Posted on 07/04/2014 11:33:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
While being interviewed by Parade magazine, President and Mrs. Obama said that they would like for their daughters to have the experience of working at minimum wage jobs. Hear! Hear!
In his wise book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide for Getting Ahead, Charles Murray advises the gilded youth of today, more isolated from what Episcopalians used to call “all sorts and conditions of men” than their counterparts in previous generations, to seek out summer jobs that will introduce them to people they might not ordinarily get to know. Such jobs can be transformative. “Once you have been a server in a restaurant,” Murray writes, “you will never again look at dining in a restaurant as you did before you were a server.”
The target audience for Murray’s book is the kind of young person who has excellent educational credentials and is more likely to land a summer job in a think tank or on Capitol Hill or as personal assistant to a Hollywood mogul than at a McDonald’s—in other words, the Obama daughters a few years hence.
It must be noted that Sasha and Malia's Dad has a very limited view of people who work at jobs outside his own golden orbit. “Every little girl I meet out there,” President Obama told Parade, “I think about Malia and Sasha, and the notion that they’d be treated differently, trapped, not paid enough, having to settle for a raw deal on the job, having to scramble between taking care of kids, taking care of an aging parent, being single moms like my mom was and going to school and work at the same time, then having to come home and cook.”
If Malia and Sasha go into their minimum wage jobs with open hearts and minds, they can learn a great deal and maybe even help Dad get a better picture of life in these United States.
First, I hope Sasha and Malia will notice that most workers the Obama daughters meet are glad to have their jobs, which are becoming scarcer and scarcer thanks to Dad’s economic policies. Many of their colleagues will use the skills acquired at these jobs to move up the ladder to a better paying job.
These low-skilled workers may not deliver homilies on the dignity of work, but, if the Obama girls are observant, they will see that these jobs do confer dignity. Some of their colleagues could probably do just as well financially going on disability, but they know that dependence is a dead end, while work is a path to a better future, no matter how onerous and often tedious the job is on a daily basis. One of the refrains when welfare was being reformed in the 1990s, was this from disgruntled people who frankly preferred welfare to work: What do you expect me to do, work at McDonald’s?
Well, yeah—as did Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who likes to brag that he learned to crack eggs with one hand while working at McDonald's, singer Macy Gray, who called the McDonald’s gig her “first big break,” according a CBS News report, and Jay Leno. Not everybody who works a minimum wage job at McDonald’s is going to scale the heights but all have the opportunity to move onto something that pays more, if they work hard, show up, and apply themselves. Oh, and if they don’t view themselves as “trapped, not paid enough, having to settle for a raw deal on the job,” as Sasha and Malia’s father described his take on the minimum wage job.
While raising the minimum wage is generally portrayed as a way to help low-skilled workers, Malia and Sasha, if they get real minimum wage jobs, might recognize that some of the people they meet would face unemployment if the minimum wage is hiked. It will be good that these people aren’t just statistics to Malia and Sasha but rather living and breathing people who were getting a toehold in the world of work and had the opportunity to come to work every day and build their skills.
Some of Sasha's and Malia's minimum wage coworkers, of course, would benefit from a minimum wage hike, but let’s hope that Malia and Sasha notice that these men and women are the employees who have honed their skills and thus were likely to move up anyway, and it’s those without skills who are the most likely to be harmed. That includes many of their contemporaries in age. Fewer and fewer young Americans have the opportunity to work. That’s a big set back for those teens, who will have a harder time getting a job without such critical skill-building opportunities.
That’s the real problem, especially since what creates poverty is not working full-time at a low-paying job, but not working at all. As my colleague Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum, recently has pointed out, researchers using twenty years of Census date found that among workers sixteen and older who are living in poverty, the problem isn’t the minimum wage—it was no wage. Only 9 percent of those living in poverty had full-time work year around, while 67 percent didn’t work at all. If Sasha and Malia talk to their coworkers, they’ll no doubt hear personal stories that, if the girls are open to new ideas, show them that a job—almost any job—is the best way out of poverty.
Life is unfair and, yes, some people do get stuck in minimum wage jobs. I know that Malia and Sasha will be able to see these people sympathetically and I hope they will view them not as unfortunates, but as people who are working heroically to support their families in tough situations. You can learn lots more than how to crack an egg with one hand if you mingle with your fellow Americans on the job. Who knows? Maybe the Obama girls will build a business one day and chalk it all up to the halcyon days at McDonald's.
Their kids as political props
Congrats
And you and I will pay for dry-cleaning the grease spatter off the Secret Service agents suits.
Would they have to go to McDonald’s U, or, like 0bama, just be given honorary degrees at elaborate, pretentious ceremonies?
Now it becomes clear why the minimum wage must be raised to $20 plus vacation and benefits.
Bingo. After a hard day’s work, guarded by SS men, they’ll be whisked off in armored limousines back to the White Hut mansion. Gee whiz, such a tough life.
Hobby Lobby is paying $14 an hour minimum
If you call your Dad, he could stop it all.
Would they have secret service protection while flipping burgers?
“While being interviewed by Parade magazine...”
Dad gives me his Sunday paper after the fact. Was sorting through them and when I saw those two on the Parade cover, I immediately tossed it in the burn bin. Didn’t even bother to read it.
Those kids aren’t going to learn jack - other than to be, ‘The Best Grifters They Can Be’ from Mom and ‘Dad.’
Chelsea (Hubble) Clinton? Please pick up the white Courtesy Phone in the Lobby! Malia and Sasha calling!
Gosh! What a heartwarming story from Charles Murray about getting to know people who work at minimum wage jobs.
Sort of like John Gielgud in the movie “Arthur” saying to Liza Minnelli: “Ordinarily, one would have to go to a bowling alley to meet one of your caliber.”
The Obamas suck, too.
When rich, elite kids “do a job” they know it’s a joke. They can pretend they rubbed elbows with “little people” and be even more annoying later in life.
Hope they have more integrity than Paris Hilton and that skank girlfriend of hers, whatever her name is. They were on a reality show where they lived with a real family and worked real jobs (for about a day), and they were exactly the total waste of skin you’d expect them to be. No integrity whatsoever.
If they do (Malia and Sasha), it might be a good experience for them. I don’t see how the logistics could work for it to be a realistic experience though. Surrounded by too many Secret Service and so on, it’s not going to be the typical experience.
Flip burgers for a photo op and then Moochelle can whisk them away to some exotic destination to recover.
They need to work at the border crossings with the kids. Or In a dump zone in Virginia if there is one there, oh no, that’s right, there’s a dem governor there
Let’s see, kids working minimum wage jobs with Secret Service protection...yeah. I can see that.
One of my best educations was working as a bag boy in a supermarket next to “the projects.” I dealt with crazy people, drunks, druggies and armed robbers. There were countless shoplifters. Yeah, it was an education. Not to mention it was a union shop. Boy was THAT educational. I used my money to buy a car and school books. But it’s unlikely these political props will ever have to decide between saving their money for something big, like a car, and spending it all because it’s less than their monthly stipend.
One of them is working on a Hollywood set... you know like millions of others. lol.
You see how great Mylie Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan turned out.
I actually don’t have a big problem with this idea. The logistics of it will probably make this impossible.
Sorry, the experience of a celebrity will be significantly different from that of an “ordinary” person. Everyone treats you differently if you are a star. It’s basically a love fest. They should empty their bank accounts so they can’t afford to quit, and go in cognito to get the genuine minimum wage experience.
It will be fake. They will learn nothing.
Malia and Natasha aren’t going to be allowed to do anything that might make them even look at normal.
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