Actually, considering how some women are treated, even in this country, I think there certainly are men, even in this country, who consider women a slave class. But to be fair, it’s not all women. So, should a wealthy woman who’s always been treated fairly benefit in the name of the women kept barefoot & pregnant out there? That’s complex, in that there’s a value to putting the image of successful, equal women out there in society.
On balance, I’d rather have a little sex-based affirmative action than have the prejudice be in the other direction to avoid offending “conservatives.”
Go back and reread my post. I did say there are plausible reasons. As a matter of fact, the situation you discribe, is one of the plausible reasons I was thinking of when I wrote that post.
I realize this is a strawman but I’m going to say it anyway:
I’ve had a couple of personal friends who fell prey to the dot com bust and the 9/11 scare. One of those friends found a job as a manager for a chain restraunt, the othe found work in a warehouse controling distibution.
Now these guys aren’t making NEAR the money they should be (or were) but they sure as hell ain’t making minimum wage (MW) either.
And how did they get these jobs? Even though their degrees had nothing to do with these lines of work?
Because the boss man looked at their application and said “Hmm, college graduates with a solid work history. I think I’ll hire these guys.”
I’m currious though:
What percentage a MW adult workers are doing so because of plausible circumstanes?
As opposed to:
What percectage of MW adult workers are doing so because of piss poor desicions in life?
I don’t have any provable data or cites to back this up; but I’d guess the percentage of adult workers making MW for plausible reasons is much lower by leaps and bounds.
I think the definition of “piss poor” is relative.
Surely, it’s not feasable for every young person to go into college and graduate. I imagine our universities don’t have the capacity for every 18-22 year old in the country at the moment. But, even assuming they did;
At some point you run into a situation where there are so many people with degrees that having a degree might be a requirement for minimum wage work! In other words, a degree is the difference between employment and unemployment, but doesn’t necessarially mean the sort of above minimum wage job you’re talking about.
Nor is there good financial aid for everyone. And, if I don’t think my odds are really good of getting a good paying job at graduation, even college loans might not be incentive to go to school. If I have to start paying off loans on a minimum or close-to-minimum wage job, why the heck am I going to want to acrue four years worth of loans when I could probably get those minimum wage jobs without the degree?
I’m not trying to suggest that any given person who applies him/herself in school in the right field and makes the ‘right’ choices doesn’t have a good chance of success in his/her chosen field. I’m just saying that the poor demographic doesn’t exist based solely on lack of education/planning. It exists because there’s a limited number of jobs that are valued at certain levels, and there are always going to be a large portion of jobs that are valued at or around minimum wage, and no matter what the education of the person working that job, the value of the work will be the same. A PhD flipping burgers gives the same value to the company as the high school dropout flipping burgers. And we will always need people to flip burgers. And we will never pay them that much.
Just ask yourself: Do you feel that people are given a fair shot no matter what their skin tone is?
If yes, then Affirmative Action is outdated and needs to be abolished.
If no, then we need it in order to help even the playing field.
Regardless of what side of the fense you happen to be on, it’s fairly safe to say that AA is not a perfect solution and it does cause problems. However, the old cannard about the qualified white applicant who loses a job to an unqualified black applicant is almost always not one of them.
As for the OP talking about “plenty of racism against white people,” that’s ridiculous. Racism against white people does exist however how often does this white racism cause a white student to not get into school or get a job? There’s a difference between some comedian telling jokes about “crackers” than the institutional racism that many minorities have faced and - studies show - continue to face.
I agree with this some what. MY opinion is that some people are born with the compulsion to succeed and some just aren’t. I’m not completely convienced about the finite jobs thing. Necessity is the mother of invention.
However, I was pretty much thinking what you just posted just a few moments ago. I then started to think “Thank God for the lower class people!” Obviously we need them to make this society and our ecconomy work properly.
That is untill some one invents an army of robots that can do our shit jobs that nobody wants to do anyway.
