No One Wants Cheech And Chong Running Heavy Machinery

Last Friday I posted about the great opportunities available for anyone who wants to show up and work hard in America, I got yer $15 per hour right here. A solid, reliable job that pays the elusive "living wage" is available to anyone who wants it. My son who has not even finished his technical certificate in welding and is also well short of his 19th birthday applied for a job that starts at $16/hour, offers full benefits and will work around his fall school schedule. They called him for an interview the next day. There are simply too many good paying jobs for anyone of prime working age who is able-bodied to be sitting at home. Let me say again for the record: if you want a great job and are willing to actually work a little and do the little stuff like show up to work when scheduled and on-time, those jobs are available to anyone who shows a little bit of initiative. In spite of this, jobs still remain unfilled and men still sit at home on the couch. One big reason? Let me give you a visual hint:

Yeah. It appears that a lot of jobs are unfilled because a lot of guys (and gals I assume) simply can't put down the joint long enough to pass a simple drug screen. From CNBC: Economy needs workers, but drug tests take a toll.

Just a few miles from where President Trump will address his blue-collar base here Tuesday night, exactly the kind of middle-class factory jobs he has vowed to bring back from overseas are going begging.

It's not that local workers lack the skills for these positions, many of which do not even require a high school diploma but pay $15 to $25 an hour and offer full benefits. Rather, the problem is that too many applicants — nearly half, in some cases — fail a drug test.

The fallout is not limited to the workers or their immediate families. Each quarter, Columbiana Boiler, a local company, forgoes roughly $200,000 worth of orders for its galvanized containers and kettles because of the manpower shortage, it says, with foreign rivals picking up the slack.

"Our main competitor in Germany can get things done more quickly because they have a better labor pool," said Michael J. Sherwin, chief executive of the 123-year-old manufacturer. "We are always looking for people and have standard ads at all times, but at least 25 percent fail the drug tests."

I don't care for the headline because drug tests "taking a toll" sounds like this is something unavoidable. I don't understand why someone who needs a job is incapable of not toking up. Of course I likewise don't understand why professional athletes making millions still smoke weed when they know full well that their league does random drug tests and when they get caught they always seem shocked. When I was looking for a job, I knew I had to do certain things like perhaps get a haircut, make sure my suit was pressed and my shirt wasn't wrinkly. Not smoking pot should be low hanging fruit but the inability to do so or to not abuse opiods is keeping a lot of men, willfully or not, out of the workforce.

Whatever your opinion is on marijuana is not really important. It certainly isn't something that the Federal government should be involved in trying to control. It also isn't something you should be smoking if you are running machinery or dealing with potentially dangerous conditions.

But workplace considerations — not social conservatism or imposition of traditional mores — make employee drug use an issue.

"The lightest product we make is 1,500 pounds, and they go up to 250,000 pounds," Mr. Sherwin said as workers pulled a barrel-shaped steel container from a glowing forge amid a shower of sparks. "If something goes wrong, it won't hurt our workers. It'll kill them — and that's why we can't take any risks with drugs."

.....

Because tests for marijuana pick up the drug for up to a month after exposure, many local manufacturers are anxious about Ohio's plan to permit medical marijuana use in the near future.

"I don't know if you smoked it this weekend or this morning," Ms. Mitchell said. "I can't take that chance."

If you have been in a plant with forklifts zipping around and machines running, and I have, you really don't want someone who might have been blazing two hours earlier at the wheel of the forklift or the controls of a machine. Marijuana legalization might be the latest, greatest issue for "liberty" based on the rhetoric from the Libertarian Party but the reality is that it impacts your ability to perform safely in a workplace and that is reason enough to just say no.

Rather than demanding that low skill, low commitment jobs like burger flipping magically be considered full-time adult careers, why not instead encourage people to go to technical schools or even just simply eschew the ganja and get a job that will train you? Of course there is a great deal of political influence to be gained when you can bribe people to not work and vote for you to keep the free money coming.

The place my son applied will teach people with basically no experience to weld and pay them a great wage while doing so. In the article one company that experiences a 40% drug test failure rate has turned to hiring people with no experience and training them to try to get to them before they turn into serious drug users. Come on! I know factory work or welding or carpentry is demanding work but demanding work also gets to demand decent pay. No one is going to give you top dollar pay for bottom shelf labor. Nor should they. The three stoners in Super Troopers were intended to get a laugh, not serve as a model for career development.

Put down the joint and get a job. You might not feel the need to get high if you have the pride of being gainfully employed.