I Don't Know What's Sadder...

So, here's the scene...

-- A sizable portion of the male chareidi population in Israel learns all day and does not work.
-- Charieidi families, like all other families, need to purchase food, clothing, etc.
-- Due to various factors (education, the economy in general, etc.), it is difficult even for chareidi women to find employment.
-- Chareidim (like all other communities) want to boost employment in their community.

With me so far? Good, because here's where it starts to get tricky.

-- The chairman of the Shas party arranges for a government call center to open near where chareidim live and employ chariedi women in Northern Israel.
-- Said government call center handles various different services, including health care organizations and pharmacies.

So, the calls start coming in. The women answer them, direct them to where they are supposed to go, whatever. Services are being provided and the women bring home a check, and all is right with the world.

Of course, I wouldn't be bringing this up if the story ended there. As you might expect, there is a fly in the ointment. As it turns out, some of the women have been getting calls regarding "virility pills." Older men are calling in asking questions about Viagara, Cialis or some of the other erectile dysfunction medications that are available. This has caused some problems for the women who view the calls as indecent and obscene. While I suppose it is possible that some of the calls could be what you or I would truly call obscene, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority (if not all) of them were actual honest calls for information about treatment for a medical condition. Since the call center handles calls for medical organizations and pharmacies, such calls are probably to be expected. Rav Asher Idan describes just such a call:

“She answered a call that was supposed to go to a pharmacy,” recalls Rav Idan. “On the other end of the line was a man of about 60, who wanted advice on pills designed to increase virility. He asked her what it does. Because she was unfamiliar with the product he had to explain it to her and then proceeded to ask detailed questions. Only when she realized what he was referring to did she hang up on him.”

Rav Idan then proceeded to state that answering such calls when not in her husband's presence* is a violation of the prohibition of giluy arayos (sexual immorality).

I think it's quite sad that people who are calling a health center about a legitimate health concern are considered "obscene" and "indecent."

I think it's also quite sad that these women are so sheltered that they had no idea that erectile dysfunction exists.

I think it's also quite sad that discussing health matters in a professional setting is considered as violating the boundaries of sexual immorality.

The bottom line is that people should not work in fields where they are unsuited to work. For example, I know that despite the fact that I like to cook, I can never work as a chef in a fancy restaurant. Why? Because of the prohibition of cooking meat and milk together. It would be disingenous of me to look for employment in that field and then say "oh, I can't cook this dish" and "oh, I can't cook that dish." Employers should make reasonable accomodations for employees, but if a bona fide criterion for the job is going to interefere with your religion, then you simply cannot take the job. If these women feel that they cannot truly work in a health center because answering bona fide questions regarding male health issues is obscene/indecent, then they should not work there.

Or, perhaps better, they should learn that not everything relating to male sexuality is obscene -- and learn to handle such calls professionally.

That being said, I'd like to end the post on a lighter note. Here's what one "leading askan" said about the incident:

“Employing charedi women should not be taken for granted,” a leading askan in the North told Hebrew website NRG. “Because of modesty issues rabbonim do not recommend women work outside of the home – only in cases where the financial situation is pressing and the woman needs to go out and get a job. Such cases require halachic clarification and a she’elas rov.”

Isn't that priceless? They set up a system where men don't work, forcing the women to work. Now this guy wants to say that women should not work either -- unless they get a hetter (permission) from a rav. And all this in a call center that was set up specifically to emply chareidi women. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

The Wolf

* I'm not sure why it would be any better (or worse) if she answered such calls if her husband was there.

** Would they say it's obscene or indecent for one of them to call their male OB/GYNs with a gynecological question?

The Importance of a Good Education

Over at the CoffeeRoom, some of the folks were having an interesting discussion concerning the merits of getting a secular education. Most of the people there seem to believe that getting a secular education (at least through the high school level) is a good thing. As is usual in these types of conversations, some one puts forth the fact that there are those who have managed to succeed without an education. One poster put it this way:

there have been many successful people who have droped [sic] out of school

My response to this was:

I think that I would ask for a definition of the word "many" in this context.

Nonetheless, yes, there are people who have been successful despite dropping out of school - but those people are the (exceedingly rare) exceptions and not the rule.

Sure enough, someone pulled out a small list of people who did well despite dropping out from school. The list they provided was Albert Einstein, The Wright Brothers, Billy Joel, Tom Cruise "and a ton more."

Well, right off the bat, we can eliminate Einstein. While he may have dropped out at one point, he did end up earning a PhD from the University of Zurich. We can, in theory, also eliminate Cruise who did graduate from high school, but we'll discuss him a bit later.

