My First Job
And It’s Not My Career
By Daniel Muniz

I love the McDonald’s commercials in which professionals, such as doctors and pilots, are describing the experiences of their first employment at the famous eatery. In essence, the advertisements attempt to explain that the popular fast food chain is an ideal place to start working a first job, especially as a teenager.

Of course you will not pick up the technical expertise required for a future profession but the commercials vividly convey that, as with any job, you can learn the soft skills that assist in developing maturity and responsibility. No where else can a young person learn firsthand about the real world, teamwork, and of a work ethic in his or her initial and subsequent jobs.

And that is the intention of the McDonald’s advertising campaign as it hopes to attract a broader workforce of people, like teenagers, who will be seeking their first employment.

Nearly all low-skill jobs are either minimum wage or not much higher than that. And with rare exceptions, advancement is severely limited but that is not the purpose of such employment because the work itself is so much more important. Yes, McDonald’s doesn’t really expect you to make a career out of working there (although for management, perhaps it can be) and it is almost certainly a dead end job. But such a place can teach the values that no one can put a price on.

My first job was stuffing bags of groceries at Albertson’s.

Living out in the fringes of the city, the suburbs were booming so there was a lot of development near where I lived at when I was as a teenager. When the Albertson’s supermarket was nearly finished in its construction, the company held a work fair that was set after a school day had ended. A huge pack of kids from my high school crowded into cars and drove out to the grocery chain.

Incidentally, all of us who applied were hired on the spot. And it was a lot of fun to be at a part-time job where I was alongside a large number of my classmates from school.

And in that employment, I vividly learned the value of work and enjoyed the wage that came attached to it even though it was not all that much. I also learned that I had to be at work on time, work as a team, and I had to respect my managers and authority. And I also had to get the job done on time and have it done correctly, even if it meant mopping the floors.

Was I being exploited?
 

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Even with the nickel above minimum wage that I was earning, I never saw it that way and neither did most of my teenage co-workers although some could argue that since we were suburban kids, nothing was really on the line for us. But that is the kind of mentality that I do take exception to.

Today as a grown adult, I look back and see that “everything” was on the line for me when I was a teenager. And perhaps that was the most important job that I ever had because what I learned.

Its value was not in terms of a “living wage” or in benefits but in understanding the work ethic and the meaning of responsibility. I saw some of my friends get fired for slacking off or for sleeping on the job. And I saw others who just didn’t care about getting terminated. But I also saw the co-workers who trudged through day in and day out who later became attorneys, accountants (like myself), etc.

And in all reality, that low paying job was never intended to be my employment for the next 40 years in life but rather as a stepping stone. And like millions of other teenagers, they have utilized such stepping stones to further their own maturity that enabled them to tackle the professions and occupations that came later in life.

But what about other low-paying jobs that older adults have? Are they not being exploited?

That’s the way that plenty of activists and union organizers see it even though such jobs require absolutely no experience and practically no skills. The favorite target of the activists is Wal-Mart although there are plenty of other huge employers who provide low paying jobs.

So someone is working at Wal-Mart and they have kids and they don’t make much money. Is that Wal-Mart’s fault?

When I was a teenager, I never expect that I would be sweeping and mopping floors and stuffing bags of groceries for the rest of my life. But I did take what I learned in that supermarket and applied it to my future jobs. As a result, the same could be said for the low-paid employees of any unskilled job. That is, your employment at such places is a stepping stone to somewhere else; not your career.

But the activists aren’t satisfied.

And they don’t seem to understand who has the greatest responsibility for a person’s career plan or ambition. That role does not belong to the employer or to the government. And it doesn’t belong to the activists.

You are your own most important career manager.

If you are a full grown adult who has a family to support but you have a low paying job, then it is up to you to absorb that work ethic and transfer that into your next job; and to learn some skills along the way to make yourself more employable. And it is up to you to make the decisions in life that will determine your future.

Some people don’t want that kind of responsibility and that is unfortunate. And regrettably, the activists are promoting that kind of mentality instead of encouraging people to learn knew skills.

I am glad that McDonald’s took this bold step to invite people, especially teenagers, to apply for their first job. And to convey the message that such employment is not the end but a beginning to a bigger and brighter future. If more people looked at it that way, perhaps they could have a better understanding to make decisions regarding their future employment instead of relying on the government or activists to do that for them.
 

COMMENTS FROM READERS

It's really a question of having to do what you gotta do at a given time and not crying about it. -Sam

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