Get a Job (if you can)
Why illegal immigration robs people of opportunity
My first job was as a paperboy for the Long Beach Press Telegram when I was 12 years old. It was a different world then as I used to ride my bike all over Huntington Beach California to deliver papers without ever a thought of danger from anything except traffic. My route was 7 miles long and went all through the one new housing tract where I lived; down in what had been the bean fields, up along the bluff and all through the older downtown area, ending up near the beach. From there I had to turn around and ride home. I found out right away that the key to making more money was learning how to "porch" the customer’s paper from your bike. Then when you went around once a month to collect your money you had a better chance to get a twenty-five cent tip, the usual amount. The hardest part of the job for me was Sunday mornings. Although the Press Telegram came out in the afternoon every other day, it came out in the morning on Sunday so first, you had to get up early and I mean like 3:30 AM. Then you had to fold the papers, which were about 3 times their regular size with inserts to put in. Then you had to pack you bags until they practically burst and your bike was loaded down with what seemed like a hundred pounds of papers. Then ride your entire route trying to throw papers that were big enough to be crush a cat. It was tough, but when I was all done around 6:00 AM I used to meet a friend of mine, who also had a paper route, at a coffee shop down by the beach and we’d splurge on hot chocolate and listen to Roy Orbison play "Pretty Woman" on the juke box while the sun came up. I made about thirty dollars a month.
My next job was as a dishwasher when I was 16. I had a driver’s license and now all I needed was a car. I worked at two places, Richards Coffee Shop on Pacific Coast Highway and Gracie’s Doughnuts on Main street about two blocks away. It was a family operation owned by, not surprisingly, Richard and Gracie. Every afternoon after school and 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday I would wash dishes and equipment and do other sidework like bleaching lettuce. Richard was a tough, coarse; thoroughly grease stained old fry cook. Shortly after I started working he was cooking when a large cockroach ran out on the counter. He grabbed it and said, "Look, if you see one of these just pinch it’s tail". He then proceeded to crush the entire cockroach between this thumb and forefinger, wiped his hand on his apron and kept on cooking. I was horrified and resolved right then and there to never eat in a restaurant again, a resolution I have failed to keep. I think I was considered an adequate worker, although likely to do unexpected things. When I was first told to clean the doughnut-making machine at Gracie’s I carefully cleaned every piece, which required the disassembly of a large part of the equipment. Richard told me later it took him three hours to get the machine running and tuned up to make acceptable doughnuts the next morning. "It’s not your fault", he said. "I know I told you to clean every piece but I meant just wipe it off". I made $1.35 an hour and saved enough to buy a 1963 Ford Fairlane for $265.
My next job was in construction working for my uncle who was developing real estate over in Sunset Beach California. He was building little two and three unit apartment buildings at the time and lived in one of them himself. I worked for him eight hours a day on the weekends and during the summer. My uncle would use me as sort of a free-floating assistant to the sub-contractors so I did all sorts of things. I learned how to stand on a wheelbarrow and shovel cement up to a platform six feet over my head which is something I’m kind of pleased at knowing to this day. The trick is in knowing just how to aim and twist the shovel so the cement lands right where you want without splattering. That and not falling off the wheelbarrow. A lot of the time I painted and I learned not to carry a bucket of oil-base paint slung over your shoulder because if the lid pops off the paint will go all over your hair and you will have to dip your head in kerosene to get it off. Actually working for my uncle was really hard because I knew if I didn’t do a good job my parents would hear about it but for the two dollars an hour I was making it was really worth it. I was making so much money I used to splurge and spend about a dollar at the Jack in the Box on Pacific Coast Highway on the way home which at the time would buy you a couple of hamburgers, fries and a milkshake which you could eat looking out at the beach, or while driving home in your Ford Fairlane.
