Your "conclusions about why THOSE MEN are Republican" are perfectly logical but do not take into account how they manage to survive without gainful employment. Surely they do not partake in the public 'COMMUNIST-SOCIALIST' dole of any kind nor engage in drug dealing or other criminal enterprise as that is reserved for the '25 million illegals in our midst who take away all the black jobs and housing.'" The most empathetic parents wear out their patience when a kid hits middle age and is still lounging away the days and hogging the dinner table. Do you have a fix for this conundrum?
In some places, like coal country detailed in the linked NYT article, they live off their wives' employment. And there are a ton living at home. Some end up homeless. Some certainly do end up taking government benefits, although the old welfare is now limited to 5 years in a lifetime.
I have no solution. The number is SO LARGE that it doesn't make sense to me.
The MAGA supporters in my extended family - male and female - are very well-educated, well-traveled professionals. They are exceptionally nice, generous, and community oriented. They are also all very religious and single-issue voters, and that issue is abortion. When people think they are serving God by voting against abortion rights, there is no reaching them. They will overlook everything else.
If you link to a NYT article, please gift it - I cancelled our subscription to that rag months ago and am unable to access it.
I opened the Hyatt Regency Buffalo back in 1984. We had 300 job openings. Most jobs started at $3.90/hr - 55¢ more than minimum wage. We were set to interview at the Buffalo Convention Center on a snowing January morning - starting at 9am. At 7am, we received a phone call at the hotel where we were staying saying to get there IMMEDIATELY - they had broken into the center to get out of the weather, police had been called, and there was a potential riot waiting to ignite. People had been lining up since before 5am.
We had 10,000 applicants. The unemployment office had sent out letters to everyone collecting that they HAD to apply for a job to continue benefits. Average steel worker pay at the time was around $13.50.
9500 of them were not qualified to be dishwashers. We interviewed non-stop until almost 9pm.
The seriously vast majority of applicants just did not have the skill-set to work in a hospitality setting. It was a foreign world to them. What kind of transferable skills does a person working in a very specific field have? And what sort of AmeriCorp Job Training is going to train a steel worker or a coal miner so they can land a comparable-paying UNION job?!? And how many jobs of any sort are available in Letcher County, Kentucky? There sure weren't many in Buffalo. It was one of the most difficult days I have ever had in my life. It sucked.
I got the travel bug when I was in the Navy - Singapore was where I flat-out learned to love food. It has never stopped. I was young and single - I moved and lived all over the USofA. I had no responsibility for anyone other than myself. I picked up and transferred whenever the bug hit me. I had a blast.
What I did not have was a wife and kids, a house - or any of the responsibilities or worries that come with them. Most people just do not have the means to pick up and move. It was easy for me - the hotel relocation services helped me find a new place to live, movers came to my house, packed everything, moved it to my new address - and unpacked it. Bought my plane tickets, paid my taxi fares. Put me up in hotels and paid for my food and drink. Try doing that with a wife and kids.
And like Linda, I have several relatives - well educated making good money - who wouldn't vote for a Democrat - ever - mainly over single-issue abortion, but also immigration. They earned their position and will be damned if someone gets a leg up and takes a job away from one of their lazy-assed kids. While I'm sure the majority of them have never socialized with a person of color, they believe the hype.
MAGA folks ain't all unemployed macho-man-wannabes. A lot of them are disillusioned with Democrats. Coal jobs are gone because Democrats hate coal burning and have created too many restrictions, regulations, ad nauseam, destroying their way of life. It doesn't matter what the actual reasons are for the decline of coal use, that's the message they're hearing. And I don't hear a lot of Democrats out there refuting it. Global Warming is an abstract concept to almost everyone. A lost paycheck is a reality.
First, I thought I DID use the share button, but obviously was failed by technology, or my vision. Here is the link AND I emailed it to you. Apologies.
