are late for work or god knpws what (the least severe, but still a **** move).

Not only are you giving the train driver a trauma,

Anecdotally, tangentially knowing a train driver who has killed people with a train, it seems they're not particularly bothered by it. Or maybe they just put up a brave front. Most of the time, though, killing people is assumed to be far more psychologically impactful than it actually turns out to be. To be honest, much of the distress is caused by feelings of "I should be more upset about this".

You sure he didn't just commit suicide?

It was good luck? No, it wasn't. I work(ed) hard to get where I am from literally nothing, similar to many other Americans in my situation. I didn't just happen to be offered a free course and a job out of nowhere in a field I had absolutely no skill in, I sought those opportunities and made them happen after living on the streets and struggling for years.

So maybe what you meant to say was I hit a run of BAD luck but didn't let it crush my spirit? I didn't cry about how tough it was to get by on a restaurant worker's wage?

And you better believe I didn't survive corporate layoffs by not "trying harder" than the ones who were let go. I'm not a pretty girl, so no one was hiring me for my rack. Employers will always keep the ones who produce the best work and trim from the ones who don't 'try as hard'.

Should Obama be making unemployment more of a priority? Ok, I'll grant that should ALWAYS be a priority, but let's not pretend that people are only successful because of "luck" and so no one should ever bother trying.