My next job was working at the school district during my senior year in high school. I had already completed enough classes to graduate with only a half time class schedule my senior year so I got a job in the audio-visual lab four hours a day. It was sort of a strange job in that I had no fixed responsibilities except to run the video recorder the school had purchased whenever teachers requested something be taped. I would lug the bulky Ampex reel to reel video recorder to the designated classroom, carefully set it up along with the large video camera, turn on and check out the setup, and then stand by to tape whatever I was told. Once while taping the rehearsal of a play I accidentally captured on tape some students drinking beer in class. I noticed it when I played the tape back and told a few people about it. It spread all over the school like lightning. The teacher involved came to me in a panic and begged me to erase the tape. I told him I was not supposed to do that but that I wouldn’t tell anyone else and would re-use the tape soon anyway because we didn’t have that many. The administration remained oblivious and nothing ever came of it. I don’t remember how much I got paid so it must not have been much.
My next job was back to dishwasher. I had to drop out of college for one quarter in my sophomore year but luckily the college, at that time, had a "stop-out" program whereby you could take a quarter off and still remain enrolled. I hope they still have that program because it sure helped me out. I got a job over at Ancient Mariner in Balboa California. Unlike Richards Coffee Shop and Gracie’s Doughnuts I think the Ancient Mariner may still be in business. It seemed like the sort of dishwasher work I was used to but with a lot more sidework than I had at Richards. I had to make the salads, make marinade, put the meat into tubs with marinade and put it in the cooler, pull down and run all the filters over the cook stations through the dishwasher, put them back up, pull up all the rubber mats at the cook stations, take them outside, clean them then put them back and a lot of other stuff. One side job was to "cool" ten or twenty bottles of each of the alcohols used to make drinks by pouring it over a jug of ice and then pouring it back into the bottle before putting it into the cooler. Of course there would be a little more so you had to use some saved bottles of the correct type for the excess. I was so naïve it was literally years later before I realized they were just having me water the drinks down. The Ancient Mariner was a pretty high-end place at the time and the other employees would sometimes eat food like lobster off the plates that came back if it looked untouched but I never liked to do that. I only kept that job for two weeks because I managed to land a job as a replacement janitor at the school district.
As a replacement janitor I was supposed to be "on call" to work from 4:00 PM to midnight in case one of the other janitors was out. In reality I was assigned a regular area of the school to clean and worked every day. It seemed to me there was a lot of padding in the work force. I had to clean two hallways, which I think was around twenty classrooms, and the boy’s gym. I quickly learned that it really only took about two hours to clean the whole thing if you kept moving fast. The other janitors showed me a trick, which was to use an early version of a leaf blower to blow everything on the floor to the back of the classroom where you could sweep it all up. The gym was more work but once I learned to mop fast, swinging the mop all the way out to the end of the handle on each side so you mop about a ten foot wide swath, it went quickly too. This was back in the days when you changed into a gym suit for gym class and showered off afterward. The resulting debris of dirty socks and jock straps I had to clean up every night were sort of repulsive so one night when there was a particularly large number of jock straps I piled them on the head coaches desk instead of throwing them away. It seemed like a good way to let him know about the problem and although I heard a few rumblings about it I didn’t get in any trouble. It didn’t seem to help much though. I left that job when it was time to go back to college for the next quarter.
My next job was a big step up, part time fireman. The college had the only multistory buildings in the small town it was located in so it had it’s own fire department. They would hire students as part time firemen. I had to compete against 76 other guys for one of what turned out to be 5 available jobs. It was all pretty exciting but I quickly found out I wasn’t cut out to be a fireman. First, you had to be right on time to work and I mean to the second. The shift leader had to call in on the radio to the main station right at the start of the shift and report the shift ready for duty. He couldn’t do that if everyone wasn’t there so if you were literally even seconds late it was a big deal. I must have been very concerned over the sequence of disciplinary measures because I still remember it. First offense written reprimand, second offense suspension, third offense termination. I was never late but the mental stress took its toll on me. Another thing that didn’t suit me was having to clean the entire fire engine and what seemed like a million feet of fire hose every shift. We actually spent most of our time just sitting around but I also learned I didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night, throwing on a turnout suit and driving down to the main campus to spend two hours standing around watching a couple of the guys fool around with a smoky old burned out air conditioner. The cops used to come by the fire department at night. I was stationed at a little airport on campus and we were always open and far enough out from the central campus to escape the repressive hand of authority, our captains. I learned that some of the wildest guys you ever want to meet are attracted to police work. I heard a story about a couple of them driving up and down the runway in their police car at 100 mph with the lights and siren running, shooting at rabbits out of the windows. The speed was probably an exaggeration. I left the job after five months and only three actual fires citing the need to focus on my classes. I made $3.95 an hour at that job which seemed like a fortune.
