Most people on food stamps and welfare consider the bottom few rungs as earning 'chump change'. They fail to understand the concept of climbing an economic ladder.

We used to call it 'getting paid to learn a trade'. That's what 16 year old kids did. With grants, 'scholarships', and lots of other government freebies giving to the 'poor', there is no need to get up and work while learning a trade or possible future occupation.

One of those crappy jobs (manufacturing) helped a few of my friends get over their meth addictions and move up a few rungs. Their employers gave them a simple assembly task to repeat over and over and over. They were also allowed to work their 40 week in two 20 hour shifts, or one straight shift, if they wanted.

My friends weren't on welfare or food stamps and they had to really stretch up on their toes to reach the first rung of the ladder. After a few attempts at those 'crappy' jobs, they finally hung on and started climbing.

Rules and regulations prevent people from starting businesses or hiring people because it is too complex. Firing is difficult

Not my experience, I applied once for one of these chump jobs. After an interview process of 10 minutes, I was hired, and two days after, I was fired in 5 minutes (for good reason, and pretty nicely).

I did not noticed that much complexity???? Before anyone ask, I did had tax withdrawal and so forth.

In western-Europe, it is really hard to fire someone, once you have been there, the US is really a piece of cake for that.

Note: for the people that don't believe how hard it is: I am still on sabbatical (unpaid though) and can resume whenever I want (but I am one the few that did some well managed conditions), and my boss over there is agonizing.

Complaining that "These people need jobs!", in the inner city or anywhere else, is pathetically naive.

Part of the magic of the free market is that every individual watches the landscape closely, trying to find new ways to be useful to others, and thus to turn a profit. A "job" isn't a little gift that comes wrapped in a bow, given to you with a kiss on the forehead, as an expression of kindness from compassionate strangers. When someone hires you, it's because you've convinced them that it's in their interests to do so.

Merely saying "I'm willing to work!" is neither helpful nor humble. Capitalism's unblinking attention to the lives of others, this constant search for insight about the meaning of value, is what gives it transformative power. Every other scheme of human interaction is merely primitive fealty to the Big Man of the Village.

(Got that? The personal adoration of Obama is pathetic.)

The world doesn't owe you a living. The world doesn't even owe you sunrise.

I can imagine no deeper servility to a master than turning to government and saying "Give me a job!"

Hey Amy, your navigation buttons are gone, can't get to earlier blog posts

I think this is where the minimum wage hurts people. Currently here in Illinois, the minimum wage is $8.25, which ends up costing employers even at fast food restaurants $10+ an hour. As a result, they hire less people. The people who don't get hired are not only out of the money, they are, more importantly in my estimation, out of work experience and employment references.

My sister, who has no college education and limited skills, went to work at McDonald's for minimum wage several years ago. Based on her work ethic, she was promoted repeatedly until she is now the head manager over 3 stores. They pay her well with great benefits, and it is good, honest work. The question is how many people missed this opportunity because their resume was all but blank and there would have been more opportunities at a lower pay?

Slightly different than this story, but the point is the same.

This is also one of the reasons I think the national sales tax would be better. It's simple to hire someone, simple to pay them, they do $1,000 of work and get paid $1,000.

Under the current system with taxes on both sides, $1,000 of work means you have to pay $1,200 to someone who is willing to do it for $800.

Bottom of the home page, can't see items from early July

@Trust: You're correct about the minimum wage.

1. Minimum wage laws decree that work which is worth less than the minimum wage is illegal. That's right, they make some kinds of honest work ILLEGAL. All that is accomplished is higher unemployment, as employers have not just no incentive but a legally mandated DISINCENTIVE to hire for certain kinds of work.

2. If minimum wage laws are a good idea, why not just legislate a $1000/hr minimum? We'll all be rich then, right? When stated that way, it's clear that not the amount but the PRINCIPLE of a minimum wage is what's wrong.

The minimum wage IS one of those "[g]overnment restrictions [that] often make these 'bad' jobs hard to come by," as the article puts it.

"Casual construction and small repair shops where people bang metal and use power tools all day long are the kinds of employers we need in the inner city"

Only a complete lunatic or a complete idiot would open up a small repair shop in the inner city, because they could be 99% certain that their sheet metal & power tools would all be stolen within 24 hours. Crime causes poverty by driving honest people & jobs away. The problem is not that potential employers have no jobs to offer to the inner city. The problem is that the inner city has nothing to offer potential employers except criminal behavior and functional illiteracy.

