What jobs have you done as an American that you didn't want to

and did anyway....

For me, waitstaff, nurses aide, substitute teaching, childcare.....

i hired on at Sears after that.

Picking beans and strawberries

If I needed a job and that's all there was, that's what I did. Having an income outweighed any dislike I may have had for a particular job.

not so bad at a local restaurant - but in College for the "Nest" (the biggest cafeteria on campus) it sucked. Especially the dishes with pancake syrup on them!

It wasn't that he didn't want to do it, it was that he had a family to support and he was glad to have the job. While he was doing that, I was working at a convenience store for $4.75/hr. We do what we have to do to support our families and bush can stick it!

make "good" while thieving whatever they have.

McDonalds, day labor and smutting corn.

All jobs that suck, all jobs that I did for 3weeks to 7months because that's all there was, and it paid the bills.

won't do those jobs! :sarcasm:

native american 200+ generation

roll them all together and you get a true blue american. :)

But here goes. Roadside flowering plants stand gopher, dishwasher (twice), waiter, cabdriver (twice), sales for home security company (sales is the most evil thing ever IMHO), landscaping, and a few others that aren't really crappy jobs but I hated doing nonetheless.

Bush is full of it. Most of us can and WILL take any job we can get if times are tight enough.

On edit I wanted to add one I forgot, perhaps the worst job ever. Chicken processing plant line work. THAT one I refused to return for a second day. The pure raw desperation of those working there was more than my psyche could take at that time.

I worked for pug lawyers, even some insurance defense firms. At least this gig was a temp job. Honest, the damage was intense.

Insurance defense lawyers are ruthless. :scared:

I literally couldn't hear for 48 hours.

Fast food store clerk
Grill cook
membership records hotline answerer
secretary
secretary . . .
did I say secretary!

(In between job that was good beginning IT stuff)

Later I was technical IT support for the House of Representatives but when they gave me Henry Hydes office and impeachment began I quit.

After that, my real career began and I became a software developer.

hourly contract programmer, stable hand,
Accounts receivable, apt complex maintenance, collections software writing.

Some jobs you can shower off, some require a full biohazard decontam.

When I was in college. I was scared shitless even though I kept a 12 gauge and had 2 big dogs outside. I got fired when the owner's kid started college and got the job and I was relieved even tho I needed the dough.

I did this as a summer job when I was a teenager. This was absolutely with out a doubt the worst job I ever had.

They wouldn't let me pick the berries that were in nice neat rows. I had to pick the berries where they had gone wild. They had already been picked through and at times I would search for what seemed like hours before finding any berries ready to pick. I can't remember what it paid, but it was so much a quart. I was probably working for less than 10 cents an hour back in 1975. I only worked there for three days, as I could make more money mowing lawns. I never even went back to get my pay, because it wasn't worth the ten mile bike ride to get there.

Oops, meant to reply to the OP.

Its all bullshit folks

I may not have loved working in fast food, or as a dishwasher, but they were honest jobs, and I worked hard at them when I was younger.

I think that a lot of jobs that B* is referring to are jobs that younger people starting in the workforce, or working through college might have done in the past.


Also, jobs like working in chicken plants that most people don't like to do, or would much rather do something else. (or are sometimes too drugged out to get other jobs) That these jobs are largely populated with immigrants now.

Immigrants do provide a work force that is largely dependable for these jobs.

for 10 hours a day on my father's farm, milked cows, picked cotton (manually and with a tractor), along with various other jobs from the late-50s to the late-60s.

When I was in college during the 60s, I had all sorts of nasty jobs to help pay the bills. Most were construction, mowing lawns, and farm work.

The most hated job I had was a draftee in the US Army 1970-72. Started at something like $110.00 a month as a private. Figured that was about 25 cents an hour. Discharged as a Sargent E-5 making about $300.00 a month.

.

I'd like to know just what he believes is the kind of job Americans "won't" do.

so he just quiet, and daddy covered his AWOL ass.

I think he really wants to quit - it's not fun for him anymore.

Watches America from on high, so effective during Katrina

That was my first job. After that I washed dishes, cooked, cleaned, and waited tables.

when it's 98 outside. Then you have the bugs and snakes to worry about.

were the result of them PAYING TOO LITTLE, not of the duties involved. I'd be happy to pick fruit or clean toilets if it paid a living wage.

Years ago, I saw a commercial for a movie in which a bum says, "I know I don't live well, but at least I don't work at it." It was meant to be a joke, but then I realized that he was absolutely right. Since then, I've refused to work at being poor!

:headbang:
rocknation

McDonalds. Dairy Queen (no pun there). Light construction. Hated all of them.

