Teaching High School Students to Work at Walmart

Oh, and by the way, when I was a waitress, I was offered the opportunity to train to be a manager, and when I worked at the grocery store, I was again offered the opportunity to train for a management position (produce manager). Either of those jobs would have resulted in my earning a good living. There are no small jobs, only small people who don't recognize the value of hard work.

Donna Stern sounds like a moron opposed to work in general. I worked as a waitress in high school, then as a cashier in a grocery store. I worked to earn money. Then I went to college, now I'm an attorney. Working in a crappy job in high school doesn't teach kids to be subservient, it teaches kids how to work. Which is a good thing. Maybe Donna Stern should try it.

“Donna Stern, a representative of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is outraged. “They’re going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school.”

I bet you good money that (BAMN) got Obama stimulus money. Got to keep the kids down and on gov't assistance. Got to keep them ghettofied and voting Democrap. Just can't have them thinking that maybe working for a living could be an alternative to living on the gov't teet. Can't let them develop a sense of responsibility for their own actions.

Of course the left is upset about this. For one thing, if kids learn work ethic and reliability, they can't be government subjects the way the rest of Detroitistan has become. For another thing, Wal-Mart isn't perverted by unions, thus they are scorned by the left.

"There’s no shame in honest labor at sixteen or sixty. And a lot of kids really do have to be taught about showing up to work on time, following instructions and being polite to customers."

Precisely.
This isn't about "a crap job being better than no job at all".
It's about learning how to work.
You can only do that by working.
I was a fifteen year kid delivering newspapers.
Did I make much money? Hell no!
But I learned to get up at 4:00 every morning and deliver those papers rain or dark.
That job was worth its weight in gold and just as important as anything else that I learned later on.

"Donna Stern, a representative of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is outraged. "They're going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school."

Fall down on your knees and thank the God that made you that anyone's investing anything in making useful citizens out of that Future Thugs of America chapter, you ungrateful critter.

"If you know about the American school system. You know it’s based off of the PRUSSIAN system. Which was designed to squelch radicals and free thinkers."

FTFY

If this program gives kids their first taste of working, particularly in what is one of THE most impoverished urban areas in the US, I don't see what the problem is. You gotta start somewhere after all, the rank snobbery of some do-gooder interest group be damned.

/MSEE, co-author of seven technical papers and a literature review, former grocery bagger and photo lab tech.

Almost any work experience can be a launchng pad to something better.

The hardest part is getting that FIRST experience.

When you are very young, you are most likely not able or willing to take on much to begin with anyway. A low responsibility job is fine. Then, you move up. Or you move out.

But why is a job at Walmart bad? If you can handle a job there, then you can certainly convince a future employer that you are worth a try.

So tired of all you people who moan about ''crap'' jobs.

You are one of the reasons that many younger people today won't go near a hard job, like one at Walmart. Because you are teaching them that work is only valuable to them under certain circumstances - ones THEY choose. So they expect to have a first job with great pay and great hours without paying any dues and without learning any skills before they get there.

ANY job can be valuable to you. Doesn't mean you have to do that job for the rest of your life! But one step at a time.

I started as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. Now I am a CPA earning decent pay and enjoying the respect of my peers. Everyone has to start somewhere, you just don't have to remain there.

"There’s no shame in honest labor at sixteen or sixty. And a lot of kids really do have to be taught about showing up to work on time, following instructions and being polite to customers."

This. This is it. I see it in my younger siblings who are a generation my junior and in high school. They want a job because having a job equals money. But, they don't seem to grasp the concepts of showing up when scheduled, staying for an entire shift or really doing much of anything while at work. Most of their friends are this way too. I'm guessing it's part of the "everyone wins, mommy will fix it all" upbringing. It's ok to skip out and lose a job when mommy will cover that lost pay and keep a roof over my head, etc...

It's a bunch of high school kids working their first job at Wal-Mart. They'll learn how to show up on time, how to punch a clock...how bad a retail job with crap pay can suck... If anything, maybe this will show them the type of job they don't want to get stuck doing for the rest of their lives or after college when they have a no-skill degree that leaves them no more employable than an high school student but with a mound of student loan debt. I see programs like this as a teaching tool about managing in an adult world and a harsh dose of reality if you choose to slack off and not apply yourself.

My first job was at a Walmart. It taught me a lot about how to interact with different people, schedule myself, and make plans to accomplish a goal. Oh, and it helped me pay for college.

There's no shame in honest labor at sixteen or sixty. And a lot of kids really do have to be taught about showing up to work on time, following instructions and being polite to customers.

No one smart enough to be an engineer or scientist is going to be participating in this kind of program in the first place.