My next job was a step down again. I was "stopped out" of school again because my sister had talked me into driving here up to Oregon to get back to her school. She had arranged to live on a little farm just outside Portland in an old farmhouse with no running water. This was during the time when "living off the land" was the hot new idea so once I was there it just seemed like a good idea to stick around for a while. Between having to dig and use an outdoor latrine, draw water by hand from a well and lug it a hundred yards up to the house, and get by with no money the glamour wore off pretty quick. We had a real nice neighbor, a Vietnam vet, who was also "living off the land" and would give us as many zucchini’s from his garden as we could eat so this was my vegetarian period. After a while the craving for protein built up to the point where it was time for another job, berry picking. Berry picking is funny work. You’re outside which is nice, and the work is honestly not that physically hard, but it gives a whole new meaning to the word monotony. There isn’t any real mental stimulation but on the other hand you still have to focus on each and every berry to be sure it’s ready to pick. After a couple of days I could close my eyes and literally see berry’s floating around which was pretty strange. I didn’t make a whole lot of money but it was enough to buy some rice, potatoes and hamburger, not to mention gasoline. Pretty soon it was time to go back to school and I sure don’t miss berry picking.
After that it was back to the restaurant business again. I was hanging out at my parents for a couple of months after I graduated from college while arranging to rent a place with a couple of friends. I got a job as a bartender at a pizza place. The job consisted of pouring beer, making pizza, making pizza sauce, making pizza dough, stocking the pizza topping containers, cleaning up, running the cash register, and stopping fights. We had metal mop bucket handles behind the bar in case we needed them but I never did. It was a pretty big place and there were usually enough employees to just swarm anybody who started any trouble. I learned that if you didn’t have a system it was easy to completely forget the customer’s list of pizza toppings in the time it took to move from the order window to the prep table. One night, after I had been on the job a couple of weeks, I decided to sneak a beer at work. I picked dark beer because it looked like root beer that we were allowed to drink. My manager noticed and asked me to show him what I was drinking. Thinking I was about to get fired I handed him the glass. "Just as I thought", he said, "here, drink this instead" handing me his own drink. It turned out to be a rum and coke so I was off the hook. I left that job when we finally got a place rented and I never worked in the restaurant business again.
My next job was selling plants. Although I had a college degree I wanted to try starting a band with some friends of mine so I didn’t want a regular job for about a year. It seemed like there was kind of a craze going on for house plants and I worked for a couple of guys who had a plant shop but would also give people a load of plants to try and sell door to door. You could keep whatever profit you made on selling the plants. It was no good trying to sell them at people’s homes; you had to go to businesses. It turned out that the whole thing was kind of a scam because the only way to really close a sale on the spot was to convince people they were getting a special deal. To do that you had to convince them you were stuck with these plants as "leftovers" and just wanted to unload them. Surprisingly I learned that the key to success was being able to say, "Just twenty-five dollars!" like you were amazed at how cheap that was. Although the job was kind of interesting and I liked the unstructured aspect of it, the income was unreliable and the whole thing was kind of a low class deal. I left after a couple of months.
My next job was as an electrician. We ran electrical cables and conduits in various apartment buildings, commercial buildings and industrial buildings. The owner was a real nice guy and everyone on the crew was easy to get along with. The first job I worked was some apartments. They were having trouble staying on schedule. I had an engineering degree in electronics, exposure to construction working for my uncle, and I got paired with a guy who had experience wiring apartments. We started busting out two apartments a day and got them caught up. That made us golden around the place. It was a good thing because on the next industrial job I installed two out of three fuses for a one hundred horsepower motor, third one was defective, forgot to tell anyone and when they tested it the motor burned right out. I learned you should never install some of the fuses, its all or nothing. That job was a time and materials job so right after I started on it I was running conduit as fast as I could and one of the other guys told me to slow down. That was OK by me so we took a pretty measured pace on the industrial work which was just as well because we worked on the wires live a lot of the time. Once you get some instruction and the technique it’s not a problem and I always appreciated the little training classes they ran for us to explain new things we would run into on a particular job. I left that job when I finally decided it was time to give up on being a musician and go get a job in electronics using my college degree. I had resisted that because I had a strong feeling that once I did that’s what I would end up doing for the rest of my career and sure enough that’s just how it worked out.
