AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The Ten Worst Jobs in America

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The Ten Worst Jobs in America


How about overpaid jobs? How about honest work?
Posted by: BigWiggs on Sep 13, 2005 4:31 AM [Report this comment]
I've lived my entire life in NC until recently moving here to NJ. Of the jobs you have listed I've had two of them as a younger man: picking tobacco and roofing. Yes it is difficult work and hot in the summer, but it is work. In my hometown and my adopted town in NC we had chicken processing plants. That's a dirty job too and it isn't fun, but it's work. Once the textiles went south and tobacco went up in legislative smoke, poultry and swine were the only jobs left in those towns for people with HS educations or less. I have a difficult time with the innuendo that these jobs are evil, deplorable, or unfair to minorities or persons of a lower SES. My home town couldn't have survived without those jobs. My high school friends and neighbors would've been in even further financial troubles if those jobs were not available. Even now residents are being displaced in those jobs by migrant workers without work visas. How would you feel suddenly unemployed when someone who just moved to your home town came in and took your desk job away from you? On the flip side (here in NJ where labor wages are some of the highest in America due to unionization) it's almost impossible for hourly wage earners to live without working 60-80 hours a week. Property taxes, licensing, process fees, union dues, and etc., stifle any opportunity to "get ahead." Just the cost of living requires a 20%-30% increase in wages between moving from NC to NJ. I still can't believe I paid a truck driver a lawyerly hourly rate to tell me he couldn't unload the truck because he was union (losing time and more money on my end) and had to pay another "union" person to unload the truck when I could've done it myself (and it was stuff I owned). Net-net my cost of business went up 30%, a cost I had to pass to my customers and I'm sure they absorbed it by increasing theirs. I'm not a left-winger and certainly not a right-winger. I was a "blue" vote in a "red" state in NC. But some of our party have got to get their heads out of their asses. Bottom line would you rather be unemployed or work one of the "worst jobs?" By focusing on the worst aspects of those jobs you forget why people are there in the first place.