Well, yeah, but then he chucked aside two other resumes thinking "Hmmm…recent college grads. Looks good, but who knows? I’ll hire the guy who’s a college grad with ten years of work history. I wonder if the these other guys kids will bus tables?’
Just what do you consider a “plausible” reason?
[ul]I married the wrong man. I had to leave on the threat of my life and my kids’. I’ve only ever been a housewife. Now I have to start a career at 40.
I have bone cancer. I am taking care of my children and my mentally ill sister’s children- five children in my two bedroom apartment. Sometimes there are weeks when my bones break and I can’t come to work. Not many people will hire on that condition…[/ul]
[ul]My parents moved to this country when I was in high school. I did well in school, but I was tracked in to remedial classes because I didn’t speak English very well. They never had any college outreach in these classes and I never knew it was possible. In my old country, a poor man does not have the chance to go to college. I assumed it was the same, as did my parents. .[/ul]
[ul]My mom got thrown in jail a year after I graduated high school. I had to quit college so I could move in with my older brother so we could finally raise our high school aged sister in a proper family. I would love to go to school, but raising and supporting a 14 year old when you are only 19 is as big of a job as I can handle right now. .[/ul]
[ul]My parents kicked me out of the house and stopped helping with tuition when they found out I am a lesbian. My college is in a place where rent on a one bedroom apartment is regularly $1,500 a month. I could not pay that and tuition at the same time. My credits don’t transfer right elsewhere. I have a few more years before their income stops counting against my financial aid and hopefully I can resume school. .[/ul]
[ul]I got a degree in a good subject, but when the time came to search for a job, the jobs weren’t there. I’ve moved out of a high rent area to a lower one, but found that the job scene was even bleaker there. So I moved to a larger city. By that time the moves (gas, pizza and beer for the guys that drove me down, storage rent during the times between homes) had eaten all the money I had, so I had to take the first job I could get, moving boxes at a warehouse. .[/ul]
[ul]I have kids and I can’t afford to keep a car. The only thing near me is miles of strip malls. I can take the bus, but each hours I spend on it costs $15.00 in childcare. So until the kids are old enough to walk home from school, I’ll have to try to make it on what we have.[/ul]
[ul]They said they would promote me to manager. They trained me and now I do all the manager work, but we are still waiting for my pay raise to go through. And we have been waiting for months. They can’t not pay me right forever. If I leave now, I will only be qualified for entry-level work and will have to spend all those months working my way back up somewhere else. And they will give me a bad reference that will make even that hard. I’m just not sure when to cut my losses. [/ul]
What do you do in these situations? How do you squeeze water from the rock? Most of these people are people I know personally. At the end of the month, the rent has to be paid no matter what. Most Americans are one job loss, one sickness and one loss away from financial desperation. And some Americans- mostly poor ones- have a much better chance of rolling that unlucky dice.
Your rich Aunt doesn’t leave you with her kids to raise when she decides her OxyCotin addiction is more important. But if you’ve got a brokedown sister she might. You doctor husband isn’t likely to leave you cold, but your plumber husband might not feel the need to keep up appearances while the divorce goes through. There are a million things that can screw a person through no fault of their own, and a million right choices that can still lead to a bad situation.
Most people on minimum wage/part time work ($12 an hour at 20 hours a week is more damning than $6.75 at 40 hour weeks…and just as common) aren’t there forever. But a few months suffered is a few months suffered. Maybe we can’t solve all of these problems. But we can certainly do better than to look down our noses and congratulate ourselves on being so much better than they are.
** even sven**, It’s not my place to critique your life personally. So I won’t
I will say this though:
I think it’s safe to say cancer goes far and beyond plausible reasons as to why somebody might be making shit wages. I’m sorry to hear about your hardship ** even seven** Prehaps what we need is a better system that looks out for people like you. But that’s another debate all together.
When I say Piss Poor decisions I mean things like:
Teen Pregancy
Drugs (obviously)
Chosing to be a houswife with no back up plan especialy when the divorce rate is up to… what? 50% maybe?
Foregoing higher education.
