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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Strongly doubt it occurs to them. Almost definitionally, people in underclasses work in jobs that do not ask for resumes. I did a lot of those jobs when I was younger, and met a lot of people who, I am pretty sure, went their whole lives and will die having never made a resume.

This is one non-HBD reason that is often given for why big gaps persist across generations. Those people never meet or interact with anyone who can model the actions that result in middle- or higher class lives.

I've never heard of a job that doesn't ask for a resumé. Even minimum wage jobs ask for resumés.

I have. Walk into your local restaurant with a "now hiring" sign and ask about it. You will not be asked to provide a resume unless you want to be a manager.

The way it worked for me was like this:

  • You go to your local staffing agency in the nearby strip mall. Every town I've ever lived in has several of them.
  • You fill out some forms they give you, which include what type of work you can do. For me this was just, "labor."
  • They call you in a day or two and say "XYZ Corp. needs some material handlers starting this Tuesday. They're paying $14.50 an hour and there's mandatory overtime. The shift is 2:30 to 11:00 PM. Stop by here before then and we'll give you your badge and show you the safety video."
  • You go and do that, and then on Tuesday you start working at XYZ Corp.

Depending on the company, they might hire you on to their own paper after 90 days or 6 months or whatever. Or you might stay on the staffing agency's paper indefinitely. I supported myself all through my early 20s doing jobs like this.

The actual work consisted of such tasks as:

  • Taking boxes from a conveyor belt and loading them into a truck.
  • Unloading things, from a truck, and placing them onto a conveyor belt.
  • Taking objects from a conveyor belt, and putting them into boxes.
  • Inspecting bottles of mouthwash on an assembly line, and doing weighing and cap tests once an hour.
  • Digging holes.
  • Watching a moving belt of electronics recycling stuff and picking out trash.
  • Assembling books-on-tape packages.
  • Loading big metal components (I genuinely don't know what they were) into this machine that would put a liquid coating on them.

I met many people whose entire working lives consisted of these jobs. I almost was one myself. I remember reading Slate Star Codex on my phone in the break rooms of these places, lol. There was never a resume involved. A lot of times these dudes also knew about casual work on the side. I still remember my buddy Luis, who every Saturday morning at like 5:00 AM would send me a text that was just an address and a work task. "8737 Maple Avenue. Fence posts. Eighty dollars." He would always be pissed off at me at our next actual work shift if I didn't show up.

I do concede that if, when you're at that level of the economic ladder, you decide to go and work for, e.g., Kroger or T.J. Maxx or some other significant corporation, yes, they may ask you for a resume. I actually remember consciously thinking about what the options were: you could work in a call center, you could go do fast food, you could work retail, or you could take a factory/labor job. I hated talking to people in a "customer service" kind of way, so for me the choice was always obvious.

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Working that shift is probably the thing I'm most nostalgic about from that phase of my life. I still went to bed right when I got home, and it was simply impossible to oversleep. And the sleep quality after eight hours of slinging boxes, it was magnificent. I've never slept so well since.

I had a period in my 20s during which I was doing temp jobs. I had two temp agencies: one that got me office work (once in a government office copying files; once in a charity call center) and another (the employment branch of Goodwill Industries, which also runs thrift stores) that was all blue collar (the one gig I can remember was moving furniture into a new hotel), and the guys I worked with through Goodwill's program never would fit in at (or wanted) the office jobs from the other agency, it was a completely different milieu.

I think they're online now, although I was applying to a maintenance job and not an in-store position.