Employment Imbalance

An odd state of imbalance in the nationwide employment market summarizes the nature of modern America. In many places, good-paying jobs go begging while in others people have stopped looking for work, accepting lives of indolence and poverty. Why are we so dull, so inactive, so complacent, especially since this country was built by and for opportunity seekers?

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Anywhere there’s oil in the ground employers are begging for qualified employees. Radio stations here in West Texas continually advertise for anyone willing to work, specifying preferred skills but adding that experience is not necessary. Starting wages are around $20 per hour; pay goes up dramatically with six months’ experience. They add that a drug test is required. Sadly, over half the applicants fail the drug test. If it’s a urine test, those who fail are asked to return in five days to retest. If they abstain from illegal substances they will then pass—unless the substance is marijuana, which can take up to six weeks to wash out of the body. The employer quickly hires the successful retested applicant, convincing himself the first test kit must have been defective—but he is desperate: one oilfield management company would hire sixty workers beginning at $50,000 per year if they could find them.

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Other companies are tired of this testing game. They give hair follicle tests—no retesting for about three years. Restaurants in the Midland/Odessa area are packed with customers with money to spend but marketing research shows that new restaurants should not be built because there won’t be enough people to staff them. Small business managers patrol the malls watching for good workers. They approach those workers on the job, offering them substantial increases to change employers. The owner of a successful machine shop in Northern California advises he would hire several people if he could find anyone who knows “how to work.” He says California high schools are graduating people prepared for two types of work: retail and fast food. Several CNC machining stations in his shop go unmanned for months at a time, $30 and $40 an hour jobs, because none of the applicants knows the simplest math, none can follow written directions, understand a graph. He has an excellent reputation for the quality of his work but believes he will sell the machinery, stop taking orders, because there is no one but himself who can do the work. This is a common complaint in the oilfield, too, where muscular young men cannot follow verbal directions, do not know how to lift loads as a team, laugh and joke until one of them gets hurt and then, for the first time, they begin to listen to their crew leader. Many of them, as in the California machine shop, become minimally proficient at some basic skill and leave after their second or third paycheck, eager to spend the money—no time for work. Texas cotton gins hire crews from Mexico, legally, for the ginning season because these men still have a work ethic. Usually all from the same town, they are used to working with each other and perform their duties reliably and well, month after month until the job is done. The gins occasionally try a local man and almost always find him to be a typical rural American agricultural worker, a school dropout reared on welfare in a single parent family. He only works because he has to; nearly everyone he knows is on government assistance or living out of relatives’ back doors, loving mothers and aunts with open refrigerators, glad for the male company. He applies at the gin for seasonal work because other local employers already know him. These conditions are identical in many American and Canadian labor markets, the oilfields in northern Alberta, for example. Meanwhile, people in other parts of the country are standing in line looking for work or filing for unemployment. If their unemployment claims are granted, 40% of their check is borrowed by the government from future Americans. If the claims are denied, they become dependent on family or their communities for charity. When interviewed they are clueless as to their futures, wholly inept at caring for their own needs, totally dependent on work coming to them. If it doesn’t, they become inert, wither in place. It’s amazing that America has the wealth to afford this mentality. Either with tax money on hand or through credit, or through community or family largesse, these multitudes have lost the ability to care for their own needs—if they ever had it. A large part of this imbalance between opportunity and poverty is cultural. People who take advantage of the oilfield are not the types to sit and wait for government or unions to direct their lives. They are multi-skilled either with the many types of equipment, its operation, maintenance and repair, or with the office technology required. They have actively pursued this knowledge since youth, growing up in families and neighborhoods of self-sufficient people where indolence is shameful. Some of them have experienced the consequences of their own ill behavior and see the oilfield as a path to financial salvation. Parolees and fathers who have served short sentences for non-payment of child support do very well there, and even make enough to have a Saturday night beer, live music in an oilfield honky-tonk with friends. They have saved themselves with hard physical labor and are used to it now, responsible citizens, fundamentally changed for the better. Some might think they’re a little crude but they are living proof of the dignity of mankind, self-reliance in pure form. The chronically unemployed are somehow able to avoid the negative consequences of their behavior. Either saddled with intoxicant dependence, an aimless adolescence where they were not familiarized with the world of work, or institutionalized into bureaucratic dependence, they are accustomed to living off the fat of the land, unable to care for themselves, and will continue that lifestyle as long as there is any fat. To them this is not bad behavior—it is their right. In their neighborhoods, it’s what everyone does. As people prefer a familiar hell to an unfamiliar heaven, the laws will most likely continue as they are until all the fat is gone—as in Europe today—and America will find the same solution as Europe: disaster. Texans have seen exceptions to this bleak forecast. Energy companies that are pariahs near their East Coast headquarters have found themselves welcome here, especially in the expanses of eastern New Mexico and far West Texas. Real estate values in Hobbs, New Mexico (on the Texas line) have more than doubled in the past few years due largely to East and West Coast transplants. Typically, the Eastern company offers a bonus to current employees to work in the bleak wastelands. The employee discusses this with his/her spouse who agrees that perhaps for a year they could use the financial relief. If the employee’s spouse is a mother with all her family around her where they have lived for generations, moving is unimaginable, not discussed. The employee finds housing in the wasteland, is introduced to friendly people and real Mexican food, sees children walking safely home from good schools, discovers the Plains and the Rockies, and coaxes his spouse out for a brief visit. She visits the schools, sees the country, does quick financial calculations and returns home to pack up the kids and say goodbye to mama. They are now Texans or New Mexicans. They still talk funny but they are the lifeblood of our nation along with the parolees and reformed fathers, the new immigrants and the traditionally self-reliant working people. All of them will be there, working, when the government coffers run dry. Richard B. Jones is a bilingual probation officer, migrant teacher and welfare worker in rural West Texas; he has lived and worked in many places including China and the Middle East. His blog is: TheCaprock.com

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