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<p>[Yes</a>, Mr. President, Americans can be ‘lazy’ - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/18/opinion/roland-martin-americans-lazy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2]Yes”>http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/18/opinion/roland-martin-americans-lazy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2)</p>
<p>I completely disagree. I would explain why my point if view is the only one that matters, but that’s too much work.
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<p>Hey, if some Americans weren’t lazy, there would be no posts on CC to complain about he we need to work harder to compete. :)</p>
<p>I find it is interesting how a statement about how US policymakers did not do enough to promote US goods and services became a statement about Americans being lazy. Worker productivity is still very high, but I do agree that we, as Americans, took our eye off economic matters since 9/11 and the rest of the world changed. Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum have a great book about what happened over the last decade, and it is a fascinating read.</p>
<p>Americans are obsessed with getting free stuff from the government rather than working hard and being self reliance.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect to find a job within your own country.</p>
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<p>It may be an issue of semantics, but one ought to question the productivity of the " American Worker." What we vcan safely assume is that Americans do tend to work longer hours that other other knowledge workers and that hourly workers are hardly competitive with other industrial nations in terms of output/quality per hour. Isn’t productivity related to quantity and quality of output over time or resources? </p>
<p>The above comment are indeed targeting large industrial and manufacturing enterprise. Think about our “amazing” Detroit and disappearing manufacturers. The story might be different when looking at the small businesses that form the backbone of our country. But that story does not seem too darn relevant to this discussion. </p>
<p>Our economic “success” has been built on a consumption society that has overspent for decades. The biggest change is the bill is now coming due. This is paricularly hard when being insular and “self-sufficient” no longer that well. </p>
<p>We cannot longer BUY our success. We have to earn it. We still talk very well; the problem is in the “doing.” Unfortunately, the stars for the United States do not align very well, especially when our boat is rudderless and the political winds of change point in all the wrong directions.</p>
<p>The book by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum has a very apt title in "“That Used to Be Us.” There are, however, few indications that the “That Will Be Us!” will be much better, at least in terms what Americans believe to be their just desserts. “That Used to Be Us” will never come back, especially with the current cast of political characters and, unfortunately, observers such as Friedman who dream of a world that has has never worked on a global basis. </p>
<p>It is easy to indict and hard to construct. As the French say, "La critique est ais</p>
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<p>I find this statement ironic because, except for pure-blood Native Americans and pure-blood descendents of slaves, all of us are descended from immigrants. However reasonable it may be to expect to be gainfully employed in your own country, our ancestors for whatever reason were unable to do so within their native lands and therefore immigrated here. </p>
<p>If our forefathers were willing to move to this country - a foreign land to them - to improve their stations in life, is it so outrageous that we might have to do the same?</p>
<p>Yes. I’m not buying it.</p>
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<p>It has never been the case that only those unable to find work in their homeland immigrate to a new country. </p>
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<p>Really? Can you tell me about this free stuff? I need to let my family know since I think they’ve been missing out. You know like my 68 year old mother in law who we can’t beg into retiring because she fears losing the medical benefits she needs; or my cousin who just got laid off at a Sony factory out of the blue and so now he and his wife (who just gave birth) are both looking for work in their town. They’d move to where there might be jobs but that cost money to relocate. How about my SIL whose husband disappeared one day, leaving her a single parent of two kids and no skills and shortly bankrupt and lost her house she couldn’t cover payments on? I could go on and on and on…We are able to help our family as much as we can, but not everyone has the lucky of some relatives with funds.</p>
<p>If you have never encountered the massive number of catch-22s existing for the underclass in the US…[y]ou don’t know squat. Not everyone was born into a decent school district, with parents who gave a damn about education. Not everyone was born with an IQ that would enable them to go to college or with health that did not disable them. Not everyone has family with extra funds to buffer them through the hard parts. You just have no friggin’ clue what you are talking about.</p>
<p>" Americans are obsessed with getting free stuff from the government rather than working hard and being self reliance. " </p>
<p>While I don’t entirely agree with this statement , I can see the point of it with regards to a certain segment of the population. With all of the jobs that have been lost in the last few years , we as business owners have encountered several people who would rather collect unemployment than take a lower paying job that what they feel they are worth.</p>