"Firing is difficult and so you take a risk of bringing someone on board who will produce less than the cost of employing them, so people don't want to take that risk."
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There is no need to hire anybody. Merely sign contracts and give IRS Form 1099's (not W-2's).

No more socialist security "contributions". No more having to fire anybody. Merely cancel the contract or let it expire.

There are companies out there that do this sort of thing and many are discovering that it is far, far easier financially and overall risk-wise to sign contracts vs. actually hiring employees.

Those who really want a job will line up for this.

Under the current system with taxes on both sides, $1,000 of work means you have to pay $1,200 to someone who is willing to do it for $800.

Under the current system, if you have $1000 of work, you find someone to do the work, hire as a contractor, pay them $1000 and 1099 them. Where it gets tricky is when you have an ongoing relationship.

I got an ad yesterday -- for Vistaprint

Cool. I've done business with them. They're solid.

There is no need to hire anybody. Merely sign contracts and give IRS Form 1099's (not W-2's).

Doing so is not always legal. Generally, independent contractors need to be able to control the details of how a job gets done; if the employer can dictate what the person uses, when it's used, and how it's used to to accomplish the job, then an employer-employee relationship is created. There are various requirements that need to be met for it to be considered contracting vs. employment.

Just thought of this:

One place where there are tons of entry level (and even some non-entry level) jobs is on the internets.

Anyone who can get online can earn money on Mechanical Turk (literally, anyone - Turk is filled with repetitive, small tasks that anyone literate can do).

Services like oDesk enable people to employ a diverse range of skill sets (from basic admin tasks to high level software engineering). People with real skills that can be employed virtually can do pretty well on oDesk and Elance (you see hourly rates for good contractors upwards of $100).

i think most all those crappy jobs are just plan gone. Most repair work is gone -- just throw away the broken and but new. Any repairs take a lot of skill.

I watched an interesting interview with a manufacturing company president. He said the only low skilled job was the janitors and the security guard. The machines are now so high tech that the operator verges on being a computer programmer (according to him). Another interesting point he made was that most the new people he hired (versus stealling from another company) were prisoners...they prison training program was one of the few that could afford the machines to train people.

In general, i would say the career ladder is broken in a lot of places. All the entry level jobs seem to have gone away or be off-shored or something.

Banker, in electronics there's a certain amount of truth to that. However, I've long observed that many failures in electronic devices are due to power supply failures. The power supply is a subassembly that can be replaced, and it doesn't take an engineer.

One area where there is a big need for relatively unskilled labor is road patching. These days, because of the cost of the labor, pothole patches are typically done by throwing a bucket of cold patch into it, hitting it a time or two with a tamper, and on to the next. These patches nearly always fail in six months or so. If the cost of the labor wasn't so high, road crews could afford to do a proper job with hot patch; the repair would last a lot longer and roads wouldn't need to be repaved as often.

In my area, there are a bunch of chicken processing plants that hire illegals. They do so because they don't have to pay them minimum wage. (Which is why I say that all future minimum-wage increase bills should be titled "Illegal Aliens Full Employment Act".) If they were forced to pay legal minimum wage, they'd either automate everything or relocate the plants in Mexico.

The current minimum wage is waaaaaay above the open market value for unskilled labor. Get rid of it, and a lot of those jobs come back -- not all of them, but a lot. (And as in the case of the chicken plants, the jobs didn't actually leave; it's just that Americans can't get those jobs.)

My neighbor and I were talking about this last week.

There are very few jobs for the kid who gets out of high school and isn't going on to college or a technical training program. And the jobs that are available don't allow him to live on his own or even support a family.

And our school system does no favors to these kids by having a college-prep-only curriculum.

minimum wage - illegal workforce - unemployment benefit:
3 sides of the same coin.

And also maybe the interesting notion that teens (and 20's) have nowadays about being entitled to everything?

Sadly, there is scant motivation to climb up even one rung of said ladder. There are more incentives to nap quiety beneath; maybe some change will fall out of those ladder-grippers' pockets! Change. Heh.

"what's needed to save poor urban areas is, of course, jobs...but not "good jobs" but bad jobs -- private sector jobs that relatively unskilled people can do"

I've been arguing this for a long time but unfortunately the idea seems anathema to most people :/ We've been brainwashed that we're all "above" such things now. Combine that with regulatory hell, and you live in a world where a society has millions of unemployed (say) women but (say) being a nanny or domestic remains out of the question or hideously expensive. Millions of unemployed men but we pay through our teeth for a plumber to come do basic work, or for even more menial labor. There's labor, there's jobs, but standing in the way of the twain meeting, is a mass of regulatory bullsh-t and peoples own petty egos.