What Are These Monday Editorials All About?

I’ve been casting around for some ways to reorganize this blog a bit and how to make it more meaningful.  Frankly I’m tired of the “please help me find a job” queries and the “how can I live in the Philippines for nearly nothing” crowd who aren’t really looking for success in life.  More or less every Monday I’m going to be writing about ways to make yourself a viable, productive member of society, no matter what your nationality, and how every country, especially the USA and the Philippines (the ones I have the most intimate knowledge of) can stand on their own two feet and move on to greatness.

Some won’t like these articles, especially many of my Filipino friends.  Too bad.  I’ve often been accused of being “blunt”, and in the Philippines especially, no matter what the problem, the “norms” of society are to never mention what is really wrong and to beat around the bush for a few paragraphs in the vague hope that maybe the people causing the problem will somehow get the message.  Well I don’t do that.  So if you want “delicadeza”, drama and innuendo that says virtually nothing, feel free to click on your browser’s “Back” arrow now and move on to someone else who will wallow in self-pity, or the latest scandal chismis.  I’m an old man.  I don’t have time to beat around the bush.

OK, now that I have your attention and perhaps raised your ire, what does the stated subject of this article mean?  Today, I don’t have a lot of answers, I have instead some thought provokers.

How We Got Here:

I’m going to drop a quote here from a writer you might find well worth reading, Naomi Dunford.  Naomi is a breath of fresh air in these days of “financial crisis funeral music” and most importantly. she lives what she writes.  A disclaimer:  If you visit Naomi’s site you’ll see that she sells things.  In fact she runs an online school that teaches many of the principles of self-sufficiency, world-market entrepreneurship and responsibility for your own life that I espouse here.  But I didn’t write this piece to sell Naomi’s products, I suspect they are good, but I’m not a user.  I just refer to her often because she has areal take on what’s going on in today’s world and what people can do to make things better, for themselves. 

Warning that I shouldn’t need to add, but will anyway, Naomi writes as she speaks and she speaks a bit “salty” for some.  If you like to put on airs to make people think you have never used the “F” word or that sex and the pursuit of sex is not part of your life, don’t go there.  Also, do not stick your head in a microwave to get yourself a tan.

We used to be self-reliant.

For 40,000 years of human history, we depended on ourselves. We were part of a small network of people who helped each other out, but mainly we fixed our own clothes, cooked our own meals and traded our own chickens to make our way in this world.

We were Jacks of all trades. When our roof broke, we didn’t hope we had money left on our Visa to pay a specialist to come out and fix it — we cut down a tree and went up the ladder. If the wheat crop was poor, we always had the cows. Wife took in some sewing work, husband ploughed the fields. If one thing went wrong, we didn’t cross our fingers and pray the big man down the lane would waltz in to take care of us.

Sometime around the industrial revolution, we gave the responsibility of feeding our families to a bunch of old guys in suits that cost more than our car. Or horse, as the case may have been.

Rich people came in and, as part of an income diversification strategy, decided to build some factories. We started to specialize. We became widget stampers, widget joiners, widget movers. Our self-identity became one of what we did to which widgets for eight or 10 or 12 hours a day.

Western culture became one of efficiency. How could we do it faster? How could we make it easier? How could we work it cheaper?

Then, on April Fools’ Day, 1913, Henry Ford added a conveyor belt to the whole process and generalism went to hell.

Flash forward 95 years and we live in a world of 10-page job descriptions that itemize exactly what we do — and more importantly, what we don’t do. We put cute little comic strips in our cubicles that scream “Not my department”. We do the same thing, every day, for years at a time. Optimally, we do our one thing and one thing only more efficiently than any other person in town.

And in order to ensure we have time for all of this efficiency, we have outsourced the rest of our lives to other specialists. Specialists grow our food and make our clothes and educate our children while we go be specialists for someone else.

We believed we were making things easier. Instead we were handing over every tiny scrap of personal power we had left.

Every Scrap, Dave?  Really?

Well pretty much in my view.  I decided to write this series because the news I see every day is just depressing as hell, and many people I read about and talk to on a daily basis seem to have their brains wired upside down. 

Just a few days ago I was reading a long and detailed account of a 62-yo man in California who had been laid off, had no real prospects for retirement income and was literally wearing out his shoes going from office to office submitting applications and begging and wishing for interviews.  In addition to being too old (yeah, I know there are laws against age discrimination in the US … work for a smart-ass 40-something when you are in your 60’s and you’ll find out how effective those laws are and how much they mean in the real world).  In addition to being on the wrong side of 60, this fellow had two masters degrees, both in technical, “meaty” fields.  Frankly I can easily see why he wasn’t finding a job.  If I had been doing employee hiring and saw his resume it would have scared me, I wouldn’t have interviewed him either. 

In admittedly tough economic times. when US business has to pick up the pace and modernize or die, what possible use would two 40 year old college degrees be to my company?  I would much rather hire a high school dropout with fresh ideas and a track record of making money for himself … any money at all, as long as he had done it on his own.  Since the transformation in society Naomi wrote about above, we seem to have fallen into some sort of perverse way of looking at things that equates a ‘job’ as some sort of plum that a business dangles, and the we who are lucky enough to have captured that ‘plum’ are now entitled to be paid for life for the winning of the prize.  In technical, real world terms, let me express this succinctly.  Bullshit.

Your right to a job exists only so far as your job provides value to the employer.  You make money for your employer or you hit the streets.  That’s the way life is, or should be.  Obviously American business has badly missed the point, as people demonstrate and vociferate over the “poster child” example of the AIG executives being paid bonuses with tax payer dollars.  It isn’t really the fact that these executives are being paid with taxpayer money that is obscene, the perverse aspect is that they are being paid a bonus for success when collectively they acted stupidly and ran the company into the ground.  Like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme or the Legacy mess here in the Philippines, these mult
i-degreed ‘smarter than the common folk’ “experts” bought into mortgage derivatives and other totally speculative “paper” that the average bum on the Bowery would be smart enough not to bend over and pick up … and because they fumbled big time in running their company they should be paid a bonus?  Give me a break.  Personally, I subscribe to the Senator Charles Grassley viewpoint.  Grassley suggested on Monday that AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.  At least Captain Edward Smith who was responsible for the RMS Titanic disaster mainly by virtue of his personal arrogance didn’t boot women and children out of the lifeboat and come ashore demanding a performance bonus … he knew how bad he screwed the pooch and chose to go down with the ship.

Filipino attitudes toward jobs seem to be, as if that was possible, even worse.  Here in the Philippines if you hire someone you essentially are married to them and you know there is no divorce here.  Recently the Philippine legislators have been mumbling about passing a law that would make it a criminal act to hire folks as independent contractors so as to avoid the life long employee “marriage”.  Yes, criminalize independence.  The Constitution is indeed alive and well .. NOT.  The idea that jobs become “property” of employees and that the employer and/or the government has to take care of the employee for life once hired is a significant contributor to the lack of jobs here in the Philippines.

So does this mean I think our destitute 62 year old man should just give up and die?  Absolutely not.  He should do as I have and how thousands of others are doing these days.  Tell the rejection artists at the personnel departments to pound salt, stand up on his own two feet as Americans, and yes Filipinos, used to do and make his own living.  You might even call it “empowering retirement”, and with the power of the Internet he can do it in California or in Cagayan de Oro just as easily. 

I know many of you who come here looking for information on conventional “jobs in the Philippines” don’t care to hear my answers, but perhaps some day the light will turn on for you too.  Reinvent yourself and make your own “job”.  Worked for me.

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