Hard to call them casualties of the 1600 Crew economy, but victims fits I think. The two folks profiled in this Washington Post story seem like a Joe and Jane Six-Pack kind of couple. The went west to Vegas looking for something more, and found less; much less. It seems that some of what happened to them was self-induced, but it's also hard to believe that a healthy economy would not have afforded them a better shot at self-sufficiency and a future.
"On the Internet, it's very deceiving. It makes it look like you can start working the day you arrive," Arreguin says, explaining the decision to come to Las Vegas. He says he has worked in construction for 24 years, that he did metal framing on just about every skyscraper in downtown Houston, and that contractors in Las Vegas couldn't have cared less. Every one of them said the same thing, he says, that without a driver's license, which he didn't have, and access to a reliable car, which he didn't have, they had no use for him.
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...There were the three months in the Salvation Army shelter, and the walks along the Strip where they were told they could not be hired as waiters or busboys or janitors without an identity card from the Sheriff's Department ($35) and a health card showing they had been tested for communicable diseases ($35), money they didn't have.
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There is another view, of course. In Las Vegas, where the unemployment rate was down to 4.9 percent last fall, the current rate is 5.6. In Phoenix, where they stop the first night to change buses, the pre-recession unemployment rate was 2.7 percent; now it's up to 5.8. In Luna County, N.M., where they stop for a snack break, the rate is 24.1 percent. In El Paso, it has gone from 8.8 percent when they passed through on their way to Las Vegas to 10.1, and in Houston, now less than eight hours away, the rate has gone from 7.9 percent when they left to 9.3.
Not to state the obvious, but plasma-selling seems like a way to prove a lack of communicable diseases, and if both had quit smoking it would have freed up the cash they needed to get the "certifications" they required; that was their choice and if it cost them a chance to work, then it's not for me to cry about that.
Bigger picture, it's a buyers market for employer with numbers like those cited in the story...again, it's with almost three years at the helm, the 1600 Crew can't lay the blame for this on the Clenis™ anymore. It's not going to work, people like Alex and Dixie are proof that all is not right with the world and all the wishing and hoping of Rangers and Pioneers will not make it so...I hope that Alex and Dixie and those like them register to vote and vote against the 1600 Crew next year...it would be a move in the right direction for them. At least in my humble opinion.
