![]() Working these types of high-demand, low reward jobs generates the type of knowledge that quality management skills are built on. ![]() Learning how to do this is another vital life skill. Handling the pressures required to keep a job under these conditions requires a fortitude far from a slacker mentality. Not as a one-hour photo-op, but for months, not just simply working the job and trying to keep the job, but doing so while worrying about making the rent, feeding the kids, and being at risk of losing it all due to one mistake or complaint. I would challenge any politician who makes condescending remarks about food-service people or minimum wage workers, to try it out for themselves. No matter what career or industry they choose to work in next, their experiences in working on these fast-food front lines will remain invaluable and extremely relevant. These people (and again, I was one of them), learn their business and life skills while enduring front line conditions. This is a far cry from the slacker mentality. They are learning these skills on the job, as they work, often for minimum wage (or less). These include customer service, quality control, brand management, occupational health and safety, staffing, franchising, leadership, team management, restaurant management, personal financial management, even conflict management. While they do this, they also learn a range of other skills. ![]() Many of these baristas and food servers get up really early in the morning or work late into the night to ensure that coffee and meals are ready for the consuming public. The taxes that help pay for infrastructure and politicians’ indexed pensions come straight off the paychecks of these hardworking people before they ever see it. But these hard working front line baristas and food-servers are indeed building a future, not only for themselves and their families, but also for the economy. Politicians who make such disparaging remarks tend to conveniently forget this fact, largely because many of them never had to go this route, and of course, it would weaken the foundation of their sound bite. ![]() They pay their way (and I was one of them) as best they can as they struggle to improve their own situation through hard work and determination. Sure, most people do not want to work on the front lines of a fast-food restaurant for their entire lives, but the fact is, many do not do this. In all these cases there is an assumption that the people who work in fast food service are essentially unemployable and don’t really want to do anything with their lives anyway. I have heard this kind of terminology before in other versions, most famously, as the McJob. He continued, “If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand.” As quoted in the Huffington Post, Cruz said, “that if young people could 'get off the bong for a minute' they might manage to “head down” to the polling station and vote,” implying the debt relief program to be simply payment for votes. Among the many insulting terms hurled by populist conservative politicians who were offended by this move was the term “slacker barista,” used by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on his podcast. When the Biden administration announced its student loan forgiveness program last month, there was the predictable outcry from that segment of society who hate seeing non-rich people get a break.
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