Spending habits
Not investing (money wise)
Not paying off debts
Etc…
The list goes on. The point I’m trying to make is that the educational system isn’t focusing enough on these things. I’m saying maybe they should.
After reading this thread, I’m quite amazed people have no clue about financial aid.
I mentioned earlier that I was a white boy from a rich family. My point in saying that is; out of all the people in this world eligible for financial aid; I would be the least qualified. Yet I still managed to get it.
Minority have way more resourses to get grants than some one like me does. I’m not bitter about it or anything. It just boggle my mind how people can turn down free money like that.
Re: check cashing places. A lot of banks require that you have an account before they’ll cash your checks, and many poor and non-white folks (in particular, recent immigrants) distrust banks. Also, they might not have the starting cash available to open an account. In addition, there are not a lot of banks in poor, inner city areas, owing to the fact that they tend to get robbed a lot. Also, banks are typically only open until four, when many people are working, whereas check cashing places are sometimes open 24 hours. I agree they’re a waste of money, but there’s a lot of reasons why people use them instead of banks.
As for Rent-A-Centers, sure it’s a better deal to spend $300 on a sofa that will last for years than to spend $10/wk on one, but a lot of people don’t have that kind of startup capital. And the stuff in rental places is generally of better quality than furniture or electronics you find at Goodwill or the junkyard.
I’m sorry, those examples wern’t from my personal life, I wrote them in the first person for ease and impact. I should have made that more clear.
SHAKES, I think you’ve got a little time to spend in the world before you can walk around claiming you know what too much about other people’s lives. Life in college is a special time when you are really isolated from the real financial world while silmultaniously throwing around huge amounts of money.
Anyway, the things you’ve listed are things that can screw up a rich white boys life. They are the things you’ve been warned away from because they are the things that can take you down. And you are absolutely right that they are easy ways to screw up your life, and stuff everyone should watch out for.
But your list is limited. Investing is a great idea, but what if you have nothing to invest? It’s an insult to tell the poor they are poor because they didn’t invest money. Avoiding teen pregnancy is always smart, but even a well-planned pregnancy embarked upon in a close family with two loving wealthy parents can end up a kid in a family that can’t support it. It just takes a couple job losses. One bad illness. It’s a tough world, and we can’t see the outcome of our choices. Going to college is wise, but is it always worth the debt? If you are doing it on loans, you are going to be poor a long long time before you see those returns. I promise you that nobody doesn’t go to college out of stubborness. They don’t go because they can’t get money for it, or they don’t have the brains for it, or they don’t even know that they could.
I know it souunds outlandish, but not a lot of information about college trickles down in non-honors inner city classes. I’m sure your school took great care of making sure you knew things like SAT dates and stuff. But when your main goal is to get some kids to graduate without killing each other, that takes a backseat. This goes doubly for immigrant families, who often have no clue about how the college system works here and no reason to believe they’d be able to be a part of it. Sometimes the school may not even have anyone on staff that speaks the kid’s language. How are they supposed to magically figure out to turn in their FAFSA?
Heh. I suppose I agree that there are always people who are going to be unmotivated and naturally gravitate towards the bottom of the economic ladder because of that. But, I also think that it’s not helpful or useful (or accurate) to view the ‘poor’ demographic as sharing that trait.
Why do you think these people act like this? Is it because they were born without a desire to succeed? Seriously?
Maybe they were raised by other people screwed over by the system, who never learned to be responsible. Then their irresponsibility gets passed on to their children who pass it to their children… etc. Now the lame excuse for the education system that exists in poor neighborhoods is supposed to fix that? Is it supposed to make a kid whose parents and peers don’t care at all about an education, suddenly start caring?
Maybe the education system is bad because the kids have no desire to succeed. Then how are they supposed to get this desire? Or are they destined for failure no matter what because they were born to poor parents?
The problem is not people who go from middle class to lower class; it is getting out of the lower class. This is the real problem and it is very hard to pull off, especially if you had the misfortune of being born there.
Now I agree that education will solve this problem, but how will we get these people educated?