Jeff Danziger for September 30, 2021

some of us got a darn good education, and lots of exercise walking to school and carrying gf’s books home for a smooch in the porch

I was behind a transit bus the other day that had a digital sign programmed to say, “NOW HIRING” and the phone number to call. Maybe the school boards should try that . . .

I find it amazing that all of these people have left the work force due to covid. Most people can’t get thru the week to the next paycheck and now they don’t have income coming in. They weren’t saving for a rainy day, so are we going to see a lot more “Go Fund Me” pages popping up?

Too much small writing!

Mark Twain: “First, God created idiots. That was for practice. Then, He created school boards.”

So where’s Ed Crankshaft when he’s needed?

these clowns just want to “do more research,” maybe the kids should drive and they should go into the school

“Labor” is just as much a product in the marketplace as “cell phones” or “fast burgers”… and it’s subject to all the same market forces. Including the easy and obvious ones like price and convenience, but also less easily measured things like personal preference and imperfect information.

Haven’t we got kids in High School who have a license?

Well, give them the keys and let’s get those yellow monsters rollin’.

School bus driver is not a great job. It’s less than full time (which can exempt you from benefits – in some areas, you’d be lucky to get 4 hours a day), the pay is mediocre at best, you have to deal with a lot of rowdy kids by yourself while also driving a bus, and you get this weird split shift that makes it very difficult to pair with another job. And all that is without factoring in covid-19 hazards.

By the way, even when I was a little kid I knew that teachers didn’t take summers off—because the bills don’t stop coming in the summer months!

My Dad drove a school bus for years after he was riffed from his job as a millworker/carpenter. He free-lanced but used the small wages to supplement his income. That was a simpler time. Round bodied 48 pupil buses with crash box transmissions and anemic heaters. Country bus routes where the students had to get out and push the bus as she “wallered” through snow drifts in granny gear, or “he’p ‘em” over the snow slick elevated grade crossings. But he liked the work and most of the kids on his route. And he relished the 5:30 (or so) AM gathering of the other drivers, on gelid mornings. All of them farmers and blue collar laborers, along with the spitter & whittler retirees. They all congregated in the bus barn and set to swapping lies, talking local politics, drinking their after breakfast coffee, while the buses warmed up at fast idle ’til it was time to “head ’em up, boys; h’it’s time to move out” 45 minutes or so later.

School bus driver, lots of responsibility, little or no benefit. Take this job and you know what.

It’s bad.

At one point, the Dallas Independent School District had more administrators than teachers.

I don’t know what the count is now.

I think few of us perhaps realize the depth of damage Covid made on the work force. We’ve had a tragic number of deaths and probably double that could be disabled for a significant amount of time with long term symptoms. When you subtract 1-2 million people from the work force, that’s a big deal especially since it seems to mostly be in low wage “essential but not expendable” jobs.

Ba ha ha. Good one Jeff!