About Buffalo - I completely believe that there were thousands applying for jobs. Back in the 80's, people really wanted to work. I remember being between jobs in my field, and looking for ANYTHING -- and applying for one of two waitressing positions at a Red Lobster - there were more than 300 applicants.
I am confused why so many people didn't qualify to be dishwashers. My kid brother was a dishwasher at a restaurant at age 16, and he didn't have any skills.
But as to your main point. I believe in union jobs, and I'm glad to see that unions are doing the hard work now to get better pay and benefits, and even working on decreasing automation. And I know that "good jobs" have been disappearing since the 80's due to globalization and corporate greed. Well aware.
When I had a travel job from 1995 - 2003, I spent the first 6 years on the corporate side, and spent a lot of time in places in Ohio that had been decimated by the loss of jobs that fed into the manufacturing supply chain for cars, trucks, planes, helicopters, etc. I'd talk to men who were now making less than they had, and wouldn't leave because they'd always lived there. But I also talked to women who were working along side them, whose husbands had moved to where the jobs had relocated (mostly auto plants in the south) and came home every other weekend. Some of the men who left went to work on gas and oil fields - huge paychecks, although they often lived in bad conditions -- often sharing a trailer with other men far from home, just to keep their families solvent.
I don't disagree that the Democratic messengers, over the past 40 years, have done a TERRIBLE job of explaining where the jobs went, as well as promulgating programs that would get jobs back to the US. Good jobs. Union jobs. And it breaks my heart that these MAGA types will be WORSE off under a Republican administration.
What struck me in the article (that you can hopefully now read) was how the wives had no more skills than their husbands, but they took courses and were able to get jobs in health care. Easy? No? As financially viable? No. But the kids get fed, and roofs stay over their heads.
While I understand that a lot of jobs today are crappy if you don't have specialized skills (and a lot of those fields desperately want more workers) the unemployment rate is 4.1%, when "full employment" has always meant 5%. That means there ARE jobs, no matter how crappy. And what confuses me is why people won't take a lesser job as compared to NO job. The statistics indicate that men from ages 25 - 54 have LEFT the labor force in huge numbers. And this may well be a personal limitation, but I don't understand why people would choose to do nothing, as compared to doing something. I cannot wrap my head around it. We are all influenced by what was inculcated early in life, and I was raised that work mattered. You always worked. My mother constantly repeated that her father crossed the Atlantic at age 11 (yes, eleven) by himself to make his way to Chicago to get an education and a job and send money home so his younger siblings could come to America. I started waiting tables when I was 13 because I could get working papers, and thus it was time to work. So I accept the criticism that I just "don't get it".
Apology accepted ♥ And I was able to read the article. Thanks.
I should have been more clear about my "dishwasher" reference. A dishwasher in a hotel is a "Steward". No one just washed dishes, they did everything from the obvious dish and pot washing to assisting in banquet set-up, kitchen cleaning, silver polishing, and a myriad of other 'back-of-the-house' duties. It could be quite stressful and frantic doing meals for 1000 people. It was a 24/7/365 operation. And, of course, there's 'attitude' which is paramount in the interview/hiring process.
You are totally correct that we are influenced by what was inculcated early in life - and it's probably the main issue affecting the men in Kentucky and elsewhere. They were taught and raised that the man worked, the woman stayed home and took care of the home and family. “The way of life is changing so bad,” “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”
They get overwhelmed, they don't know where to turn, they drink or take drugs to numb the feelings... They're not lazy, they're lost. They lack the mental acuity to see beyond the present. If you've only known one way, it's not easy to see other avenues. Not to mention the frustration and humiliation when they apply for a lesser job, only to be passed over. It pretty much reinforces that overwhelmed and lost feeling.
One line definitely caught my attention in the article: "A state program for miners’ families not only paid tuition but, critically, also provided money for living expenses." Knowing nothing about the program or who it was available to - it would appear that it could have been a driving force in getting women into the local workforce. And from my own experience, I know UCSF Health is the largest employer in San Francisco - and I receive a lovely pension from them, today. Healthcare, in general, is a great field with tons of opportunity.
