But Seriously...

This as well I don't agree with.
The only difference between those two jobs is responsibilities. You are trying to tell me that managing a golf course is so difficult you need, and I'm highlighting the word need, a specialized degree in golf course management to effectively get the job done? I can tell you right now, you don't. It's smoke and mirrors to put up barriers to entry.

 

Popped Cherries, I'm telling you right now, because apparently you're so entrenched in you're claim you're blind, a the person running the course needs experience to do so. That experience means skills learned, competence gained. How do I know? I'm working at a golf course part time now and I can tell you I wouldn't know how to do any of the shit my head boss does. Its not a grab a shovel and go job. I'm almost baffled by your claim that anyone can run a course as successfully as someone who is trained and educated in that field.

Smoke and mirrors? Not really, just not everyone is equally talented at everything. Thats why people specialize. Thats why we have doctors, dentists, mechanics, etc. Not everyone is equally skilled at every task and unfortunately some people are at the bottom of that pile. Some people lack the mental and physical capabilities to specialize at a sufficient level to ever become skilled labor. The world needs ditch diggers and doctors.

Skilled job: Neurosurgeon
Unskilled Job: Kindergarten teacher (kidding!)

 

On a macro level, sure, they can out purchase Joe-Schmo, but that's all they have. Walmart offers nothing besides low prices and convenience. Absolutely nothing. If you try to compete with them on that playing field, you are going to lose. If you were able to compete with them on any other level, especially at a local level, you'd "crush" them and have no problems competing.

 

So outside of your one boss who is the course manager, who needs specialized training, how many other skilled positions are there?

 

I don't agree that most jobs in a modern office should be classified as skilled positions. I do agree there are people who have inherent skills that make them better suited for those jobs, but I don't agree that those jobs require some skill equivalency test that says you are able to complete them and they are worth more than someone taking orders in a fast food restaurant. They aren't the same roles, but the skill cap is not greatly above one another.

 

I understand that which is why I said if you try to compete with them simply on price and convenience you aren't going to be successful, but luckily there are ways to compete with them in other arenas where a good businessman would still be relevant. Especially in the local realm. With the introduction of the online world, yeah, that I can understand is crushing for a business. However, there are a lot of people selling goods and services online that are making a lot of money as a small business so you can't really say it's not possible.

 

I hate this fucking quote about the world needs ditch diggers and doctors...blah blah blah. It's bullshit because it takes the two most extreme examples and preys on human nature.

I agree with you wholeheartedly though, Doctors, Dentists. Skilled jobs. You need specific training to complete your specific job. Mechanics, eh, kind of? Most mechanic work nowadays is simply replacing broken parts. It's unscrewing the correct nuts and bolts in the correct order and putting a new piece in it's place. The rest is done by diagnostic computers and technology. If you said something like metal fabricators or mechanical engineering, I'd agree.

Let's go into a broader viewpoint though. What's the difference between a clerk at a fast food restaurant and a random job title 45k a year employee? There really isn't much. Go look through the online ads for jobs in the 40k range and tell me what qualifications are required so far and above the qualifications of counter help at a restaurant. When doing so, don't let the "typical fastfood worker" cloud your perception. Just go strictly on what the roles of the job require.

 

Not as much training as a doctor, but this is just wrong. You clearly haven't worked around mechanics very much. If you think someone who knows how to turn a wrench can just walk in and do the vast majority of mechanic jobs you're crazy.

A lot of office jobs I would agree don't really need the fancy degrees people in those positions have. However, I'm going to be really skeptical that your average minimum wage worker could do them just as well, or that they don't really require any experience.

Regarding minimum wage - the idea that unemployment is going to sky rocket is a bullshit narrative. That's only likely to happen if there was a massive hike over a very short time period. I don't recall ever seeing that in my life time (realistically no one is going to raise the minimum wage to $15 over night). There are other consequences, but this isn't one of them. It's also not true that if you bump these jobs up to $12/hr you suddenly have access to all these brilliant people who can do 3 of the old jobs at once. Frankly if that were the case these wages already would have been raised.

 

Your 45k employee makes about $21.63/hr on a standard 40hr/week. There is a huge difference between the guy working the counter at a fast food restaurant and an office job making $21/hr. Having been a fast food worker at a Walmart, I can tell you that many of those people could absolutely not work in a standard office environment without much more schooling. As ridiculous as it sounds, spelling, grammar, and basic algebra are actually skills. While people don't necessarily need fancy degrees to do many/most office type jobs, they do need a certain level of refinement to do much of the work that is required.