So what’s the point besides a trip down memory lane? Just this, I had eleven jobs before I ever got onto a "white-collar" career track. Those jobs helped me learn how to make and save money. They helped me learn how to be independent. The helped me learn what having a job and working a job is all about. They gave me a chance to screw up and learn how not to screw up at a time in my life when the consequences were still relatively modest. I learned what I was good at and what I wasn’t good at. What I liked and what I didn’t like in a job. Although I will be forever grateful to my parents for financing my college education those jobs helped me get over financial rough spots with a sense of personal freedom and independence. I am currently a company president and I am certain that much of my success is due to learning how to work from broad exposure to different jobs.
So my point is; what are kids today supposed to do? If every low-end job is taken by an illegal immigrant how do they enter the work force? As a college graduate I am a strong believer in classroom learning but I also know you learn many more things much faster on the job. Worst of all a shortage of low-end jobs robs young people of their best safety net, a job that pays at least reasonably well. The result is the difficulty young people now have in establishing themselves away from their parents. The current system victimizes everyone who needs an entry-level job.
The solution is not more government training programs, although those certainly have their place. It is not to improve schools, although that is certainly needed. It is not to raise the minimum wage, which in the current environment will only cause employers to hire even fewer legal workers. It is not to re-institute more welfare programs, which thankfully doesn’t even seem to be on any serious agenda. The solution to creating better paying entry-level jobs is the law of supply and demand. To create an increased demand for legal US citizens, particularly young and unskilled people, we need to restrict the supply of illegal immigrant workers. Increased demand will lead to higher wages. It’s really that simple.
My first job was as a paperboy for the Long Beach Press Telegram when I was 12 years old. It was a different world then as I used to ride my bike all over Huntington Beach California to deliver papers without ever a thought of danger from anything except traffic. My route was 7 miles long and went all through the one new housing tract where I lived; down in what had been the bean fields, up along the bluff and all through the older downtown area, ending up near the beach. From there I had to turn around and ride home. I found out right away that the key to making more money was learning how to "porch" the customer’s paper from your bike. Then when you went around once a month to collect your money you had a better chance to get a twenty-five cent tip, the usual amount. The hardest part of the job for me was Sunday mornings. Although the Press Telegram came out in the afternoon every other day, it came out in the morning on Sunday so first, you had to get up early and I mean like 3:30 AM. Then you had to fold the papers, which were about 3 times their regular size with inserts to put in. Then you had to pack you bags until they practically burst and your bike was loaded down with what seemed like a hundred pounds of papers. Then ride your entire route trying to throw papers that were big enough to be crush a cat. It was tough, but when I was all done around 6:00 AM I used to meet a friend of mine, who also had a paper route, at a coffee shop down by the beach and we’d splurge on hot chocolate and listen to Roy Orbison play "Pretty Woman" on the juke box while the sun came up. I made about thirty dollars a month.
My next job was as a dishwasher when I was 16. I had a driver’s license and now all I needed was a car. I worked at two places, Richards Coffee Shop on Pacific Coast Highway and Gracie’s Doughnuts on Main street about two blocks away. It was a family operation owned by, not surprisingly, Richard and Gracie. Every afternoon after school and 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday I would wash dishes and equipment and do other sidework like bleaching lettuce. Richard was a tough, coarse; thoroughly grease stained old fry cook. Shortly after I started working he was cooking when a large cockroach ran out on the counter. He grabbed it and said, "Look, if you see one of these just pinch it’s tail". He then proceeded to crush the entire cockroach between this thumb and forefinger, wiped his hand on his apron and kept on cooking. I was horrified and resolved right then and there to never eat in a restaurant again, a resolution I have failed to keep. I think I was considered an adequate worker, although likely to do unexpected things. When I was first told to clean the doughnut-making machine at Gracie’s I carefully cleaned every piece, which required the disassembly of a large part of the equipment. Richard told me later it took him three hours to get the machine running and tuned up to make acceptable doughnuts the next morning. "It’s not your fault", he said. "I know I told you to clean every piece but I meant just wipe it off". I made $1.35 an hour and saved enough to buy a 1963 Ford Fairlane for $265.