I got my first job in 1961 - I'm much older than you <g> - and the only time I was purposely unemployed was late 1975 when I was laid off from a cooking job. I was living with my pregnant sister-in-law and her boyfriend - she collected AFDC, her BF sold pot, and I collected unemployment. For about 4 months, all I did was smoke pot, drink Coca-Cola, and watch Mary Hartman. It was great. Then, a friend who I had previously worked with called me up and asked if I wanted a cooking job up at Lake Tahoe. I was hired and my travel adventures really took off!
And that hotel in Buffalo?!? I lasted 9 months there. I hated it with a purple passion. I walked out. I went back to SF and got a job with a gourmet food distributor. Six months later, the hotel voted in a union.
Thanks for accepting my apology, and for explaining about the dishwashers.
I have some LIMITED banquet experience - I was sent to work in the Jewish Alps while in college. The idea was to wait tables during the day, and sneak in to watch comics at night, to learn timing. While I was there, I mostly worked in the breakfast and lunch "cafe" where a table would come in, and you'd take their order and deliver it. But I spent a few horrible nights in the main dining room, where the choices were limited, you had to be organized to get food out to tables of 16, not get hit by the doors -- it was A LOT.
When you talk about the state program -- I just can't help wondering why men didn't sign up too? I understand depression and being lost. I honestly do -- I just view it as transient and not permanent. But my life experience is different from that of a miner, and I've never been a fan of strict gender roles.
BTW- MSNBC is running a series called "My Generation" - Tim and I watched the first installment last night -- the one about Boomers. I think you and Victor would enjoy it.
I would have loved to see The Borscht Belt in its heyday! Such talent!! And I definitely did my share of waiting tables, although I was never an actual paid waiter. The entire food industry just came naturally to me. It totally made sense. One of the reasons I loved openings so much is I could walk into a construction site and instinctively know where things needed to be. Setting up kitchens, storerooms, waiter stations in dining rooms... Standing on a cook line and knowing where to place things so the cooks could instinctively reach for things without looking. I had four very distinct careers, but every one was in the food industry. I would have been lost in another field.
And I think many men didn't sign up for the training because - as the article stated: "Women in coal country always found paying work in greater numbers during the lean times, cleaning houses or making burgers, earning enough to get the family by until the mines picked up again. When that happened — and it always did — wives often returned home or cut back on hours..."
It's because they were waiting for the mines to pick up again - because they always did. And then one day they didn't but they still waited because they always did. They always did.
If I train for this I won't be ready when the mines pick up and if I miss a call I'm stuck making so much less money and my wife has to work, too, and there's no one to care for the kids if we both work but we can't afford childcare and we'll need two cars but we can't afford the one, and how will we pay for insurance... That's the “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.” I understand it because I've seen similar scenarios up close in my own family. It's not easy to get out of that spiral down - and sometimes, they just don't.
As for My Generation... We cut the cable cord a couple of years ago, so I'll have to see where we can catch it! It sounds like fun! ♥ xox
It WAS a thing back in the day. So sad to see the relics that are now left. And people were funnier back then.
My cousin managed Jim Carrey when he was a young impressionist, working on being a comic, in Toronto in the late 70's early 80's. I went up to visit my cousins for a weekend, stayed 5 weeks, and served as Jim's gopher. After he performed (and he was brilliant) we'd go to this deli where all the comics were prepping for the next day. That was when HBO was doing a bunch of comedy specials. I was astounded at how serious all these guys were. They'd pour over the newspapers (which were generally out around midnight - 2) - working to make funny the items of the day. A lot of camaraderie.
We don't have cable - we have YouTubeTV -- I need constant access to the news. Plus, I'm a vidiot.
