The Enemy Called Idleness

          Anybody with a television has probably seen Mike Rowe host a series called “Dirty Jobs.”  In a recent blog he relates how his first job was in a movie theater “cleaning out the bathrooms, emptying the trash, and scraping dubious substances from the floor of the theater.”  From there he was promoted to concession vendor, then to cashier, and eventually to film projector, the job he had wanted in the first place.  The point he makes is that the career he has now as the star of his own television series began with a dirty, minimum wage job.

          Rowe argues that there is no such thing as a bad job.  “Some jobs pay better, some jobs smell better, and some jobs have no business being treated as a career.  But work is never the enemy, regardless of the wage.  Because somewhere between the job and the paycheck, there’s still a thing called opportunity, and that’s what people need to pursue.”
          Which brings us to the question of minimum wage.  I don’t profess to know what the minimum wage in this country should be.  I’m rather glad for those workers at Wal-Mart who will see their wages increase to $10 an hour.  But I think that raising the minimum wage to, say, $20 would harm the least skilled, those people who need to step on the first rung of the career ladder.  As Mike Rowe said, “If the minimum wage in 1979 had been suddenly raised from $2.90 to $10 an hour, thousands of people would have applied for the same job.  What chance would I have had, being seventeen years old with pimples and a big Adams apple?”
          One consequence of paying artificially high wages in the move to automation.  Mike Rowe wouldn’t have a job as a film projector these days: most of those jobs are handled by the push of a button.  Yet, there are thousands of jobs out there with nobody to fill them, because they require a skill that kids coming out of high school don’t have.  The shame is that too many kids who are not college material do not have the opportunity to acquire skills like carpentry, sheetrocking , welding, and auto mechanics, to name just a few. 
          To be sure, college graduates who can’t find jobs is a problem.  But what about those kids in our own community who are standing idly on the corner because they can’t find that first rung on the ladder of opportunity?
          Common Core is the much-debated government program to combat ignorance.  Maybe what we need is a Common Core program to fight idleness.