Forgive me if this does not flow very well. I just came from donating platelets and I always have a poor reaction to the citrate - I've stopped shaking now, for the most part, but I'm still feeling a strange buzz in every cell in my body. It will pass sooner or later.
A conversation with the volunteer at the donor center crystalized something that's been bouncing around my head ever since Rep. John Fleming, a "job creator", said he only has 400K left over after paying out 6 million in payroll for five hundred jobs. Someone did the math and figured that the average worker was making about 12K a year at his "jobs" - just above the poverty line for single adults, and well below it for anyone with a child.
The volunteer, an older gentleman who retired not too long ago from IT, was muttering that there are plenty of "jobs" available out there, people just don't take them.
Remembering Ministry of Truth's video from yesterday, I replied back that "no one wants a job that can't actually pay their bills."
"Well," the man said, slightly taken aback, "a job is not a career."
He's right.
We don't need "job creators" like Representative Fleming, who use their savings to open up new fast food franchises.
We need career creators. We need people who invest in long-term, well-paying jobs that someone will be proud to work at, and want to stay at, for extended periods of time.
I have led a pretty typical life for late gen-X early gen-Y. I did very well in high school, graduating from one of the top schools in the country because I applied myself and my parents believed in a good education. I attended a good four year college and graduated with a BA in English with an emphasis on technical writing, a degree choice that was a great idea in 2000 and a not-quite-so-great idea in 2002 after the dot com crash.
I was promoted from my call center McJob to become a supervisor, a position I was pretty okay with until I was unceremoniously downsized after seven years with the company.
Thankfully, the safety net kept a roof over my head until I found another call center job, one I stayed at for three years. The pay was not bad, but the stress levels were so high that I had to leave when I got married because my hair was falling out!
I spent a year as a housewife, before I got bored and luckily landed something quite close to my dream job, working as a technical writer (and essentially as the systems administrator) for a small IT firm.
Things took a turn for the even-better when I was accepted to the graduate program I wanted to attend, the MIT program through the Terry College of Business at UGA.
My cohort is full of people mostly my age - some a little over, a few a little younger. Most of us have been through the same story - bouncing from job to job, in search of a career.
That is something that my generation has been denied. A BA isn't enough to give you a career any more - a high school diploma most certainly isn't. You can get a job with it, but forget a career!
Even my current job, where I am happy and I feel needed, has been expressed to me in terms of temporariness by my manager. He knows that someday I'll leave this "job" and go onto a career instead. Fortunately, he's a great guy and he's determined to stuff my head with all the experience an IT director is going to need out there in the wild world.
But since when is a master's degree a pre-requisite for a career? Even people who go to trade school (especially those who made the decision to go into construction) may find themselves stuck in "jobs" with no long term prospects beyond the end of their contracts. A few of the most skilled will be lucky to land apprenticeships and become members of formal trade unions, but with Joe the Plumber out there diluting the value of Actual Union Plumbers, even formerly safe career choices might be reduced to merely "jobs."
So the next time someone starts declaring himself a "job creator" and beating his chest over his own value to the country, let him (or her) know that he can keep his jobs and shut up until he's started investing in careers.