Does anyone remember the days when

Yopu could drive througfh any industrial area and see help wanted signs and positions and go in and if qualified get the job plus on the job training and ins paid for?

I am old so you have to be at least 50 or older to remember that.

I do remember that. I also remember when companies felt and expressed a sense of loyalty to their employees and you could work at the same place until you retired if you did a good job.

I must be really old, because I also remember effective unions which kept workers safe, well compensated and which could make or break politicians. Hey! Maybe that's why the unions were stomped into extinction by the politicians.

your company, your job and yourself, and you felt there was a sense of fairness with it all. And companies appreciated your loyalty. You felt rewarded for your efforts.

Remember cash bonuses, Christmas bonuses, being told to "feel better" when you called in sick? Certificates and recognition for your better efforts, parties at work when someone retired, or left for greener pastures. All of these things were civilized niceties that went bye bye forever in the 80s.

I think my highlight of the new worker is trash incivility was when I called in sick with a bleeding bladder infection which I had spent all night getting treated in the ER. The manager told me that she had bladder infections too, and they were not that big a deal. I did the only thing I could. I offered her a container of the bloody urine with the little clots which I would refrigerate and bring to her when I returned to work. I had the time off and I didn't use it very often which was kind of the cherry on the cake of it all. She turned down the urine and we spent five minutes discussing how I could not deny her this experience. She never hassled me again about sick time.:evilgrin:

and companies didn't reward failure the way they do today.

But I live near Detroit so they were all abandoned buildings. I'm in my twenties, so I can't remember a time when that was the case.

I remember reading through the want ads and sorting out from all the gobbledygook just what the job was.

One stuck in my memory, an eighth column of job requirements for the right baccalaureate degreed candidate. After trying to decipher the bafflegab for a good 5 minutes, I finally figured it out: they wanted an office stock boy.

But yes, before that I walked in off the street and landed some pretty remarkable jobs. You'd need a master's degree for them now.

and those days are probably never coming back. Although some of the jobs didn't really pay all that well, the insurance kind of made up for it.

Those were kind of drying up by the late 70s though.

I do remember that a lot of what people pay a 2 year college for used to be trained, like medical transcriptionist or legal secretary or even CNA.

Back when we had a middle class. Also before piss tests, credit checks, routine background checks and intrusive personality quizzes. All of which I still refuse to do.
I'm 53.

There was a sense of respect in the workplace between employers & employees then. Both knew they needed each other. That was before NAFTA & GATT & Raygun & Bush & shipping our jobs overseas. Corporations didn't "need" American workers anymore when they could pay third world wages of pennies.
THIS was the demise of our economy more than anything else.
I'm 53, also.

I came up in restaurants at the tail end of the apprenticeship system. I just walked into good restaurants (some of whom had signs out front) and got a job working for the chef, training was part of the job. Apprenticeship also weeded out the ones who didn't want to do the dirty work which is half the job.

I can't believe what young people today pay to get less of an education then I recieved for free. And many of them are a little taken aback by the realities of the job, especially those pushed into it by guidance counselors. I grandfather in OK, because of my experience, but for the most part certification is now pretty much the only way to get into an entry level kitchen position (especially in better places wher you might make a few bucks more).

On edit: For the record, I'm 46.

:hippie::smoke:

The day he quit high school, before he went home we went to the Motorola plant and was immediately hired for the 3-11 shift. Of course those were also the days when after he tired of factory work, he got his GED and then went to college and law school and came out of it with little student loan debt thanks to grants and MUCH lower tuition.

On edit: this was in 1971

there'd be a permanent sign out front with the kind of letters you could take out and put back in, and whatever positions were open would be listed there.