It's always nice when you catch a glimpse of elitism just lurking back there behind the do-goodery.

Everybody's got to start somewhere, and that somewhere is not generally where you want to end up.

I don't see anything wrong with it. I know having worked retail comes in handy as I can show I've got sales and customer service skills.

it always interests me to hear older generations saying how over privileged young people are and how they want something for nothing but when we are trained for a job that we will probably have to work to pay through college suddenly we're all too good for a minimum wage job.

"Dude, you work at Wal-Mart?"

"No I don't, shut up!"

America must be so grateful to have Donna Stern looking out for the interests of the opressed. So must the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary bunch of utter morons.

Replying to Doc, I'm glad your first job provided a path to college for you, but there's a big difference between the purchasing power of a minimum-wage worker 35 years ago than there is today. At the same time, the cost of an education today is at least an order of magnitude higher than it was in your day. As to your support for Wal-Mart teaching the work ethic in areas where the unemployment rate is 50%, I guess irony really is dead. Freddy D. is rolling in his grave.

I used to give classes at the local high schools on how to get and keep jobs. Nearly 90 percent of the young people who came into my shops were totally unprepared with the simple concepts of: You have to come to work on time; You have to come to work when scheduled; You have to dress in clean clothes; You can't give away the boss's product; etc, etc. If the school and Walmart want to train these students in order to make them employable for first jobs, more power to them. We all had first jobs and they weren't as rocket scientists.

I'm reminded of a radio interview some years ago with a young man who was on welfare and who was asked why he didn't get a job at McDonalds. His reply was that he was too good for that. Think about that.

pdq I think you're missing the point. A job at walmart is not one's entire life. I'll agree that math and science are very important but a strong work ethic is fundamental to both of those.

Seriously - you don't see anything wrong with this, people? Any job is better than no job? Is it because math and science take actual teaching and actual time to think and learn? No one here recalls that the U.S. lags far behind the rest of the developed world in math and science not only in elementary, middle and high school, but in college AND IN SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS AND PEER-REVIEWED SCIENCE!!!

So what? We'll take a greeter job at WalMart and let someone else build the jetpacks.

Better than no jobs these days!

I don't know why anyone would have a problem with this.
A Walmart job is still a job and someone has to do it. If it's a bunch of High School kids doing it, earning some money and learning some responsibility, then hell, more power to them.

Really? A post from TWO years ago? I expect a mildly pushed agenda from Alex, and often they're some of the most commented posts probably because of that, but two years old? That's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. What would be interesting to know two years later would be, how did it do? Are some of those kids department managers or something like that, or did they mostly get let go when they reached the 90 day 'have to pay them full minimum wage' threshold that was discussed? THAT would make for a good discussion, unfortunately Google isn't providing info on that.
Detroit has a jobless rate of 11.2 now, so maybe it worked fantastically, however, that really old article above was using a guess at the U6 'underemployed' number so if they were all hired as part-timers it wouldn't have decreased much.
Curiously, where does one come across a two year old article in their daily internet touring? Google also did not show anything remotely recent (other than the Neatorama post) so I really do wonder!

A crappy job is better, and Walmart isn't that crappy!

My first job was working in a poultry slaughter house. I cannot describe the constant filth and reek of the offal, blood and feces. Thirty five years later I still can't look at a raw chicken without feeling disgust. At least Walmart is air-conditioned and clean.

I kept that first job three years, it helped pay for my college and motivated me to eventually become a professor. I have to wonder what sort of twisted logic would oppose trying to teach a work ethic to students in an area where the unemployment rate is 50%?

My first job was quite literally a crappy one, as it involved cleaning lots and lots of toilets. I also was paid at the then "youth minimum wage".
Looking back, there were times when I'm sure that my employer would have been more productive without me than with me, but in the course of that job I learned a lot about dealing with people, being responsible, and eventually as I neared the end of high-school, supervising others and getting the best out of them.

This crappy job also gave me something else, that proved to be the most valuable. The name and phone number of a previous supervisor that I could put on my resume. For every internship or summer job that I applied for in my college years, poor Dan got a phone call from someone asking if I showed up on time, was I responsible, did I show initiative.

In any place a poor supervisor can make life hell, and poor attitude can make any job hell. But a Walmart job needn't be crappy, even for a cosmopolitan aristocratic famous author:
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/item_K8hD47GcZBkh1v3SjNYldI

School doesn't train them to be subservient works?

*BWHAHAHAHAHA!*

Pull the other one!

If you know about the American school system. You know it's based off of the Persian system. Which was designed to squelch radicals and free thinkers.

At least with this program your kid has a job.