The Meaning of Work

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/18/AR2006111801189_pf.html

by uladzislau • 13 years ago

9 7 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

lwhalen2• 13 years ago

So... what's the point of this article? Young man who:

* quits HS early, has multiple opportunities to get equivalent degree but doesn't

* quits his first job without another lined up

* 'hangs around' for a couple of years, but somehow...

* lands a steady (albeit crappy) job at Jiffy Lube, yet...

* doesn't bother showing up for his first or second day because 'reasons',

is discovering that life, in fact, is hard. How is this a societal problem, or anything other than 'lazy kid can't keep a job because of his own personal problems'?

just to update, it appears that by the end of the article, our 'hero' discovers that showing up to an interview early, dressed in suit and tie, with a warm smile and firm handshake, does indeed stack the deck in your favor. Continuing to show up early and do the job you've been hired for means they'll continue to pay you. Shocking expose by WaPo right there.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the guy found work by the end of the article, and I hope his attitude changes and he reaps nothing but success. However, up until that point it appears that the majority of his troubles are of his own making. I still fail to see how the above bullet points are society's problem, which seems to be the point the WaPo article dances around.

abraham_s2• 13 years ago

1)"his neighborhood's unemployment rate 16.3 percent"

2)Chris began his new job. Eight dollars an hour, 40 hours a week, $16,640 a year.<> An income of $11,490 for a person is defined a the poverty threshold.

3) She is 52 years old, and after 10 years of working as an attendant at a nursing home, a job that paid her $7 an hour when she began and $9.75 an hour when she was let go, she wonders if she will ever work again.

4)He thought he had a job as a stocker at K-mart, but on the day he was to start training, he didn't have bus fare, and that was that.

I see multiple things which are "societal problem" in the article.

"lazy kid can't keep a job because of his own personal problems"

Unless you have gone through a long bout of unemployment, where you get rejected on a daily basis, I would say you are not qualified to comment on the effect of such a episode on a persons morale and psychological well-being of this person. What you see as laziness just might be depression.

I am not completely justifying the person in the article. But I tend to view these things through a more compassionate eye after I went through a brief period of unemployment.

edit: Formatting

a3n• 13 years ago

"What you see as laziness just might be depression."

Man, I've been there, and that was exactly what I was feeling when I read the article. The hopelessness. It's a vicious, killing cycle.

Just about everything in this kid's environment and experience was negative. Yes, we can rise above, but it's really hard to see that there's even somewhere to go when you haven't seen it in your life.

Unemployment of 16.3 percent. Does that mean that "they" are lazy? Or are there other more fundamental factors?

emilisto• 13 years ago

Try reading it again, this time without reducing a persons life into a bullet-point list of what he did and didn't do. As other replies are pointing out — it's the whole situation from day one that creates a situation like that if Chris'. If you think you can solve that by saying its because of laziness, you really ought to read up on how people have been made to change throughout history: by being given a fair chance to succeed. How many times have you risen from the ashes, yourself?

pjdorrell• 13 years ago

It seems that we have constructed a world of jobs where consistency is the primary value, even though the end goal is just to get some work done.

On the Internet we have constructed systems that accept contributions from people that can be as little or as much as they want to contribute - like Wikipedia, or newsy sites like Hacker News, or Github. These websites succeed where those that require too much up-front commitment fail. Like Nupedia (or even SourceForge, in the old days, when it was the "go-to" place for open-source development).

Out in the real world we still demand (mostly), mandatory minimum levels of commitment. Or, where work can be casual, it gets paid much less than the "regular" jobs.

There are opportunities for any company that can work out how to make use of those who want to work, at least some of the time, but who are unable or unwilling to commit to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.

We could blame the contributors of Nupedia for the failure of that website. And we could blame all those open-source programmers who were too lazy to jump through the minimal set of hoops that SourceForge required for contributors, for the demise of that website. But we know that better alternatives exist, which are more tolerant of slackness and lack of commitment from their contributors. So we can see that those older websites were not the best possible way to organise how to get people to contribute their efforts.

The Meaning of Work

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