american born kids and their work ethic

allen levine

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new york city burbs
In preparation that hopefully we move in a year or so, i needed to start somewhere, so I decided to clean out the 4 foot crawlspace under my house.
beach chairs, golf bag and clubs, bins and bins of books, tapes, 1960 excercise bike, 3 busted up old bicycles, and 100s of other items, you get the picture, old luggage,
everything was rusted or just unusable.

I tried to get some kids from my block, I offered each one 125 dollars, guaranteed only 3-4 hours work for one kid.

oh yeah, Ill let you know was the response.

I waited, forget it, I tried thru someone I knew from high school, forget it.

40 dollars an hour is not enough it seems

a woman who cleans our house now and then, has a son in high school, although b orn here, his p;arents were born in central america.

the kid works weekends all weekend long.

he was thrilled and b rought a friend.

in less then 1 hour they had everything in my yard. then they helped me sort thru the heavy stuff, p;ut it where I wanted it, and left.
good boys....both central american born parents, parents who work who immigrated to this country legally and love this country and the opportunities it gave them.
this kids father painted my house, he has a thriving business. he and his wife taught his kid the right things....respect and have a good work ethic.

unfortunately, I dont see the same in the american born parents kids....seems noone wants to get their hands dirty or do anything that will cut into their twitter or twatter time online.

sorry, had to vent....something has gone wrong with american kids.....not all, but it seems way too much laziness for me......my kids worked since they were young....and still work hard.....maybe Im a bad parent, I made my kids respect work and they worked hard....maybe they resent me for that....dont care...
 
Couple years ago, I needed some decorative rocks shoveled and wheelbarrowed into some (former) flower beds. I contacted the local high school football coach (a neighbour) and he sent three footballers out to do the work. One of them quit after filling the first wheelbarrow, and called his mother to come for him. Second one left with him. The third one was a kid from the poorer area of town who spent the rest of the morning finishing my job, and then started another project for my next-door neighbor which took him until dark. Hardest working young man I've encountered in years. Neighbor and I paid him well, for sure.
 
when Carol was sick and needed the tools unloaded from two trailer into her shop I brought my grand daughter and one of her friends and those kids work their butts off for two Saturdays, all day in 110+ temps. and had no idea how much they were going to get but they did it because I asked em to. Carol did pay them when it was all said and done but no where near the hourly you were offering Allen but they were happy with what they got. When I was running a shift of volunteers at the food bank and needed help in the warehouse unpacking crates of food and stuff some of the best workers I had came from the local high school, sure they were doing service hours as required by some of they programs but they worked hard and were very cheerful about doing it. There are still good kids out there.
 
Over the course of my 40+ years in the workforce I must have hired several hundred people. I noticed a decline not only in the desire to work but in their abilities.
We had to have remedial education when we hired people because they did not have the skills necessary to do even the simple tasks we asked of them. When I was in industry we wanted employees to make measurements of various kinds, record those measurements, total them up and divide to obtain the average. In the last 10 years or so we found that young people were incapable of doing that without their phone or a calculator. They had no idea how to do math on paper.

I also discovered to my chagrin that many of the new hires in the last 10 years or so of my career had absolutely no work ethic. They were not aware that the job required them to do something. to actually go to work. These people were hired to work within a territory in which they lived and did not report to an office on a daily basis. We would inform them that they were supposed to be on the job and working by 8 A.M. and still they didn't show up on time or leave their house until later in the day. We tried disciplinary measures and discovered that the Human Resources department was more of an enemy than a help. We were told that we could not fire these people for not showing up to work and actually working because we didn't have a written policy which required them to do those things.

We had two employees who actually worked at another job during the hours they were supposed to be working for us. We tried to fire them and were told that a policy specifically stating that they could not work another job while on the clock for our department. I am not kidding.

We had employees who falsified their work. We could not fire them until a policy was developed that stated that the reports had to truthful and accurate.

We had employees who when they actually went to work did little more than issue a notice of inspection and take a brief walk through the facility and then spent two or three days preparing the report....a fictitious report that is. I had one employee that performed her entire inspection of a 6 story 650K square foot facility in less than an hour and never left the first floor. It took her five days to fabricate the report. She actually copied sections from previous reports and submitted them as her work.