My next job was in construction working for my uncle who was developing real estate over in Sunset Beach California. He was building little two and three unit apartment buildings at the time and lived in one of them himself. I worked for him eight hours a day on the weekends and during the summer. My uncle would use me as sort of a free-floating assistant to the sub-contractors so I did all sorts of things. I learned how to stand on a wheelbarrow and shovel cement up to a platform six feet over my head which is something I’m kind of pleased at knowing to this day. The trick is in knowing just how to aim and twist the shovel so the cement lands right where you want without splattering. That and not falling off the wheelbarrow. A lot of the time I painted and I learned not to carry a bucket of oil-base paint slung over your shoulder because if the lid pops off the paint will go all over your hair and you will have to dip your head in kerosene to get it off. Actually working for my uncle was really hard because I knew if I didn’t do a good job my parents would hear about it but for the two dollars an hour I was making it was really worth it. I was making so much money I used to splurge and spend about a dollar at the Jack in the Box on Pacific Coast Highway on the way home which at the time would buy you a couple of hamburgers, fries and a milkshake which you could eat looking out at the beach, or while driving home in your Ford Fairlane.
My next job was working at the school district during my senior year in high school. I had already completed enough classes to graduate with only a half time class schedule my senior year so I got a job in the audio-visual lab four hours a day. It was sort of a strange job in that I had no fixed responsibilities except to run the video recorder the school had purchased whenever teachers requested something be taped. I would lug the bulky Ampex reel to reel video recorder to the designated classroom, carefully set it up along with the large video camera, turn on and check out the setup, and then stand by to tape whatever I was told. Once while taping the rehearsal of a play I accidentally captured on tape some students drinking beer in class. I noticed it when I played the tape back and told a few people about it. It spread all over the school like lightning. The teacher involved came to me in a panic and begged me to erase the tape. I told him I was not supposed to do that but that I wouldn’t tell anyone else and would re-use the tape soon anyway because we didn’t have that many. The administration remained oblivious and nothing ever came of it. I don’t remember how much I got paid so it must not have been much.
My next job was back to dishwasher. I had to drop out of college for one quarter in my sophomore year but luckily the college, at that time, had a "stop-out" program whereby you could take a quarter off and still remain enrolled. I hope they still have that program because it sure helped me out. I got a job over at Ancient Mariner in Balboa California. Unlike Richards Coffee Shop and Gracie’s Doughnuts I think the Ancient Mariner may still be in business. It seemed like the sort of dishwasher work I was used to but with a lot more sidework than I had at Richards. I had to make the salads, make marinade, put the meat into tubs with marinade and put it in the cooler, pull down and run all the filters over the cook stations through the dishwasher, put them back up, pull up all the rubber mats at the cook stations, take them outside, clean them then put them back and a lot of other stuff. One side job was to "cool" ten or twenty bottles of each of the alcohols used to make drinks by pouring it over a jug of ice and then pouring it back into the bottle before putting it into the cooler. Of course there would be a little more so you had to use some saved bottles of the correct type for the excess. I was so naïve it was literally years later before I realized they were just having me water the drinks down. The Ancient Mariner was a pretty high-end place at the time and the other employees would sometimes eat food like lobster off the plates that came back if it looked untouched but I never liked to do that. I only kept that job for two weeks because I managed to land a job as a replacement janitor at the school district.