Cleaning out the scrubbers in the exhaust stacks of an insulation making plant with an air chisel...good times. And this was AFTER I graduated from college, but hey, I needed the money and no one else was hiring.

But you did manage to find a lower level of hell.

And it doesn't just wash off in the shower, either. You just always feel like you're covered in tiny pieces of glass. Which you are.

And this was before we used even a face mask. I'm probably gonna die.

I was also a parts runner for an automotive shop one summer. The best part of that job was the fact I got to drive a MINT CONDITION antique T-Bird! White/Red leather interior....BEAUTIFUL. That was a BORING :boring: job. The summer after high school, I sold Blue Jeans at "Just Jeans" and that job sucked. I also babysat during a summer for the KIDS FROM HELL :grr: and the mom used me as her freakin' servant...cleaning the house, stripping the wax off of her kitchen floor that hadn't had a wax strip in YEARS, run her errands, and cooking. I never did THAT again. Then I got my Opticianary License and did that forever.

My most FAVORITE job was making stained glass windows and lamps. I LOVE doing stained glass. I did that until I got pregnant and had to stop because of the lead in the solder.:(

I would love to get a paying job in POLITICS, but I have no experience or education (except DU ;)) in the field. I think it's a job I would like.

Ok, if the wages were the same at Mc Donalds and this place paid what Mc Donalds currently does -- Where would you work?

We agreed we would both be flipping burgers, and we love our jobs.

managing part was good, cleaning other peoples clothes in a hot hot building wasnt really a lot of fun

Answering service employee, graveyard hours receptionist, dog walker.

(the dishwashing gig paid better than the substitute teaching), and once I chopped ONIONS for eight hours a day for a temp agency. Wow. Thanks for making me relive that memory.;(

Hands down, most laborous, thankless, long hours, back breaking job I've ever known. If there are any here that have done it, they'll agree I'm sure.

You know those turkey roasts you buy? Well, I spent a year tucking the skin around them. Also, stuffed whole chickens into the cans.
Spent one summer walking bean fields pulling weeds.

Every other job I enjoyed. Even when I had the most difficult job in the world. (I really did.)

The one thing I've never done is waited on people who stand in line. I don't know how people do it.

developed a nice case of fish lung too.

they tend to harbor bacteria that gives people a low grade lung infection. Occasionally leading to a high grade lung infection. Wearing disposable particle masks helps but doesn't eliminate the risk.

I spray painted toy plastic riding horses, then sprayed glue on them, then threw flock on 'em and hung 'em in an electric chamber that made the fuzz stand up like hair on them little suckers.

The horses were the kind that are linked to springs, and a frame, so when the little kid bounces on it, he feels like he's riding a horse.

BTW, no masks or ventilation in that place either! I was making a whopping $3.25/hr and worked from 10PM to 6AM!

I lost my job as a controller in the early 90's. A friend got me the job. He was an ex-Navy EOD and got me on his remediation team. The job really sucked. My fellow workers were the most fowl mouthed low life types I has ever worked with. I had to go through poison oak and brush and dug up every kind of garbage metal that I found. I had to use picks and shovels and my hands. Occasionally I found a live round and we had to call the Navy to come blow it up. My feet ached every day from walking sideways on hills. I was in a clinical depression and could not afford medical help. I made $8 dollars an hour when we worked. If it rained we did not work and I did not get paid. My friend who got me the job knew that when I was a controller I made much more money than he did and now things were reversed. He rubbed it into me every payday saying he had money left over from last payday. I lost my condo because we could not make the mortgage payments and we had to move into a crappy little apartment.

I never gave up and learned that if you try to improve your life there is no guarantee that things will get better but if you don't try there is a guarantee that they won't get better.

I did this for 2 summers back in '94 & '95 when I was 18 and 19 years old. My duties including, mowing grass, tree trimming, brush clearing, mulching, weed trimming, etc. Summers in St. Louis are damn hot & humid and that's mostly what made the job so bad. It was my second year of doing this that Mexican immigrants began working with us. They could handle the heat with no problems and worked like mules, so I can see why they now work in landscaping in such big numbers.

Waitstaff, Pizza driver,

ALL.... EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE... sorry, I'll stop that now

Each and every single one of them working alongside someone in this country illegally and not paying taxes. Getting health care without paying or being deported. Payed poorly and over worked.

And your damn right, I'm bitter about it.

With proper programs in place Corporations would pay a fair wage. Immigrants would pay their fair share into the system.

I'm sorry, but it is well past due to get these issues straight. It is well past time for both, the exploitation of illegal immigrants and the undue burden of tax paying Americans, to be corrected.

To this day, I can't eat at a buffet restaurant. Ugh.

