Bandages don’t cure infections.

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From: NY Times
January 24, 2011, 9:15 pm
Training Youths in the Ways of the Workplace
By DAVID BORNSTEIN
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My comment

Bandages don’t cure infections.

Training our youth into the work culture, is a great program and it is an excellent opportunity to address the youth unemployment situation; but it does not solve the cause of the problem. For, there are a few factors causing problem which do not seem to be addressed. Moreover, a working culture needs to come from reality. It requires desire and opportunity.

First, all forms of the most powerful influence on our youth, teaches them that living is having joy at the beach, partying, dancing, and sports; that is fun—working is not what our youth are genuinely learning. From text books, to TV, to You Tube, and all the literature available to our youth, work is the last think, if it is ever shown. Therefore by instinct, our youth are trained not to work. Work is not part of the youth’s reality.

To make it worse, when we see resume examples, the focus is on those who are above average. Supervisory skills, and leadership, or super situations of excellence are the focus of sample resumes. However, in an average workplace, the ratio of supper-skills need is small—over-qualified, not hirable. Leadership, while being need to excel, is not essential in the working heard. Only one leader is needed to supervise 15 or 20 workers. Many times, a human robot is all that the job requires. So there is no connection to reality.

Also, a job is an idea that is foreign to many youth. They have seen it on their parents’ lives; but they also have been taught that their parents are “old fashioned”, the fad is being different. Reality has been the opposite of work. The perimeters of punching a time clock, and staying working for two hours before a break, and being at the work station within ten minutes after the break starts, seems too rigid to them.

However, let’s aim at the ultimate culprit. We have more people than we have jobs. To make more millionaires out of the stockholders and CEOs, our corporations have been pumping jobs overseas faster than we could think. That has bee going on for about 30 years.

The fire keeps on spreading, because those exported jobs never come back. Also, those machines and jobs that went to other nations are working against us. The same corporations that took the jobs away, are now pumping the same products into the USA, at cheaper prices. The people who use to make such products, now cannot buy them because they are unemployed or they are working at two part times jobs.

Then, much of the training these youth get is on the service sector such as sales. Any successful sales career requires a bit of cleverness that at times interferes with dignity and integrity.