As a replacement janitor I was supposed to be "on call" to work from 4:00 PM to midnight in case one of the other janitors was out. In reality I was assigned a regular area of the school to clean and worked every day. It seemed to me there was a lot of padding in the work force. I had to clean two hallways, which I think was around twenty classrooms, and the boy’s gym. I quickly learned that it really only took about two hours to clean the whole thing if you kept moving fast. The other janitors showed me a trick, which was to use an early version of a leaf blower to blow everything on the floor to the back of the classroom where you could sweep it all up. The gym was more work but once I learned to mop fast, swinging the mop all the way out to the end of the handle on each side so you mop about a ten foot wide swath, it went quickly too. This was back in the days when you changed into a gym suit for gym class and showered off afterward. The resulting debris of dirty socks and jock straps I had to clean up every night were sort of repulsive so one night when there was a particularly large number of jock straps I piled them on the head coaches desk instead of throwing them away. It seemed like a good way to let him know about the problem and although I heard a few rumblings about it I didn’t get in any trouble. It didn’t seem to help much though. I left that job when it was time to go back to college for the next quarter.
My next job was a big step up, part time fireman. The college had the only multistory buildings in the small town it was located in so it had it’s own fire department. They would hire students as part time firemen. I had to compete against 76 other guys for one of what turned out to be 5 available jobs. It was all pretty exciting but I quickly found out I wasn’t cut out to be a fireman. First, you had to be right on time to work and I mean to the second. The shift leader had to call in on the radio to the main station right at the start of the shift and report the shift ready for duty. He couldn’t do that if everyone wasn’t there so if you were literally even seconds late it was a big deal. I must have been very concerned over the sequence of disciplinary measures because I still remember it. First offense written reprimand, second offense suspension, third offense termination. I was never late but the mental stress took its toll on me. Another thing that didn’t suit me was having to clean the entire fire engine and what seemed like a million feet of fire hose every shift. We actually spent most of our time just sitting around but I also learned I didn’t like getting up in the middle of the night, throwing on a turnout suit and driving down to the main campus to spend two hours standing around watching a couple of the guys fool around with a smoky old burned out air conditioner. The cops used to come by the fire department at night. I was stationed at a little airport on campus and we were always open and far enough out from the central campus to escape the repressive hand of authority, our captains. I learned that some of the wildest guys you ever want to meet are attracted to police work. I heard a story about a couple of them driving up and down the runway in their police car at 100 mph with the lights and siren running, shooting at rabbits out of the windows. The speed was probably an exaggeration. I left the job after five months and only three actual fires citing the need to focus on my classes. I made $3.95 an hour at that job which seemed like a fortune.
My next job was a step down again. I was "stopped out" of school again because my sister had talked me into driving here up to Oregon to get back to her school. She had arranged to live on a little farm just outside Portland in an old farmhouse with no running water. This was during the time when "living off the land" was the hot new idea so once I was there it just seemed like a good idea to stick around for a while. Between having to dig and use an outdoor latrine, draw water by hand from a well and lug it a hundred yards up to the house, and get by with no money the glamour wore off pretty quick. We had a real nice neighbor, a Vietnam vet, who was also "living off the land" and would give us as many zucchini’s from his garden as we could eat so this was my vegetarian period. After a while the craving for protein built up to the point where it was time for another job, berry picking. Berry picking is funny work. You’re outside which is nice, and the work is honestly not that physically hard, but it gives a whole new meaning to the word monotony. There isn’t any real mental stimulation but on the other hand you still have to focus on each and every berry to be sure it’s ready to pick. After a couple of days I could close my eyes and literally see berry’s floating around which was pretty strange. I didn’t make a whole lot of money but it was enough to buy some rice, potatoes and hamburger, not to mention gasoline. Pretty soon it was time to go back to school and I sure don’t miss berry picking.
After that it was back to the restaurant business again. I was hanging out at my parents for a couple of months after I graduated from college while arranging to rent a place with a couple of friends. I got a job as a bartender at a pizza place. The job consisted of pouring beer, making pizza, making pizza sauce, making pizza dough, stocking the pizza topping containers, cleaning up, running the cash register, and stopping fights. We had metal mop bucket handles behind the bar in case we needed them but I never did. It was a pretty big place and there were usually enough employees to just swarm anybody who started any trouble. I learned that if you didn’t have a system it was easy to completely forget the customer’s list of pizza toppings in the time it took to move from the order window to the prep table. One night, after I had been on the job a couple of weeks, I decided to sneak a beer at work. I picked dark beer because it looked like root beer that we were allowed to drink. My manager noticed and asked me to show him what I was drinking. Thinking I was about to get fired I handed him the glass. "Just as I thought", he said, "here, drink this instead" handing me his own drink. It turned out to be a rum and coke so I was off the hook. I left that job when we finally got a place rented and I never worked in the restaurant business again.
