Dead-end Thinking

A young man, about 17, came through the business the Headmaster manages; he was looking for work. He said his father had abandoned the family, his mother was on welfare, and he had dropped out of school and wanted to help contribute to the family income. The Headmaster didn't need any help at business, but as the child of a divorced family abandoned by both parents, he's always interested in giving a hand up to those who need it.

He asked the young man a few questions about his work history (we'll say 'McCoy's'- a fast food restaurant where he'd been laid off, and it was a dead end job anyway). He explained that he couldn't hire him for the business, but that we did need some help clearing our pasture of poison hemlock. It was hot, sweaty work, but poison hemlock pulls up easily, so it's not back breaking. Just tedious. Because the work is so hot and sweaty, and because the Headmaster is a good sort, he said he'd pay about .15 an hour over minimum wage, and he'd pay in cash on a daily basis. The business would have only paid minimum wage, anyway, so this was actually more money than he could have made working at the store.

The kid agreed, and he came out for work the next day. The Headmaster worked with him for two or three hours to kind of show him what to do and to give him a chance to talk to the kid about going back to school, and the kid did okay. The Headmaster paid him at the end of the morning and asked him to come back the next day, but explained the next day he'd have to work alone, because the Headmaster had paperwork to catch up on inside.

The second day the kid showed up, worked for half an hour and then took a thirty minute cigarette break on our front porch. The Headmaster wandered outside and chatted with him a minute or two, asking him how many hours he'd put in so far that day. The kid said an hour. The Headmaster asked, "Son, if you can name me any place in this country where you can work for thirty minutes and then give yourself a half hour break to blow smoke inside your employer's windows and get paid for the full hour, I'll pay you for the full hour. But you need to name me one such place."
The kid thought for a minute, and then he said, "McCoy's."
The Headmaster replied, "Dude, you don't work there anymore, and maybe this is why. If you expect to get paid, I expect to receive some of the work I hired you to do."

The kid left, and he didn't come back again.

He's not the first such disappointment, and he won't be the last, I'm afraid. What he and a string of others like him never stuck around to find out is that the Headmaster had decided that anybody who demonstrated a good work ethic would receive a pay increase after two or three days. What they should have also realized is that as the manager of a business, anybody who impressed him at this 'dead-end job' stood a better chance of getting hired on at the store in town when he next needed somebody. But they don't realize that because they long ago bought into 'dead-end thinking,' the kind of thinking that Thomas Sowell says is counter-productive for the poor.

Notions of menial jobs and dead-end jobs may be just shallow misconceptions among the intelligentsia but they are a deadly counterproductive message to the poor. Refusing to get on the bottom rung of the ladder usually means losing your chance to move up the ladder.

Welfare can give you money but it cannot give you job experience that will move you ahead economically. Selling drugs on the streets can get you more money than welfare but it cannot give you experience that you can put on a job application. And if you decide to sell drugs all your life, that life can be very short.