On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 07:54:55 -0600, AMuzi wrote:

On 2/20/2020 9:49 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 2/20/2020 10:38 PM, AMuzi wrote:

When I was young, one might easily travel the country,
always confident of finding a day or two of work
everywhere and anywhere (As I did. Everywhere.) .

Interesting. I did some of that too, when I was young. I
also did it while not traveling, just to get spending money.

But my success rate while on the road was pretty low. It
seemed I'd have to spend many hours waiting inside a
Manpower office to have a chance at getting anything at all.


This is no longer true, to the greater loss of the
nation's wealth and productivity, no more painfully felt
than at the bottom of society, those who suffer most.

I really am sympathetic to those people. Say what you will,
many have very high barriers in front of them.


And changes in work itself. It was once possible to show up
at any truck terminal around midnight and to transfers
(truck-to-truck, dock-to-truck) which was badly paid
unskilled manual labor. Now, almost everything is palletized
and moved (more efficiently) by machines. There are no
mason's helpers (really crappy job and very hard work). Even
dishwashing has a much lower labor content. In the larger
sense these are improvements but, again, a closed door to
the marginal human.

Certainly true, and of course those who can't find work, for one
reason or another, are paid, in essence, not to work, by "the
government".

I remember reading about a program, in Detroit before the decline, to
find work for the unemployed. The car factories joined in by making
unskilled work available but the program failed, simply because the
3nd and 3rd generation of unemployed couldn't imagine a relationship
between work and income.
--
cheers,

John B.