My next job was selling plants. Although I had a college degree I wanted to try starting a band with some friends of mine so I didn’t want a regular job for about a year. It seemed like there was kind of a craze going on for house plants and I worked for a couple of guys who had a plant shop but would also give people a load of plants to try and sell door to door. You could keep whatever profit you made on selling the plants. It was no good trying to sell them at people’s homes; you had to go to businesses. It turned out that the whole thing was kind of a scam because the only way to really close a sale on the spot was to convince people they were getting a special deal. To do that you had to convince them you were stuck with these plants as "leftovers" and just wanted to unload them. Surprisingly I learned that the key to success was being able to say, "Just twenty-five dollars!" like you were amazed at how cheap that was. Although the job was kind of interesting and I liked the unstructured aspect of it, the income was unreliable and the whole thing was kind of a low class deal. I left after a couple of months.
My next job was as an electrician. We ran electrical cables and conduits in various apartment buildings, commercial buildings and industrial buildings. The owner was a real nice guy and everyone on the crew was easy to get along with. The first job I worked was some apartments. They were having trouble staying on schedule. I had an engineering degree in electronics, exposure to construction working for my uncle, and I got paired with a guy who had experience wiring apartments. We started busting out two apartments a day and got them caught up. That made us golden around the place. It was a good thing because on the next industrial job I installed two out of three fuses for a one hundred horsepower motor, third one was defective, forgot to tell anyone and when they tested it the motor burned right out. I learned you should never install some of the fuses, its all or nothing. That job was a time and materials job so right after I started on it I was running conduit as fast as I could and one of the other guys told me to slow down. That was OK by me so we took a pretty measured pace on the industrial work which was just as well because we worked on the wires live a lot of the time. Once you get some instruction and the technique it’s not a problem and I always appreciated the little training classes they ran for us to explain new things we would run into on a particular job. I left that job when I finally decided it was time to give up on being a musician and go get a job in electronics using my college degree. I had resisted that because I had a strong feeling that once I did that’s what I would end up doing for the rest of my career and sure enough that’s just how it worked out.
So what’s the point besides a trip down memory lane? Just this, I had eleven jobs before I ever got onto a "white-collar" career track. Those jobs helped me learn how to make and save money. They helped me learn how to be independent. The helped me learn what having a job and working a job is all about. They gave me a chance to screw up and learn how not to screw up at a time in my life when the consequences were still relatively modest. I learned what I was good at and what I wasn’t good at. What I liked and what I didn’t like in a job. Although I will be forever grateful to my parents for financing my college education those jobs helped me get over financial rough spots with a sense of personal freedom and independence. I am currently a company president and I am certain that much of my success is due to learning how to work from broad exposure to different jobs.
So my point is; what are kids today supposed to do? If every low-end job is taken by an illegal immigrant how do they enter the work force? As a college graduate I am a strong believer in classroom learning but I also know you learn many more things much faster on the job. Worst of all a shortage of low-end jobs robs young people of their best safety net, a job that pays at least reasonably well. The result is the difficulty young people now have in establishing themselves away from their parents. The current system victimizes everyone who needs an entry-level job.
The solution is not more government training programs, although those certainly have their place. It is not to improve schools, although that is certainly needed. It is not to raise the minimum wage, which in the current environment will only cause employers to hire even fewer legal workers. It is not to re-institute more welfare programs, which thankfully doesn’t even seem to be on any serious agenda. The solution to creating better paying entry-level jobs is the law of supply and demand. To create an increased demand for legal US citizens, particularly young and unskilled people, we need to restrict the supply of illegal immigrant workers. Increased demand will lead to higher wages. It’s really that simple.
posted by IR1 at 9:29 AM
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