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>>It's not that we don't want to work.<<

My mother is a GM manager at a grocery store and she would just LOVE to hire someone who wants to work. All the time I hear her complainign about people that sail through their 90 day probation period only to start calling in sick on day 91. Kids who go to lunch and never come back to work. Adults who want a job as long as they dont have to do anything they don't want to do get theri two breaks and a lunch a day and can get paid to call in sick when they are having a bad day.

People don't want to work. I'm not saying that you personally dont want to wrk cause I dont know you from Jack. But if you do want to- I mean really really willing to work- to get your hands dirty or to lift something heavier than a stapler or something else that "wastes" that precious college degree there IS someone out there that would love to have you over the other 1999 applicants that just want to sit on their hands all day and collect a paycheck for it.

People *say* they want to work. But mostly I dont believe it. People who want to work will work, even if its flipping hamburgers at McDonalds and then heading to that second job cleaning toilets in the building you used to have a nice fancy office in.

My college degrees are earned with honors. I worked my ass off to earn them, tending bar, waiting tables and selling cars.

God Bless your mother and people who do her thankless work. I've done that kind of crappy work and hired slouchy people to fill crappy jobs. More power to her. I am not being an elitist, just discrimating since I am getting older. Why hire on just to get fired? I know my limitations and it is not that I think I am better. F*ck! I had a job as a banquet cook a few years ago! Talk about physical labor hauling crates of potatoes and meat up a flight of stairs ten times a day! I'm not immune to hard work!

From your tone, I'm guessing you didn't pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

People don't want to work. I'm not saying that you personally dont want to wrk cause I dont know you from Jack. But if you do want to- I mean really really willing to work- to get your hands dirty or to lift something heavier than a stapler or something else that "wastes" that precious college degree there IS someone out there that would love to have you over the other 1999 applicants that just want to sit on their hands all day and collect a paycheck for it.

Yes, the issue is not work per se. But you are missing a key and critical point. People go through a "life cycle". When they are young their overhead is low. A single person can live on $8.50/hour because they get together with 3 other single people and bunk down in a two bedroom apartment. Normally these people are going to school part time to find get some skills for a better job.

A married with kids and mortgage person cannot effectively make it on $8.50/hour. Which is what the kinds of job you describe pay. This is a phase of life. Once you have kids you have to keep them safe (which means don't live in a crime infested neighborhood), which means a mortgage in a nice (or at least "nicer") part of town. Once the kids are out, yeah, you can downsize the house and go back to working for less money. But people with kids have higher expenses. It is not necessarily about a fear of "wasting a precious college degree." It is that when you compete with unskilled labor, you get paid too little to cover the overhead that comes with kids.