Among other sundry tasks. After a few weeks, life at the group home just became normal. No humiliation involved.

door to door was the one I disliked the most. I also did housecleaning but I actually liked that one even though it involved cleaning toilets. It didn't bother me and living in the Los Angeles area the pay was decent. I knew a guy who pumped out Port O Potties so really no job is beneath Americans. We just expect to be paid a decently. Chimp obviously has nothing but contempt for Americans to make such a statement. :mad: I guess Chimp is speaking about himself and his ilk's refusal to do certain jobs! x(

that's it. and it was a long time ago.

you know, all those things that we Americans aren't supposed to be able or willing to do

full time all summer. It was steamy and hot as could be, not to mention loud.

Fast food.

Convenience store.

A rest home where I was the only staff person for 24 residents.

The whole show was overseen by a nurse who was the boss and operator of the rest-home. Of course, whenever she was on duty there was a second person to help her out. :eyes: Needless to say I quit after about 4 months because it was just too much.

bathrooms, not to mention mountains of laundry & dishes! LOL!

Also bartending, wait tables, potato sheds, roofing for a short while, ironwork - oh, mustn't forget cabdriver! That sucked! Does make for an interesting life-view, experience in so many different situations. Also tends to instill a very wicked sense of humor (sometimes in the most inappropriate situations!).

Trained as an industrial radiographer in my 30s - didn't count as an asset after I got too creaky to climb in & out of tanks or pipelines, though. Too creaky for housekeeping too, but so far I've been able to hide it from my clients. I've known a few other 'Alices' to have their customers quit them for being too old & slow, 2 of them had been w/their 'families' for more than 15 years & had raised the kids. They are still working, for less pay - at Walmart. Not much of a pension in this line of work!

But hey, if *ush says no one will do these kinds of jobs - whaddaIknow!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

And we're clean, too!

at the very least $18.00 an hr. I told my cheap labor boss I was making these kind of wages in 1986, and doing the same thing.

People can be really NASTY when they're hungry, y'know?

I'd swab toilets and handle cum-stained motel sheets before I'd work fast "food" again.

paperboy, dishwasher, fast-food worker, construction laborer, factory worker, ditchdigger and laborer, short-order cook, taxi driver, and industrial temp. Although, actually, I enjoyed many of those jobs at the time.

The jobs I've really hated have been office jobs: I was a salesman for large-ticket consumer items, falining miserably. I cold-called top executives in Connectict trying to promote a small executive search firm. At my current employer, I was sent to Siberia for awhile generating very complex repetitve reports which were closely examined for errors.

at a place that unplugs sewer drains.

I like my job now, but it took a ways to get here.

Talk about fun....the guys who worked there loved to trash the bathrooms - I'd find smoke bombs, paint, stubbed out cigars, beer cans. Total pigs. And these people produced 1800 caskets a day. Caskets everywhere.

I took the job because I desperately needed to pay my mortgage, and decided that I would sit down and call about jobs and take the first one offered. $9 an hour, no bennies, and hideous working conditions. I lasted a month, til a friend offered me a job as his assistant ( he was CEO of a Telecom co) and I was able to go from the janitor's closet to my own office in a day's time.

I'd do it again if I had to, and I know more than a few folks who would be happy to have that job now.

Just curious how it may have changed your view.

I'm in management now and have hired several friends and good folks I know. But I don't set the payscale. I fight for my people to make more, but upper management are pretty much repukes who think only THEY should make a decent living.

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Stocked shelves at Cub Foods on the third shift, which I had to walk 4 miles to and from.

Dishwasher/bus boy at a restaurant.

Waiter/Bartender.

Legal secretary to a partner at a law firm who liked to yell at people.

I NEVER wanted to work. I worked from age 17 to age 65 and never once did I really want to. I had other things that interested me, like hobbies, gardening, etc. I really wanted to spend my life doing what I pleased.

Washing steel rods in a chemical bath, grinding rubber cylinders for platens, running a press that made mylar balloons, shifting boxes from shelves to pallets, hospital laundry, looking at copper rings through a microscope all day to spot defects, packing commercially made melba toast, packing tapes for K-Tel records.

Most of this was for $4 an hour in the early 1980s.

and believe me, if the pay weren't good, there wouldn't be a person on the face of the Earth that would work there. It's stinking, dirty, dangerous, heavy work with exposure to all kinds of pollutants and dust and cancer-causing toxins. During layoffs I worked as a waitress, in a gas station and once even desperately tried telemarketing although that lasted only two hours. :)

Now I work in IT and I'm nervously watching as the jobs around me disappear to India.

worst was a couple of years ago when I imaged documents in an insurance office for awhile.

What I think this thread is all about, though, is that there is dignity in work and Americans, like people the world over, will do what is necessary to pay their bills, feed their families, etc.

