TALKING ABOUT WORK AND WAGES OVER THE WEEKEND

Before I Begin, let me say Happy Canada Day.

In a comment on a previous post, I mentioned that I would buy my brother and fellow blogger JnvReno lunch.

So yesterday we went out to Brick House Pizza.

And we had a wonderful time. (In case there's any ambiguity, I'm the one with the gray hat.)

And now the topic at hand.

Rather than spend a few days driving between numerous stores and restaurants asking for job applications, filling them out, and then returning them, I took the same path I took last summer, and went straight to a job placement agency, Diamond Staffing, and was able to get a job for my brother and I before the day was over.

We've been working there for about three weeks now. The place is a factory in Milford, New Hampshire, run by Saint-Gobain, a French-owned corporation with factories in many nations across the world. This particular factory is part of their ceramics division, and produces igniters for use in appliances made by such companies as Whirlpool, Amana, and Maytag.

My job is fairly simple. After the ceramic igniter has been cemented in place inside a larger ceramic block and sent through the oven to dry, I take the blocks off of racks, put on a metal shield over the delicate igniter part, and pass them on, a bin at a time, to the next part of the assembly line.

I'm not going to gloss over it; the job is mind-numbing. Between that and my inability to force myself to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes open until lunch at 11:30. I can't really have an interesting conversation with anyone, since all the people I work with are southeast Asian immigrants, most likely living in Lowell, which has a large Cambodian and Vietnamese population. Most of them only know enough English for the bosses to be able to relay orders. Almost all the signs are written in both English and Vietnamese/Cambodian (again, not sure which).

At least at lunch, I can sit with my brother and we can talk. Since we both needed a job this summer, but we only have one car between us, we decided we'd work at the same place. We're going to try to work there all summer.

I think it's important for everyone in the country to work a blue collar job like this one. It makes you ask yourself a question: "Do I want to do this for the rest of my life?" It's motivation to get a good education, so you won't have to work blue collar. But also, it reminds you that there are people who have to do things like this. I think this is important because it could have an effect on white-collar crime: if a businessman understood what his workers have to worry about, he might not be as inclined to outsource people or cut wages, and we might prevent another Enron.
I think our president's failure to create ONE new job stems from his inability to understand that not everyone has had an education that includes prestigious names like Phillips Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School. He just doesn't get the fact that they don't work at these places making minimum wage because they chose to.

And there's another thing: The minimum wage bill, proposed by Senator Ted Kennedy, failed 52 to 46. It would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in three increments. We haven't gotten an increase to the federal minimum wage since 1998, and with gas prices rising to unimaginable levels, I think we need it. I don't specifically, since Massachusetts' state minimum is $6.75, with increases of $1.00 scheduled for september 2006 and September 2007. And the job at Saint-Gobain pays $9.25/hour anyway.

But I'm sure there's a family who's barely making rent right now, for whom an extra $84 dollars a week would be a godsend. Were those who voted against the bill thinking of them? I think they were thinking more of the businessmen whose votes they needed, for whom an increase in wages would constitute a decrease in the bottom line. One reason mentioned in an article
was that businesses would be more reluctant to hire people because of the prospect of increased cost of labor. I'm going to come out and say this now: Anyone who would not hire someone they need because the rest of their workforce is overloaded...is an asshole. I could come up with a more elegant way of putting it, but it's late and I want to get this post finished. If the company's bottom line is the motivation for denying someone a job, you're an asshole and you're going to lose more workers in the future.

My final thought on this issue: Democrats running for congress have a campaign issue now. "Such Andsuch voted against the minimum wage. Do you want him representing you in the Senate?"