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.
My question is, will they have real part-time burger flipping jobs, at minimum wage or the Democrat political elite, 1%, no work, $600,000 minimum wage job, such as Chelsea Clinton? $600,000 must be elitists minimum wage.
They mean it... I kinda like the Obama’s as parents. They’re raised good kids under somewhat difficult circumstances. We can afford to ‘give them credit where credit is due’...
The Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor probably has minimum wages jobs. Imagine the life lessons they could learn.
Their father should do the same. Lazy ass do-nothing doesn’t know what it’s like to get out of bed before 11am.
Can’t imagine the store owner being willing to put up with the ongoing, never ending media and security hassles
Yeah, right.
I’d like to see Clown Prince nobama and the Worst Lady, mooch-elle, breaking rocks.
The Princesses and the Paupers.
Give them minimum wage jobs without the minimum wage life. They will not get the experience of paying rent, buying gasoline for their beater cars, walking home from work on a dark rainy night, losing their job to someone who can live on less or even needing to have more than one job to make ends meet.
Some years ago, I was a payroll supervisor for a company that had about 750 weekly paycheck employees.
It was the law at that time in California that anyone UNDER 16 years of age COULD NOT work a job. Perhaps that law has been changed, but I am unaware of such.
Obama’s kid was hired more than a month ago as ‘an assistant’ on a TV production, in Hollywood. SHE was ONLY 15.
In the world I worked in, she could NOT have such a job prior to being 16. It was my job to be certain such violations did NOT occur, along with other responsibilities.
She is 16 TODAY.
How come no one has challenged this employment???
Yeah. Even if Malia is making minimum wage, which she’s not, working in Hollywood is hardly like flipping burgers or mowing lawns.
If they want to give the kids a real world experience, then drop them off in Guatemala and let them get into the USA the way his other children are.
The girls could learn a lot about how Dad creates minimum wage jobs.
President's daughter. Female. Black. Bulletproof.
‘uncle’ Eric.
Hobby Lobby pays well. ;)
First, the Secret Service would vet all the employees of the restaurant.
Second, the owner would be directed to pay them $20 per hour by their daddy.
Third, Malia and Sasha would determine their own hours and show up and leave as they pleased.
Fourth, all McDonald's customers would have to pass through Secret service check points with full body scanners and metal detectors before ordering.
Fifth, Moochelle Obama would want to control the McDonald's menu items to make certain the customers were fed according to her ideas about “healthy” eating.
Yeah, I can see how your average small business would be salivating at having the Obama kids work for them...NOT.
Obama: “I want Malia to work at a minimum wage job. Yes. That is why I had my donor friends in the Hollywood studios give her an internship as a production assistant making movies. She barely makes minimum wage! Now she will understand poverty and the meaning of a dollar, which I will discuss with her after AF1 gets back from picking her up in L.A. After work.”
I pity the poor things. They don’t have a chance.
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