Workforce Woes

NAFTA has little to do with the job situation in Greenville. The problem lies within the community. Industry will move here because it can get cheap labor, only to find out later that the workers are not worth even bothering with. And that hurts the qualified skilled labor force that can actually provide reliable service to an employer.

The whining, welfare workforce in this town will forever make it even less desirable to future investors unless they just want people to push brooms or hire the type that stand in the aisles of Wal-Mart to ignore you.

If the North wind blows in the smell of cooking rice to the city, I wonder what comes through when the South wind passes over the waste water treatment plant?

The writer makes a good point. It is difficult to find people in the Delta who truly want to work. Sure they take the job when offered, but they fail to see the connection between performance and paycheck.

If they pass a pre-employment drug screen, which is a big "if" in the Delta, employees enter a race to see who can do the least for the longest. If you address their performance, you are being discriminatory because "no one else does any more than me"... which in most cases, is true.

They don't care if they are fired because they can then get unemployment, food stamps, TANF, and eventually disability income. Most will qualify for Medicaid which provides the same level of medical care provided through employee benefits, for a mere $3.00 co-pay.

So, what are the incentives for a person to enter the unskilled workforce of the Delta? They are all listed above. You have to have worked to qualify for most of the state and federal assistance programs, so to take a job and then lose it, becomes the only prequalifying event.

What has been created in the Delta is a subculture who is very adept at how to "work the system". The result is that programs intended to be temporary subsistence for the needy have evolved into full time careers for the lazy.

We created this system and have permitted its abuse for years. As I stated before, not until we make working more lucrative than not working, will we attract a workforce that values a job.

Forthright