Your "conclusions about why THOSE MEN are Republican" are perfectly logical but do not take into account how they manage to survive without gainful employment. Surely they do not partake in the public 'COMMUNIST-SOCIALIST' dole of any kind nor engage in drug dealing or other criminal enterprise as that is reserved for the '25 million illegals in our midst who take away all the black jobs and housing.'" The most empathetic parents wear out their patience when a kid hits middle age and is still lounging away the days and hogging the dinner table. Do you have a fix for this conundrum?
In some places, like coal country detailed in the linked NYT article, they live off their wives' employment. And there are a ton living at home. Some end up homeless. Some certainly do end up taking government benefits, although the old welfare is now limited to 5 years in a lifetime.
I have no solution. The number is SO LARGE that it doesn't make sense to me.
The MAGA supporters in my extended family - male and female - are very well-educated, well-traveled professionals. They are exceptionally nice, generous, and community oriented. They are also all very religious and single-issue voters, and that issue is abortion. When people think they are serving God by voting against abortion rights, there is no reaching them. They will overlook everything else.
I am so sorry for what family get-togethers must be like.
They all live in another state, so we don't see each other much. Some are on FB and we keep our comments non-political and respect each other's pages.
If you link to a NYT article, please gift it - I cancelled our subscription to that rag months ago and am unable to access it.
I opened the Hyatt Regency Buffalo back in 1984. We had 300 job openings. Most jobs started at $3.90/hr - 55¢ more than minimum wage. We were set to interview at the Buffalo Convention Center on a snowing January morning - starting at 9am. At 7am, we received a phone call at the hotel where we were staying saying to get there IMMEDIATELY - they had broken into the center to get out of the weather, police had been called, and there was a potential riot waiting to ignite. People had been lining up since before 5am.
We had 10,000 applicants. The unemployment office had sent out letters to everyone collecting that they HAD to apply for a job to continue benefits. Average steel worker pay at the time was around $13.50.
9500 of them were not qualified to be dishwashers. We interviewed non-stop until almost 9pm.
The seriously vast majority of applicants just did not have the skill-set to work in a hospitality setting. It was a foreign world to them. What kind of transferable skills does a person working in a very specific field have? And what sort of AmeriCorp Job Training is going to train a steel worker or a coal miner so they can land a comparable-paying UNION job?!? And how many jobs of any sort are available in Letcher County, Kentucky? There sure weren't many in Buffalo. It was one of the most difficult days I have ever had in my life. It sucked.
I got the travel bug when I was in the Navy - Singapore was where I flat-out learned to love food. It has never stopped. I was young and single - I moved and lived all over the USofA. I had no responsibility for anyone other than myself. I picked up and transferred whenever the bug hit me. I had a blast.
What I did not have was a wife and kids, a house - or any of the responsibilities or worries that come with them. Most people just do not have the means to pick up and move. It was easy for me - the hotel relocation services helped me find a new place to live, movers came to my house, packed everything, moved it to my new address - and unpacked it. Bought my plane tickets, paid my taxi fares. Put me up in hotels and paid for my food and drink. Try doing that with a wife and kids.
And like Linda, I have several relatives - well educated making good money - who wouldn't vote for a Democrat - ever - mainly over single-issue abortion, but also immigration. They earned their position and will be damned if someone gets a leg up and takes a job away from one of their lazy-assed kids. While I'm sure the majority of them have never socialized with a person of color, they believe the hype.
MAGA folks ain't all unemployed macho-man-wannabes. A lot of them are disillusioned with Democrats. Coal jobs are gone because Democrats hate coal burning and have created too many restrictions, regulations, ad nauseam, destroying their way of life. It doesn't matter what the actual reasons are for the decline of coal use, that's the message they're hearing. And I don't hear a lot of Democrats out there refuting it. Global Warming is an abstract concept to almost everyone. A lost paycheck is a reality.
