The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
For the first two years of my college career, I attended Ohio University. OU was notable in the day because it adhered to a “quarter” schedule while most schools had adopted a “semester” plan. As a result, the school had a rather odd calendar which included a holiday break that lasted from just before Thanksgiving to just after New Years Day. One of the supposed benefits of this schedule was that students could go home, get a temporary job over the holidays and make a few dollars. That was the theory, anyway, and while it may have worked for kids in more urban and suburban areas, there weren’t a ton of job opportunities in the rural summer resort area where I lived.
The first year, I did a couple of catering jobs for the restaurant where I worked over the summer and made maybe $50. The second year, I essentially volunteered for a local CPA where I made copies and fetched coffee. I think he may have given me a 20 as a Christmas “bonus.”
Unquestionably, there is a difference between a job and a good job, but we need to be careful about how we apply those terms, especially as unemployment rates have fallen below 5 percent, the threshold many consider “full employment.” An economist colleague recently published an article bemoaning that the economy is creating many jobs, but few good ones, and backed up his claim with statistics showing the majority of new jobs are low-skill, low-wage, service-sector positions. I don’t doubt his methodology, but his conclusions fly in the face of what I hear every day from local companies.
A quick scan of the NCWorks website for Anson County shows there are 209 jobs currently available, and many of them – 92 by my count – pay $30,000 per year or more, the equivalent of $15 per hour. And while almost all of these jobs require some sort of specialized training and/or experience, only a handful of them require a four-year degree. Jobs such as CDL truck driver, grocery store manager, CNC machinist, paramedic, territory sales rep and manufacturing foreman may not be for everyone, but it’s unfair to suggest those are not good jobs simply because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard set by holders of multiple advanced degrees.
If we were to take television shows as an example, the only “good” jobs would be doctor, lawyer, policemen, and maybe fireman or soldier. That’s just not reality. One of the best jobs I ever had was a “menial” food service position that paid $5.50 an hour, and one of the very worst jobs I had was a position with a tech company which paid twice that in a time when $10 an hour was a decent amount of money.
At some point, we need to stop talking about the unemployment rate and start talking about the unenjoyment rate, the percentage of people who are working a job they hate. Don’t get me wrong, we all have bad days and we don’t 100 percent love our work 100 percent of the time. But if depression starts setting in around 9 o’clock every Sunday evening because you know the work week is just a few hours away, then it doesn’t matter whether you make $10 an hour or $100 an hour. Miserable is miserable whether your commute is in an old pickup or a new Lexus.
So what do you say? Do you love your job? Hate your job? What is your unenjoyment index?