In what will soon be the bane of the writers' (and the readers') existence, The New York Times has published a study about the growing number of working-age men who are not working and who are not looking all that hard for a job.
You want to know the truth of it? The jobs suck — and by that I mean the jobs you can get if you're a male with a high school diploma.
Steel Mill? Pffft! Gone. Lifelong white-collar employment with a pension and health insurance you can afford? Frfffft! Vanished.
Part-time, no benefits. is out there. You can get that. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, take home, when you’re working full-time, which you won’t be.
Live with a girl on welfare. Grab a little landscaping work under the table. Sell a little dope. Got anything wrong with you? Ever been in the military? Try for disability, the OTHER lottery. Get an EBT card. Get heating assistance. Hell, the free medical care you get from the state when you're poor is worth more than most jobs you can get.
People like me, jackasses who already HAVE a job, we’re gonna comment that New York Times article until it’s gasping for breath.
It's just another stick to beat men with, this notion that because we're trying not to work 20 hours a week for $10 an hour, we're bums.
Here's a jagged little bit of reality. Poor and lower working-class people work to get money, not to make the statistics look better or because we're embarrassed by where we were on the last pie chart we saw.
The jobs stink.
The wages stink worse. You don’t get a pension. You get a 401(k) to which you can’t contribute because the wages stink. You’re lucky if any job you can get lasts more than three years because the unproductive traitors who run Wall Street don’t want to OWN companies, they want to SELL companies and they sell yours and, pretty soon, you and Luis in accounting and Darnell on the loading dock all have to go home.
But, hey, if you've decided that disability, drug dealing or just "getting by" on any assistance program you can milk is better than a crap job at crap wages, you're a phenomenon and can be talked about on television "news" programs by people who don't spend much time in the dollar store where you buy the thinnest of toilet paper.
You know what? Increasing numbers of American men are looking at what kind of slavery is available as work and they’re deciding to trust to luck.
Yeah. We don’t want to work for you anymore — not at these rates. Not when the bosses are allowed to talk to you like you were a dog and the Republican Party tells you to get poorer, to lick, to squirm, to wriggle on the floor and, above all, to be “grateful you have a job.”
The jobs stink, is what it is, and we don’t want to work for you anymore. You blame us?
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist.