Jobs for the Poor Build Character; Jobs for the Rich Build Wealth

Apparently, the rich don’t require character building

A pair of my husband’s work boots. If you’ve read Strapped, you’ve seen these same boots on the cover! (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

My son got his first job at age 13. It was detasseling corn – a hot, dirty and somewhat dangerous job. He always came home caked in mud and sunburned despite copious sunscreen and protective clothing.

Detasseling is one of the few jobs that will hire a kid so young, and it offered him the chance to earn enough money to buy a computer. It’s not as if I could have afforded to buy him one.

I told him the job would build his character.

“Why don’t you come to the cornfield with me so you can build your character, too?” he asked.

“My character was already formed many years ago,” I told him.

I need to apologize to my son. I was brainwashed back then.

I have worked a list of shit jobs a mile long

None of them built my character. But we have concocted all kinds of myths in order to convince poor people to do shitty jobs for low wages so that the upper classes can enjoy the cheap labor of poor people and their children.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, often talks about the “dignity of work.” I checked out his bio and was positively shocked to see his summer job while attending Harvard was not detasseling or working at McDonald’s or scooping up ice cream at a mall.

Nope, his summer job was at Goldman Sachs.

Full disclosure: I have never worked at Goldman Sachs, so perhaps I’m dead wrong when I say I suspect that job involved a lot less sweat, dirt and physical exertion than the summer jobs people like my children and I worked in our youths.

My college adviser berated me for not taking a summer internship

He didn’t understand why I planned to spend my summer working at a fast-food joint. Many of my most talented fellow journalism majors were going off to work unpaid internships at good newspapers. Not only would they earn no money for school, but their parents would have to cover their living expenses for the summer.

Many of those people today have (or used to have) quite impressive media jobs, and those internships helped get them there.

It’s not that I was unaware of the value of a good internship, but I needed to earn money.

The list of jobs I’ve worked in my life begins with selling Avon and babysitting – two things I could do before I was old enough to drive. Once I turned 16, I could get restaurant jobs and I had a lot of them through high school and college. I worked at countless restaurants (both fast-food and high-end places, waiting on customers and serving drinks and washing dishes and cooking and cleaning) and for the college food service.

I had a job in the alumni office mail room. I worked late nights on the newspaper printing press that also frequently printed my byline. I trimmed Christmas trees for two summers. No, not decorating them; trimming them with a very long, sharp knife! I worked one summer in a factory that made shelving units, and I’d walk out of there with fine sawdust coating my sweaty body, making me resemble a piece of raw chicken dredged in flour.

I’d honestly take any work I could get because there’s a lot of competition for shit jobs in a college town and I sometimes had to cobble three or four of them together.

Just one job was never enough. Minimum wage remained at $3.35 for my entire high school and college period. I worked as much as I could and fit my studies in around my work.

That was backward, but instead of recognizing that, I took pride in how hard I could grind.

The role of toxic pride

I grew up in a working class family and believed wholeheartedly that hard work was a virtue. I didn’t want to be lazy.

I wish I had recognized before raising my children that I’d swallowed a pernicious myth spread by the exploiting class.

Privileged families did things differently. Some of them did value letting their children work something like a fast-food or retail job as a way to teach them some responsibility and perhaps to make sure they appreciated their good fortune in only needing to work such a job for a short time.

But I don’t know any well-off family that thought it a good idea for their kids to work every possible hour all summer, to put in long hours after school and to prioritize a restaurant or ag job over career preparation.

Their kids took enrichment classes or traveled or did the kind of volunteer work that would look good on a resume. And when it came time to apply to colleges and later to start their careers, they appeared infinitely more desirable than the kid who had spent long hours asking people if they wanted fries with that.

None of this was clear to me when I was young

I didn’t know any really wealthy people as a child, and I had no idea how atypical my tiny rural hometown was compared to the places so many other students grew up.

So it took me a long, long time to realize society had encouraged me to feel proud of how hard I could work instead of feeling justified anger that I was forced to prioritize washing dishes over concentrating on my education.

When I became editor of a small daily newspaper, I continued to feel proud of how much I could get done and how many hours I could work. My personal record was a day that began at 5 a.m. and continued until 3 a.m. the next morning, with no break from the newsroom longer than a few dashes to the restroom.

Why was I so proud to be exploited?

I’d been taught that toxic lesson over my whole life. Now, sometimes very hard work is a means to an end, but there was never any sort of reward in store for me. Nor is there a big pay-off for most working class folks.

When the newspaper world imploded, journalists much like me all over the country were summarily kicked to the curb. We walked out of the newsrooms where we had spent most of our waking hours and blinked at the sunshine and wondered what the hell had happened to the last few decades of our lives.

If you’ve read my novel The Trailer Park Rules, you may have a question about what happened to the character Jonesy, a reporter. I sobbed when I wrote it. Even now, when I read page 366, I tear up.

‘Quiet quitting’ had its day

So did “acting your wage.”

I don’t hear those terms used anymore. People are frightened. The brief time when workers had some leverage is over. I doubt I’ll see that change in my lifetime.

And that’s not just for the working class but for the battered remnants of the middle class, too. Maybe even for some of the people who used to think they were set for life but now realize that might not be true.

This is where I wish I could say that a smart, dedicated, talented, hard-working person will always come out on top, but don’t be ridiculous. That’s clearly untrue.

Some jobs require you to get your hands dirty, and we need people to do them. Provide pay and respect for such labor, and people will line up. If people aren’t willing to take a job, it’s because they don’t want to accept insufficient pay and to be treated like trash. It’s not because people are lazy.

Don’t tell me working class people are lazy. We call them the working class because they work.

I’d like to see people organize and unionize to gain some basic protections, but this is instead an age in which some states are eager to let children work all night in dangerous jobs.

We appear to be moving backward. We’re more Sixteen Tons than Norma Rae these days.

I promise you do not need to sweat your ass off for low pay to improve your character. But if you expect others to do such jobs without respect and for insufficient compensation, you’re the one whose character needs to be built.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.