 

I happen to be one of those pro minimum wage raising commies, but I have to agree that a lot of people on welfare are on welfare because they're worthless human beings. I was poor for a good period in my early 20s, and lived in one of those poor borderline ghetto neighborhoods. Half of my neighbors were high all day on whatever they could find. They accosted me for beer and a 'loan' at every opportunity. They even tried to sell me their food stamps so they could go buy more drugs. These people are fucking garbage, and because they can't do anything on their own we have to take care of them to some degree. It is what it is. Some of them spoke such wretched garbled English I couldn't even understand them, and I grew up going to an international school hearing all manner of bizarre accents.

However, I'm not sure raising the minimum wage helps or hurts these people. They can't hold down any job anyway. I just wanted to throw that out there because yes it's true that a lot of people on welfare really do just suck as human beings. It's not fair to paint everyone poor that way, but it's not fair to just pretend these people don't exist either.

 

I honestly think most people with a general understanding of how to read instructions and how to turn a wrench could do 90% of the work mechanics could do. It's not like mechanics are just staring into an engine bay and saying, "Whelp, guess I'm going to have to figure out what to do here." They have detailed schematics and manuals from the car makers on exactly how to service the vehicle. I'm sure there is some general knowledge that is learned when getting a degree, like how to operate some of the diagnostic systems and general use abilities, but, overall, it's not something that couldn't be taught on site to someone in short order.

So to sort of bring it back on topic, a lot of mid-level jobs require on site training and I think most people would be able to slide into those roles fairly easily without much experience. Obviously you are always going to have people who are just incapable of advancing past a certain level, but that is an entirely different topic.

 

Before we jump back to the topic on hand. I worked building race cars for three years. At my current job I work with the mechanics every day to keep shit running. I know what I'm talking about.

For starters there is a lot more types of mechanic work than fixing cars. Even for them if all they knew how to do was read a manual it would take forever for anything to get done. At my current job there are very few providers of the types of machinery we use. As a result the cost of replacing parts is astronomically high. If all the mechanics could do is slap something new in there every time something went wrong our costs would be through the roof and over the moon. They wouldn't have a job and neither would I in all likelihood. Also, when we do need new parts it often takes over a week, it's not like there's some magic part replacing wizard who just appears. They have to figure out how to keep shit running or we close down the department for several days while I get paid full salary, they get paid to check on the other machines, and the other workers get a high percentage of their salary for sitting at home. It's not what I would call a viable business strategy. [I have to reiterate too that these machines are not like cars with huge resources of step by step instructions. Many of the problems we encounter likely have never even come up elsewhere.]

Every once in awhile they really do get stumped and have to do the read a manual/go online shit and it costs us so, so much money. There's a reason they get paid better than any of the other non-management workers there. While I'm skeptical of the claim that your average burger flipper can do the jobs at your office paying 80k I don't work there so I don't really know. You don't work in mine either so please don't tell me how things work, or that what they're doing is the equivalent of putting cheese on a fucking hamburger.

 

You cannot teach somebody on site to program a logic controller, build a tool or fastener from a solid block of metal, correctly function a mill, use the correct order of materials to properly balance a pneumatic/hydraulic line, electrical theory, or even read a fucking blueprint because THAT requires education as well. Can you spot teach somebody to use an oxy-acc torch and get the exact correct flame feather so that it welds and doesn't melt the metal or the proper combination of transistors and resistors to use so you don't overload a circuit? Can you spot-teach somebody on what correct vane pump to install and how close to the compressor it should be, and what's the proper shutdown and maintenance procedure should that compressor's pressure suddenly drop? Because of you don't do it properly you could blow the building up. And you need to know ALL that shit before you even pick up a tool.

Just because it's a dirty job doesn't mean any idiot can do it. Because unless you can look at things in a three dimension perspective-- which a majority of people do not understand-- you aren't spot-teaching jack shit.

 

To expand on this, you also need to have to understand the theory of what you're working on in a skilled trade, mechanics especially. You need to understand how the entire car works, and how one function leads to another. The biggest part of being a mechanic is being able to diagnose a problem based on what the vehicle is doing. A diagnostic test will only help you out if you have a faulty sensor or other failing electronic component. Our business does vehicle and machine maintenance in-house, and I've had some very smart employees fail miserably at basic maintenance due to lack of experience.

