« Persian predicament | Main | Desperate, How Sven's »

May 09, 2006

Comments

John

My father worked with a man who was, from what my father said, a first rate accountant. He was handsomely paid for his efforts at the bank where my father worked. Yet, this man maintained until he retired that he preferred his 18 years on the line at the local Ford plant. He said he knew each day that all he had to do was install 28 radiators in car engines and he was done. No pressure. Great comraderie.

Of course, this attitude is probably provides a good picture of what was wrong there and why Ford closed the plant (forcing this man to go to night school where he got his degree in Accounting).

Hugh Green

I agree that there's nothing necessarily good about making stuff, but his definition of 'the service sector' seems to imply that working in a 500-angry-dudes-a-day call centre has something important in common with, say, being a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic. It might have in technical terms - the intangibility of what gets 'produced' - but I can't imagine parents dreaming about their kids working in the former.

Frank McGahon

It's actually not his definition - he's referring to a piece by Paul Craig Roberts which bracketed all "domestic service" jobs together in order to make an erroneous claim that America was becoming a nation of bartenders and waitresses.

Hugh Green

Ah, fair enough. See what happens when you read posts and flip burgers at the same time?

The comments to this entry are closed.

March 2008

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          
Blog powered by Typepad