I can still remember my first full "real" job, as in one that I drew an actual paycheck. I worked part of a summer at a grocery store in North Carolina. I was visiting my father that summer. My mother and father had divorced years earlier, and he had made the arrangements for me to be hired. For various reasons, we hadn't got to spend very much time together when I was growing up, but we did that summer. I got up when he got up, I ate when he ate. I worked when he worked, and that man worked.
My recollection is that we worked six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day that summer. There might have been a few days that we knocked off after eight. Most of the work areas were hot. The work was hard. For my labor, I was paid the marvelous sum of $1.50 per hour (or about $1.12 after taxes and deductions).
I can't say that I really enjoyed it. I was never big or muscular, or coordinated, and grocery stock work required a skill set that I was dismally lacking. I'm sure my dad knew that before he arranged for the job. We hadn't spent much time together when I was growing up, but he had seen me do enough. He knew my strengths and weaknesses, and he knew I was way out of my element. I kept plugging along.
Time has wiped away a lot of the specifics of that summer. There were some times with my dad and I joking on the job. I think were probably times when I was tired on the job, and I would grumble the way tired fifteen-year-olds do. And I think there might well have been a point when my father looked at me when at told me to either quit or stop grumbling, and that's the point I would have shut up real quick.
Just prior to that trip to North Carolina, my father had purchased a new car, and he had talked to my mother about giving his old car to me as present for my sixteenth birthday. My mother said that she would agree, but that I had to find a way to pay for gas and insurance. As I said, the two had divorced some time ago, and while both had managed that was about all. Money was tight. She had no money to get me set up. There weren't any jobs available for fifteen-year-olds where we lived, and none for sixteen-year-olds either, if they didn't have a car. It was summer stock-boy, or spend my junior year at high school as the walkin' dude. I kept sweeping and placing cans.
I really disliked working as a stock clerk, and that's the truth. It was hot, boring, and I have little to no talent for the job. I am also grateful to everyone involved, from my father who patiently worked with that summer, to the store owner who hired me at that pitiful wage. In the brief span of six weeks in my fifteenth year I got lessons that have lasted the rest of my life. I learned about responsibility, follow-through, working in difficult conditions. I learned the kind of work that I don't want to do in life, which can be almost as important what kind of work you do want to do. I learned I was capable of more than I thought. And I was able to earn enough to by my initial car insurance and have gas until I could get a job at home.
I was able to do all of that because I had the opportunity to work.
Today there are so many people at every level of government and out of government that are trying to protect people from "bad" jobs. If these same people had been around when I was growing up, I would not have had a summer job. That would have meant no car, at least not then. Life lessons would have been put off. I can't really say how things would have ended up. I do know this: I would not have thanked them then. Nor do I thank them now.
The current administration is not the first to shrink the ability of Americans to work or start new businesses, but it certainly has accelerated the process. The White House is now cheering the ability of people to be "free" of the need to work to meet the expenses of health care as the rolls of the long term unemployed and disabled grow. The path is clear, grim, and unsustainable, which leaves us a rather stark choice: we must either return the nation to a land of opportunity largely free of government interference, or resign ourselves to having no opportunity the government does not provide.
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