Making the Underclass Permanent
By Walter Williams
[Reprinted from Issues & Views Winter 1998]
Not quite a teenager during the late 1940s, I built a shoeshine box to
start earning money after school and weekends. One of my regular customers, who
owned U-Need-A-Hat factory, asked me to deliver a couple of packages. After a
while, I was delivering packages and sweeping the factory floor more than I was
shining shoes. For a couple of years, it became my regular after-school job.
Later, I caddied at Philadelphia's Cobbs Creek golf course, washed dishes
at Horn & Hardart, shoveled snow for PTC & Reading Railroad, packed
boxes at Sears & Roebuck mail order house, and worked for the Postal
Service during the Christmas season.
Plus, there were other jobs that just lasted for a day or two, like picking
blueberries in New Jersey and helping people paint. These jobs were held before
high school graduation. There was nothing unique about my experience; all of my
schoolmates and friends, who wanted jobs, had jobs.
During those years, I lived in the Richard Allen housing project in North
Philadelphia. Deserted by my father, Mom was a domestic servant; the after-
school earnings helped make ends meet. Here's the tragedy: kids who live in
today's Richard Allen project don t have the chances to learn the world of work
that I did.
A minimum wage law of $5.15 an hour makes hiring an inexperienced, immature
12- or 14-year-old a losing economic proposition. There are child labor laws
making it illegal to hire a person less than a certain age. Then there are
liability laws that make hiring a 12-year-old to shovel snow from a commercial
establishment an act of lunacy.
You say, "Williams, all of these laws are to protect the
children!" If that's your position, I have an assignment for you. Visit
the Richard Allen project and see how this "protection" has benefited
the children compared to being "unprotected" back in the 1940s and
1950s. See what they do after school and on weekends. Then ask yourself,
"Would they be better off, say, delivering packages and sweeping floors at
U-Need-A-Hat, or running the streets and engaging in anti-social and
self-destructive behavior?"
The little bit of money a kid can earn after school isn't nearly as
important as the lessons gained through early work experiences, such as good
work habits, respect for supervisors, and being prompt. Plus, early work
experiences give youngsters a chance to make job mistakes at a time when they
are not as costly as when there are dependents counting on a continuous source
of income. Then there's the self-respect from being at least semi-financially
independent.
These benefits are important for any young person. However, they are even
more important for young people growing up in disfunctional homes and
neighborhoods, and attending rotten schools. If they are to learn anything that
will make them more valuable employees in the future, they won't learn it at
home, in the neighborhood or in the schools. Their only chance is in the world
of work. Government has cut off that rung of the economic ladder.
Today, the handout mentality has been substituted for work and dignity.
Even if a $2.00, $3.00 or $4.00 hourly wage job was available, many youngsters
in the Richard Allen project probably wouldn't take it. Unlike what I was
taught, they've been taught that it's beneath them.
I will never forget the words of the man who ultimately became my
stepfather, "Walter, any job, at any wage is better than begging and
stealing." Government handouts and a flourishing drug trade weren't around
to corrupt that lesson.
-- Walter Williams is Chairman of the Department of Economics at
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA) and author of The State Against Blacks
(McGraw-Hill) and Do The Right Thing: The People's Economist Speaks (Hoover
Press).
Copyright © 1998 Creators Syndicate,
Inc.
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