As always with the repukes, this proposed "guest worker" program is a nothing more than a smokescreen - giving license to repukes to hire slave labor at slave wages.

drive the cost of labor down across broad segments of society...Why blue-collar r's continue to vote for r's, absolutely amazes me. Blue-collars are the ones taking the brunt of this, at least for now.

I guess they'd rather watch their quality of life plummet and their earning potential destroyed, so long as Steve and Ed down the street can't get married.

Well, guess they'll be working until they're 85 or just die on the job. Hope it's all worth it to them.

Fools.

for a time in Colorado. That was fun.

Volunteers were wonderful and kids were into it, but professionals only interested in numbers so they could get bucks out of United Way. Knew I had to leave when I recruited drunk adult to be head of Cub Scout pack. Or, lose my job, and I had a brand new baby (young then). So I signed him up. They didn't care. Just get the numbers. Goodbye, Boy Scouts.

nurse's aide, tomato sorter, dishwasher, food service worker, hoo, boy. Lots.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3555870

SoCalDem (1000+ posts) Wed Apr-27-05 03:51 PM
Original message

Would YOU pick peaches for $10 an hour? Babysit for $8 an hour?



The little troll on Lou Dobbs' show today flatly stated AGAIN (for the umpteenth time) that "there are just some jobs that Americans just WON'T do".. He claimed that "the 18 yr old at Starbucks would NOT pick peaches at ANY pay rate"..

I disagree. there are always people who WILL do menial labor, stoop labor, and repetitive type labor. They cannot AFFORD to do it at $5 an hour though.

The dilemma we have is this..

IF we assume that fruit/vegetable pickers are at the bottom of the wage-ladder, and prices have escalated to the level of today, is it because the workers have started to get MORE in wages, or that the companies HIRING them have just taken a larger and larger cut of the money generated from the sale of that fruit?

Oil companies have presented us with the same issue. Last year when oil was $50 a barrel, and prices climbed to "near $2.00", they raked in PROFITS up 50-60% over previous year levels...and now that oil is considerably higher, they are making even MORE OBSCENE profits.

Higher prices seem to have little if ANY connection with supply and demand. The only demand, is that the CEOs DEMAND more money.

But I digress...

Are there jobs that Americans won't do??

We have had septic tanks cleaned before..by Americans..

We have had plumbers crawl into spidery-filthy crawl spaces..Americans again

We have had concrete work done in August..by Americans

We have had babysitters..Americans

In fact, I personally, have NEVER hired a non-American to do ANY job I have ever needed done.. and I have never had ANY trouble finding someone to do whatever job we needed done..

I just wish that more people would call these guys on their coded diatribes.. There are jobs to be done, and there are people who would do them..but they expect to be paid..

How many CEOs take NO compensation for their work??

Busboy
Dishwasher
Janitor
Delivery Driver
Stock Clerk
McFry-vat Man
Newspaper Jogger*
Receiver/Shipper
Mail Sorter




*To anyone unfamiliar with the term, a jogger is one who takes the folded newspapers and tightens the fold up to a clean square, and places any advertisements, coupons, or other inserts into the center fold. Just an FYI. :)

but frankly, in about ten years I hope to be done completely.

I went to factory work after that..for a buck more an hour. Nothing like dealing with the smell of melted plastics, grinding plastic parts..some with fiberglass in them and having machines run so fast that two pair of gloves couldn't keep burn blisters from forming when I handled the parts.

before then, in my other unemployment stints, I was a UPS worker (part-time, no benefits), a temp worker, a low-level hourly city employee (no benefits), graveyard shift worker at a hotel, the list goes on....but for a number of reasons, the teaching has been hardest for me

flipped burgers at Wendy's, worked in the dining hall during college to help pay off my tuition...

Teaches you humility

into a corn silo under construction when the temperature in the silo was about 120 degrees. I finally quit the job when we were asked to deconstruct the wood subfloor used to pour the concrete cap on the silo. As we deconstructed the floor, there were fewer and fewer places to stand, and it was a 150ft drop to the bottom with no safety equipment.

Oh, and I was paid the amazing sum of $1.75 an hour for this death defying job.

Loading trucks, warehouse assembly, driving a truck to dump for tech company, stacking boxes, a whole lot of menial labor wtih Temp. Agencies.

This Pres. and his Neo Fascist thugs are destroying America in behest of the Multi-Corps.

just a few hours a day helping my neighbor. That was gross. Then I waitressed all throughout high school and college - I loved waitressing and I put myself through college with my tips. I also waitressed a little for extra money at night, after my husband came home when my kids were really little. The hours were too late, though, and it was hard to get up with the kids in the morning, so that had to go.

I was desperate... $3.10 p/hour lasted 6 weeks.