First, I thought I DID use the share button, but obviously was failed by technology, or my vision. Here is the link AND I emailed it to you. Apologies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/appalachia-coal-women-work-.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QU4.6F8e.HywPsPztuvUb&smid=url-share
About Buffalo - I completely believe that there were thousands applying for jobs. Back in the 80's, people really wanted to work. I remember being between jobs in my field, and looking for ANYTHING -- and applying for one of two waitressing positions at a Red Lobster - there were more than 300 applicants.
I am confused why so many people didn't qualify to be dishwashers. My kid brother was a dishwasher at a restaurant at age 16, and he didn't have any skills.
But as to your main point. I believe in union jobs, and I'm glad to see that unions are doing the hard work now to get better pay and benefits, and even working on decreasing automation. And I know that "good jobs" have been disappearing since the 80's due to globalization and corporate greed. Well aware.
When I had a travel job from 1995 - 2003, I spent the first 6 years on the corporate side, and spent a lot of time in places in Ohio that had been decimated by the loss of jobs that fed into the manufacturing supply chain for cars, trucks, planes, helicopters, etc. I'd talk to men who were now making less than they had, and wouldn't leave because they'd always lived there. But I also talked to women who were working along side them, whose husbands had moved to where the jobs had relocated (mostly auto plants in the south) and came home every other weekend. Some of the men who left went to work on gas and oil fields - huge paychecks, although they often lived in bad conditions -- often sharing a trailer with other men far from home, just to keep their families solvent.
I don't disagree that the Democratic messengers, over the past 40 years, have done a TERRIBLE job of explaining where the jobs went, as well as promulgating programs that would get jobs back to the US. Good jobs. Union jobs. And it breaks my heart that these MAGA types will be WORSE off under a Republican administration.
What struck me in the article (that you can hopefully now read) was how the wives had no more skills than their husbands, but they took courses and were able to get jobs in health care. Easy? No? As financially viable? No. But the kids get fed, and roofs stay over their heads.
While I understand that a lot of jobs today are crappy if you don't have specialized skills (and a lot of those fields desperately want more workers) the unemployment rate is 4.1%, when "full employment" has always meant 5%. That means there ARE jobs, no matter how crappy. And what confuses me is why people won't take a lesser job as compared to NO job. The statistics indicate that men from ages 25 - 54 have LEFT the labor force in huge numbers. And this may well be a personal limitation, but I don't understand why people would choose to do nothing, as compared to doing something. I cannot wrap my head around it. We are all influenced by what was inculcated early in life, and I was raised that work mattered. You always worked. My mother constantly repeated that her father crossed the Atlantic at age 11 (yes, eleven) by himself to make his way to Chicago to get an education and a job and send money home so his younger siblings could come to America. I started waiting tables when I was 13 because I could get working papers, and thus it was time to work. So I accept the criticism that I just "don't get it".
Apology accepted ♥ And I was able to read the article. Thanks.
I should have been more clear about my "dishwasher" reference. A dishwasher in a hotel is a "Steward". No one just washed dishes, they did everything from the obvious dish and pot washing to assisting in banquet set-up, kitchen cleaning, silver polishing, and a myriad of other 'back-of-the-house' duties. It could be quite stressful and frantic doing meals for 1000 people. It was a 24/7/365 operation. And, of course, there's 'attitude' which is paramount in the interview/hiring process.
You are totally correct that we are influenced by what was inculcated early in life - and it's probably the main issue affecting the men in Kentucky and elsewhere. They were taught and raised that the man worked, the woman stayed home and took care of the home and family. “The way of life is changing so bad,” “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”
They get overwhelmed, they don't know where to turn, they drink or take drugs to numb the feelings... They're not lazy, they're lost. They lack the mental acuity to see beyond the present. If you've only known one way, it's not easy to see other avenues. Not to mention the frustration and humiliation when they apply for a lesser job, only to be passed over. It pretty much reinforces that overwhelmed and lost feeling.