I hired three women fresh out of graduate school with Master's degrees in food science who did not know what pH was. They did not understand any food preservation principles. They were unable to do even the most basic part of the job.

I could go on and on with more war stories but people don't believe this stuff actually happened. Colleges are producing idiots with a paper degree. They are not expecting to have to work hard because they have a degree.
 
when Carol was sick and needed the tools unloaded from two trailer into her shop I brought my grand daughter and one of her friends and those kids work their butts off for two Saturdays, all day in 110+ temps. and had no idea how much they were going to get but they did it because I asked em to. Carol did pay them when it was all said and done but no where near the hourly you were offering Allen but they were happy with what they got. When I was running a shift of volunteers at the food bank and needed help in the warehouse unpacking crates of food and stuff some of the best workers I had came from the local high school, sure they were doing service hours as required by some of they programs but they worked hard and were very cheerful about doing it. There are still good kids out there.


I didnt say all, some kids are raised correctly, some kids are just good people.....I used to force my son at a young age, maybe 11 or 12 to go into manhattan with me on sunday mornings to imp;orters, where Id p;urchase merchandise, and make him help me carry it to store, p;rice it up......he would have rather b een home on his computer.......ofcourse, if I realized how much money he was going to make as an adult as an IT engineer I probably would have let him stay home on computer, but who knew.
 
These are some discouraging experiences for sure.
We live in a rural area and have a small farm with livestock, a hungry wood-fired furnace and a collection of old wooden buildings. There’s always work to do and some jobs get harder every year. We always encouraged our own boys, now in their 30’s, to work along with us from a very early age and were careful not to abandon them to some dirty, miserable task that would lead to discouragement and resentment. We also made sure there was a balance with fun and recreation, including video games, of course!

In the past few years we’ve had the pleasure of being able to call on the teenage sons of a former co-worker who live nearby. They are wonderful, polite and hard-working boys, obviously the products of a loving family environment. It’s harder to book them, however, the oldest has gone off to university and the second has a part time job and a girlfriend keeping him busy. But, we’re very pleased to see two younger siblings coming along!!😀

Of greater concern here on a higher level is the succession picture in agriculture. The average age of farmers is almost 60 here and a concerning number of the commercial farm businesses have no successors coming along. A job in the city and a “normal” life is somehow more attractive than taking on enormous debt, working all the daylight hours and often having nature and other forces working against you.
 
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I worked in the export shipping and packing business for about 40 years... we could rarely keep Anglo help in the packing business... it was hard and hot work, especially in the Houston area were temps reached high 90s and humidity even higher, plus our back yard was all concrete at about 11 inches thick... I could ruin a clean shirt just walking from the warehouse to the back side of the lot and back.... most of our workers there were Hispanic from south & central America and Mexico. If we told them we needed a 20x20x20 box built and packed by 3:30, they would have it finished by 3 pm... at any given time we would have from 100 to 200 men working in the yard, never complained or were never sullen about their work.

A client was visiting one day during the summer and taking a tour of the facility... He watched a few guys walking around, dragging air hoses, lumber etc... and commented to the boss... "Your people don't move very fast do they?".... to which the boss said, "No, but they will move like that for 18 hours if I ask them to."
 
I have no solid answer to this. Not even much to say except kids grow up and learn according to their environment. I have seen what can only be described as a decline in "quality" in young Americans. Not all, for sure. But seems to be a steady increase. Education quality is dropping. It just ain't the way it used to be. Probably will never revert back to how it was, either.
 
Long ago I stopped trying to get hired help. I either do it myself or harangue one or the other of my three sons until they come help me with what I can't do (really they come when I ask)...

Many years ago I had a little fence crew. Myself and three, uh, exchange students. Those guys would work and it seemed they loved it... We built and repaired a lot of fence... When they, after completing their education as it were, left after a couple of years I hired six guys from town. After two weeks of "I'm sick", "can't go today", no answer to horn honking in front of their house I called it quits. This along with EVERY axe or wooden handled tool I had being broken off at the head (those guys would break an axe to keep from working) was too much.

