The American Spectator : The End of Wishful Thinking
Ben Stein's Diary The End of Wishful Thinking
...2. The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along -- not always easy.
(This brings to mind an idea I have long had: that high schools and colleges should have a course on "how to get along" and "how to do a day’s work." This would include showing up in clean clothes, smelling well, having had a good breakfast, dressed in a businesslike way, calling the other employees "sir" or "ma'am" and not talking back. This would include a teaching of the fact that the employee is not there for amusement, but to help the employer make money and to get a job done. It would include the idea that once you are at work, you are not at play. It is an idea whose time has come.)
Productive workers with real skills and real ability to get along are also sometimes unemployed, but they will be the last fired and the first hired.
I remember back in the 1990s when Welfare Reform was started a local clerk was saying how she got a woman a job and after one day she quit. Why? The woman won a prize on a radio show and she wanted to go get it. She figured she would just go back on welfare.
Compare that with Will Smith, the actor. He was being interviewed by 60 Minutes and asked what got him his start:
“Why does he think he has been so successful?
"I've never really viewed myself as particularly talented. I've viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working. While the other guy's eatin’? I'm working. While the other guy's making love, I mean, I'm making love, too. But I'm working really hard at it," he tells Kroft, laughing.
That he makes it look just the opposite is testament to his personality and his skill as an actor. He likes the fact that you never see him sweat unless you are supposed to, or notice the emotional capital expended as a homeless father with a hungry son, or the commitment it took to become Muhammad Ali. Or the sheer challenge of his last film "I Am Legend," in which he was required to hold the screen, all by himself, for over an hour, as the survivor of biological outbreak that has wiped out most of the world. And he managed to pull it off.
The instincts and the work ethic come from his middle class upbringing in Philadelphia. His mother was a school administrator, his father owned a refrigeration company.
One summer, his dad tore down a brick wall in the front of his business and told 12-year-old Will and his 9-year-old brother to rebuild it, a job they said was impossible. It took them a year and a half, but they did it.
"And he said, 'Now, don't you ever tell me there's somethin' that you can't do.' And walked right through that door, went inside. And me and my brother stood here and looked. And said, 'Daddy crazy as hell, ain't he?'" Smith recalls, laughing.
The wall is still there, and so is the lesson he learned from building it. "I just put my head down and lay the first brick," Smith explains.
I see kids in da hood every day who have never been taught how to work and who think they should make no efforts to get money. Again, showing up on time, sober (yes, that is a problem), clean and ready to work. Something we hopefully can start teaching people this again.
I was mortified when I first read that article earlier this week. I don't think it's true at all that "The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say 'generally' because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work." That's a very large blanket to be casting.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree with his explicit instruction about work "rules", though.
It may be a broad net as he does have a rather particular group he hangs with. But he does cover a major societal problem we have. We got to start teaching people how to work again.
ReplyDelete