<p>I grew up in a single parent household and my mother worked as a school cafeteria " lunch lady " . I have three sisters and we all know it wasn’t easy for my mother to make ends meet , yet she did it without any government assistant or child support. As a child , I had no idea that we were poor because we never went hungry or cold , lived in a small but clean and nice house that she owned. </p>
<p>As a result , three out of the four of us have all lived our lives with a strong work ethic …my oldest sister though is another story</p>
<p>She seems to have an attitude of entitlement and fits into the category of not working hard and being self reliant.</p>
<p>As a result , she now is on the brink of being evicted from her rented apartment ( which is too expensive for her in the first place</p>
<p>She has been out of work for over a year and her attitude about finding another job is awful…she refuses to take a job that she deems to be beneath her. </p>
<p>None of us can understand it , particularly not our mother who made her share of sacrifices in order to earn a living and take care of us</p>
<p>It is silly; anyone from anywhere can be that way or not. It is a choice.</p>
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<p>Yes. There are no more sparsely populated frontiers anywhere on earth and no small population of indigenous people occupying a large area that can be fairly easily overwhelmed with superior technology. There is no more room for mass emigration movements. We have to make it work wherever we are.</p>
<p>Some individuals will emigrate to other places to start businesses, be employed by multinationals, etc. But it’s not realistic to expect millions upon millions of ordinary people to emigrate for a livelihood as in 19th- Century America. There’s nowhere to go.</p>
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<p>Two observations here from my experience working with my company’s German subsidiary.</p>
<p>In Germany, long hours are verboten, workers are out the door after 8 hours regardless of how the project is doing. 1+ hour lunches, free coffee, etc. BUT, in these hours my German buddies put out a LOT more work than we do -no idle chat about the Packers, no wailing about the Cubs, bragging about our kids in college, about our neighbors’ dog, etc. No cellphone calls either (I never saw a cellphone in use during work hours there and finally asked “you do have cell phones, right”?). No smartphone posting Facebook updates during work either. So, needless to say, their 40 hours and our 50+ are about the same.</p>
<p>In terms of manufacturing, their quality of work is largely a function of apprenticeships and other well-funded programs that are simply unthinkable here. I’ve seen German heavy manufacturing floors and they’re lightyears ahead of us - but they only do high value stuff…</p>
<p>Bottom line, yes, we’re ‘lazy’ in that we put up the pretend long hours and the boss pretends to appreciate. It’s the 20th century equivalent of the old Soviet proverb “As long as they pretend to pay us we pretend to work”.</p>
<p>In my fields of work (software development / industrial design) it’s borderline laughable because you can’t pull long hours before quality of work or creativity suffer…</p>
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<p>That’s not how it works actually - the problem we have is not that there aren’t jobs, but that there aren’t jobs paying decent wages. The bell curve has become a bathtub curve, whereas a few people earn excellent money and the rest is either outsourced or farmed out for $25/hr @ 1099…</p>
<p>"Two observations here from my experience working with my company’s German subsidiary.</p>
<p>In Germany, long hours are verboten, workers are out the door after 8 hours regardless of how the project is doing. 1+ hour lunches, free coffee, etc. BUT, in these hours my German buddies put out a LOT more work than we do -no idle chat about the Packers, no wailing about the Cubs, bragging about our kids in college, about our neighbors’ dog, etc. No cellphone calls either (I never saw a cellphone in use during work hours there and finally asked “you do have cell phones, right”?). No smartphone posting Facebook updates during work either. So, needless to say, their 40 hours and our 50+ are about the same."</p>
<p>I agree with this statement. Our company headquarters along with most of the workers (they are all in unions) is in the Netherlands. While they are on “holiday” a lot, they do seem to work more efficiently during work hours than we do.</p>
<p>"Americans are obsessed with getting free stuff from the government rather than working hard and being self reliance. "</p>
<p>razorsharp you hit the nail.</p>
<p>They get a lot of free stuff other places also - not just here.</p>
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The only people I see who are obsessed with getting free stuff from the government are corporations (who get most of the “free stuff” the government hands out) and affluent folks, who seem to think that they deserve to get all of the services government provides to protect and grow their investments, assets and businesses without paying for it.</p>
<p>Are those the “Americans” you were referring to, Razorsharp?</p>
<p>^ Agree kluge. I now work and live in a blue collar town and don’t see a different work ethic from that of my father (WWII vet) and grandparents. I don’t have time to talk about sports or post online during working hours, as I am busy with my customers. I also pay more for healthcare and get fewer tax breaks than I did when I worked in a financial giant in CA. That is not to say that workers in other western companies don’t have a good work ethic, but they also have less income disparity and overall higher quality of life (healthcare, infant mortality, obesity, alcohol/drug/crime statistics).</p>