 

The problem with minimum wage is that few people can/do live within their means. Teenagers and old people aren't the only ones on it and it provides a baseline for everything else. The gap between a living wage and their actual wages is so wide, most of these people fill it with a variety of anti-poverty measures like government aid. I know people that have done it through fucking student loans. You think those payments ever get made? A lot of people jeopardize their family's retirement because they don't make enough to achieve financial independence. You can see how these two examples are going to come back to bite a lot of people in the ass?

We, as a society, are paying for these people to live: they eat, drive cars, pay rent, etc. They are trying to meaningfully contribute to society by working within the realm of choices they are presented with. For some of us, they are shit choices, for some of us we've been there. I think most of us are WAY too comfortable with borrowing money for basic needs and then working a shit-tier job to get rid of that debt. I have worked with and studied poverty for long enough to say: fuck your moral judgement. Poverty sucks, it's like a cancerous stain that is almost impossible to shake off in this society. There is no part of your life it doesn't disturb, often for decades: your health, your family, your ability to earn later in life. In a society this fucking rich, it's inexcusable to have ANY poor people, much less a hundred million.

If you don't think it's ridiculous that some of the most respected and profitable countries in the richest civilization in history employ legions of working poor, then go read the definition of "indentured servant". There are a few, and I mean a precious few mom and pop stores that couldn't survive a wage hike. Those laws typically are written with the large organizations in mind: they ignore the family farms and firms with less than 5 full-time employees. If Costco, Market Basket and Whole Foods can pay livable wages on the razor thin margins that they exist off of, then companies like Wal-mart have no excuse. If that means they hire robots, good.

I'm not advocating a wage hike, I am advocating a simple rule as part of an economic bill of rights that FDR almost implemented: if you have a job, that job should pay you enough to live on. If that's done via a wage subsidy (IE Universal income), or a minimum wage, or whatever....

The reality is we pay more in taxes for a fistful of programs (WIC, Section 8, etc) to handle problems associated with poverty than we would if we just gave them enough money to live off of. Let me put it this way: If you make $8/hour and get government assistance for your housing, food, utilities, kids and healthcare to make up for the $20,000/year gap you cost taxpayers a hell of a lot more than the $20k (the value of the services the government delivers to you). Odds are this isn't an individual, but a family. And odds are they perpetuate this system, because it makes economic sense for them to do so: one of the biggest obstacles to securing full-time employment is that the low wages paid do not provide independence or in some cases, any real economic improvement. It's not lazy, entitled, or whatever. It's they can't work 200 hours a week at $7.25 to live and if they make any progress in that regard, the support they receive is cut out from under them.

The two most infuriating and persistent fallacies about poor people: that they are stupid and that they are not resourceful. Both are bullshit and those fallacies add up to "well, they deserve it because they didn't x,y, and z because they are stupid." No, choices look different when you're debating an $8/hour job that will cost you $80 a week to commute to or a $7.25/hour job that you can take the bus to, but no health insurance.

 

Mechanic Replies.

You guys are talking about highly specialized fields. One of you is talking about working on cars for racing and the other is talking about apparently building a neutron bomb...
I was talking about your run of the mill car mechanic who makes somewhere in the 40-50k range for a salary.

Jesus you guys always take shit to the nth degree and blow things so out of proportion.

 

Building a neutron bomb? Those are the "simple" things a millwright, tool or mould-maker needs to know. A millwright is simply a mechanic of machines, a journeyman. A car motor is a machine. You need to thoroughly know pneumatics to operate the tools and compressor and hydraulics to operate the presses. Fixing cars in your garage is not being a pro mechanic. Every mechanic needs to know how to weld, be educated in the fields of bearings, shafts, keys, metals, tools and fasteners. as well as have knowledge of electrical and mechanical theory which requires you to know math. There's more to it than replacing parts, sometimes you need how to know to build those parts from scratch like drive shaft keys, mechanical screws and bearings. You need to set-up maintenance schedules to upkeep your machines that you use to fix OTHER machines. You need to know a LOT of shit, in both the field of theory and hands-on experience.

It may seem like being a grease monkey is for guys with mullets with a smoke constantly dangling from their lips, but even if you want to know how to repair a lawnmower/blower engine you have to have a qualified pro teach you how. That might take hours instead of days, weeks or years; but some things hands-on experience alone can't teach. You need to learn the theory as well. There's a line in the sand between an assembly line drone and a tradesworker that is a mile wide.