#1 son has his own business doing all sorts of things... his business is himself and one helper. At first he had several helpers, he kept the one that wasn't on their phone all day. I don't know where to find someone that doesn't have a phone. He has a flip phone. He sends me pictures every now and then. I always have to as what it is. He refuses to get a new phone... Gets a helluva lot of work done in a day though...

I spent 24 years working in some capacity at a public high school (rural)... There are still lots of kids out there who work like crazy... There are some that are pretty much worthless in that regard unless you want to know how to make people look funny on your phone... They are the only ones you'll find when you want an odd job done... all the rest have real jobs and are working when they aren't in school....

Alan
 
my daughter went to school outside of buffalo NY.
Im guressing its a totally different world in rural ny because she had to student teach as part of her college, and those kids were put to work on the farms by the time they were young teens. she told me every kid in her class, 5th graders knew how to drive since they worked and drove tractors on their farms. not sure if they were all forced by parents or just were brought up like me, hard work never killed anyone.
 
I also learned to drive a tractor, drive a hoe, drive a shovel, mattock, pickaxe, lawnmower, hedge clippers, dish rag, vacuum cleaner, paint brush (which my father finally decided I should not ever have in my hand again) and a wheel barrow. I was washing dishes as soon as I was tall enough to stand at the sink. I cleaned the house during the summer; vacuumed, mopped, dusted, cleaned toilets, tubs and showers.
We lived in the country and raised a big garden. It was usually 2 acres planted in red clay. I plowed it, cultivated it, hoed it and harvested it.
There was always something to do. I was the only boy and my father always had a job for me. There was no such thing as being bored at my house. Bored was a word guaranteed to get you some work to do.

I went to bed tired.
 
Maybe the definition of work ethic has changed over time. Hard work used to be rewarded. Hustle, dedication, on the job early and stay late when needed, loyalty to your employer is returned by your boss and the company. The job was yours for as long as you wanted it. Times have changed.
loyalty of the employer has shown itself to a few of us here. so trust in the boss isnt growing either.
 
I have no solid answer to this. Not even much to say except kids grow up and learn according to their environment. I have seen what can only be described as a decline in "quality" in young Americans. Not all, for sure. But seems to be a steady increase. Education quality is dropping. It just ain't the way it used to be. Probably will never revert back to how it was, either.
No child left behind is the downfall of our education system... my math teacher in 1958-60 refused to use the grading on the curve system that was being implement during that period... he said if he did his job right, every student in class would be making 100 (A+) on his tests... we always had open book tests because he believed it was more important to know how to find an answer than it was to memorize an answer. We could even work together on tests as long as we did our own work and "kept the noise down"... he taught algebra, trigonometry and even an introduction to calculus.
 
My next door family is Portuguese. They are hard working people.

My neighbors grandson, Derick, highschool age runs a skidsteer and an excavator that his granddad taught him to run. Isaiahs his grandfather is a construction supervisor and has somewhat ready access to construction equipment.

The other day I was talking to Isaiahs daughter and Derick was in the car. I said I was going to cut down a 5 year old apple tree in my yard to make way for a new blueberry patch. Derick asked if he could have it and offered to dig it up and move it. It was not just a pipe dream - he would certainly do it. Not his first rodeo. I said he would need to do it with the excavator. I fully expect him to do it. He will also dig a bed area for my new blueberry patch.

One in a million.
 
I learned to drive in an old WWII war surplus jeep. My Dad bought it for $600 from an Army Surplus store in Portland, Ore. It was our tractor, hunting rig and his drive to work for probably about 20 years. He eventually put a Ford flathead V/8 engine in it. I had to sit on a little stool in the seat to see out the windshield when I started driving (probably arounsd 9 years old). When I was in High School, I rolled my car '54 chev. I need to drive to school because I worked at a grocery store after school each day. He let me use the jeep.. I worked on it's look, got it painted (my older brother painted it in autoshop class, A friend of the family upholstered the seats for me... I picked up more girls in that rig than any other car I owned while in school. Could beat any other car through an intersection. But not top speed. Ah the fun old days..
 
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...my father always had a job for me. There was no such thing as being bored at my house. Bored was a word guaranteed to get you some work to do...
Pretty much the same for me. I wanted to play sports in high school. Dad's response was "If you've got time to play games, I've got work for you to do instead."
 
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