One line definitely caught my attention in the article: "A state program for miners’ families not only paid tuition but, critically, also provided money for living expenses." Knowing nothing about the program or who it was available to - it would appear that it could have been a driving force in getting women into the local workforce. And from my own experience, I know UCSF Health is the largest employer in San Francisco - and I receive a lovely pension from them, today. Healthcare, in general, is a great field with tons of opportunity.
I got my first job in 1961 - I'm much older than you <g> - and the only time I was purposely unemployed was late 1975 when I was laid off from a cooking job. I was living with my pregnant sister-in-law and her boyfriend - she collected AFDC, her BF sold pot, and I collected unemployment. For about 4 months, all I did was smoke pot, drink Coca-Cola, and watch Mary Hartman. It was great. Then, a friend who I had previously worked with called me up and asked if I wanted a cooking job up at Lake Tahoe. I was hired and my travel adventures really took off!
And that hotel in Buffalo?!? I lasted 9 months there. I hated it with a purple passion. I walked out. I went back to SF and got a job with a gourmet food distributor. Six months later, the hotel voted in a union.
Thanks for accepting my apology, and for explaining about the dishwashers.
I have some LIMITED banquet experience - I was sent to work in the Jewish Alps while in college. The idea was to wait tables during the day, and sneak in to watch comics at night, to learn timing. While I was there, I mostly worked in the breakfast and lunch "cafe" where a table would come in, and you'd take their order and deliver it. But I spent a few horrible nights in the main dining room, where the choices were limited, you had to be organized to get food out to tables of 16, not get hit by the doors -- it was A LOT.
When you talk about the state program -- I just can't help wondering why men didn't sign up too? I understand depression and being lost. I honestly do -- I just view it as transient and not permanent. But my life experience is different from that of a miner, and I've never been a fan of strict gender roles.
BTW- MSNBC is running a series called "My Generation" - Tim and I watched the first installment last night -- the one about Boomers. I think you and Victor would enjoy it.
I would have loved to see The Borscht Belt in its heyday! Such talent!! And I definitely did my share of waiting tables, although I was never an actual paid waiter. The entire food industry just came naturally to me. It totally made sense. One of the reasons I loved openings so much is I could walk into a construction site and instinctively know where things needed to be. Setting up kitchens, storerooms, waiter stations in dining rooms... Standing on a cook line and knowing where to place things so the cooks could instinctively reach for things without looking. I had four very distinct careers, but every one was in the food industry. I would have been lost in another field.
And I think many men didn't sign up for the training because - as the article stated: "Women in coal country always found paying work in greater numbers during the lean times, cleaning houses or making burgers, earning enough to get the family by until the mines picked up again. When that happened — and it always did — wives often returned home or cut back on hours..."
It's because they were waiting for the mines to pick up again - because they always did. And then one day they didn't but they still waited because they always did. They always did.
If I train for this I won't be ready when the mines pick up and if I miss a call I'm stuck making so much less money and my wife has to work, too, and there's no one to care for the kids if we both work but we can't afford childcare and we'll need two cars but we can't afford the one, and how will we pay for insurance... That's the “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.” I understand it because I've seen similar scenarios up close in my own family. It's not easy to get out of that spiral down - and sometimes, they just don't.
As for My Generation... We cut the cable cord a couple of years ago, so I'll have to see where we can catch it! It sounds like fun! ♥ xox
It WAS a thing back in the day. So sad to see the relics that are now left. And people were funnier back then.
My cousin managed Jim Carrey when he was a young impressionist, working on being a comic, in Toronto in the late 70's early 80's. I went up to visit my cousins for a weekend, stayed 5 weeks, and served as Jim's gopher. After he performed (and he was brilliant) we'd go to this deli where all the comics were prepping for the next day. That was when HBO was doing a bunch of comedy specials. I was astounded at how serious all these guys were. They'd pour over the newspapers (which were generally out around midnight - 2) - working to make funny the items of the day. A lot of camaraderie.
We don't have cable - we have YouTubeTV -- I need constant access to the news. Plus, I'm a vidiot.
Love and hugs.