If I’ve said it once in this feature, I’ve said it a hundred times: low paying jobs with no benefits created at McDonald’s and Wal-Mart aren’t worth layoffs for decent paying government jobs with respectable benefits.
In a previous WCE titled “Why the Bush Tax Cuts Actually COST Jobs” I debunked the myth that tax cuts for the rich create jobs. Instead focusing on the very simple math that if you cut taxes by billions of dollars (a revenue cut for the government) you will have to start laying off government workers you can no longer pay.
This week we’ve seen the other side of that which is the “careers”–if mopping shit off a Chuck E Cheese bathroom floor can be called a career–created by the private sector off the back of public sector layoffs are McJobs: low paying, dead end jobs with no benefits and forget about retirement. They’re low level service industry jobs that weren’t capable of being outsourced anyway…mostly because it’s not possible to drive to China just to order a hamburger.
This isn’t meant to mock the good people that work in low level retail (as I used to), only to acknowledge that those are usually just meant to be a temporary stepping stone into something better. The idea is not to make it where you forever earn wages that would qualify you for welfare in the service industry, but that you go to school, graduate, and get a government job earning four times as much with actual “luxuries” like dental insurance.
But what if there are no good paying jobs left to transfer up to? We’re dealing with so many nationwide government layoffs, pension cuts, health insurance squeezes, and entitlement cuts to basic programs like social security, it makes you wonder how much we really need to hear “Would you like fries with that?”