The Wright Brothers did not complete high school -- that is a fact. Nonetheless, they lived in an age when completing high school was more luxury than necessity. Many people in the 1880s and 1890s did not complete high school; they were often forced to go looking for work to help out the family. That reality, however, does not exist today. You really can't use The Wright Brothers as a comparison. Were they alive as teenagers today, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would complete their high school education.

Billy Joel and Tom Cruise have a fairly unique quality -- they have been blessed with very unique talents. Not any shlub off the street can walk into a studio and open a $100M movie based on name recognition alone. Not any shlub can announce a concert at Shea Stadium and sell out the tickets 45 minutes after they go on sale. The fact is that these people (like many professional athletes) have such unique skills that they don't need an advanced education to make a ton of money. But the fact of the matter is that the reason they can make so much money is because their skills are exceedingly rare. You can't tell the average kid "it's okay to drop out of high school like Celebrity X," because the average kid doesn't have the God-given unique talents that Celebrity X has.

That being said, let's talk about what the more typical kid might find. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here are the usual median weekly earnings of people in the US by education for Q3 2008:

Less Than High School: 471
High School Diploma: 618
Some College Education: 725
Bachelor's Degree: 1020
Bachelor's Degree or more: 1131
Advanced Degree: 1333

I have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics going back to 2000 (email me if you want them, or you can get them from here), and the relationship between education and salary always holds. The more education the average person has, the more they earn.

Is it possible for a person with little or no education to strike it rich? Absolutely. But in just about every case, you'll find that the person either has an incredibly rare and valuable skill or is incredibly lucky (and won the lottery). For the other 99.99999% of the population, you need an education. In other words, you can't look at the exception and posit it as the rule.

It should be noted that an interesting development seems to be occurring in the chareidi world. The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday that chareidim want to go to college. Many, however, cannot go to college because they lack the necessary skills that they would have learned in elementary and high school. However, I wonder if this isn't the beginning of a change in chareidi society towards seeing the value of a decent secular education as necessary to get by in day-to-day life. Even if these particular chareidim can never go to college, you can bet that they will see to it that their kids don't follow the same path that they did, and that their kids *will* get a decent high school education, even if they have to go through "back channels" to get it for them.

The Wolf

UPDATE (1:20 pm): The person who posted the original comment came back with this response, which I hereby dub "the stupidest quote of the day:"

i hold that statistics dont affect us yidden.

The Wolf

Letter to the Editor: Lakewood Salaries and Employment Economics

I know that when I fall into a bit of a blogging funk, I can always count on the Yated to print something interesting. This week is no different.

Here's a letter to the editor titled "What A Joke." Any spelling errors or typos are my own.

Dear Editor,

I must say that the salaries that women receive in the city where I live - Lakewood, New Jersey - are pitiful. It is a disgrace that they get little more than $10 an hour. I am not sure what the situation is like in other places such as Brooklyn, Monsey and the Five Towns, but in this city, where so many upstanding people are struggling financially, it is simply disgraceful that our wives can't find jobs that pay decently.

Some people now highly regret that their wives, when they were single, didn't get some sort of degree to enable them to get jobs that pay decently. I don't want to get into a whole discussion about whether a girl should or shouldn't get a degree, because that really isn't the point here. The point is that, in a city where the concept of "hashkafaToraso umnaso" can be applied to so many people, the fact that wives can't earn a half-decent salary to keep their families afloat is a serious problem that has not been discussed sufficiently. In most cases, even where the husband is the primary breadwinner, the family needs the mother to earn a decent salary to help cover ever-growing expenses.

In Lakewood, apparently, $10 an hour is supposed to cut it.

$10 an hour is what you give the guy off the street who you hire to clean your backyard.

$10 an hour is what you give Maria, your cleaning lady, for scrubbing your floors.

Because of the large number of young (and not-so-young) married wives who need jobs, storeowners and business owners can - and do - dictate how much they will pay their employees. And let me tell you, they are taking full advantage of the situtation. I know of two companies that are seriously contemplating moving to Lakewood for one reason only - cheap labor.

Not Mexican cheap labor.

The cheap labor of our neshei chayil, who can be hired for "bubkis."

It's a shandeh.

Eli Parkowitz

Here's my response:

Dear Mr. Parkowitz,

I can certainly understand the frustration that you and other people in the Lakewood community are going through in your efforts to raise your families. Gas prices have shot through the roof, food prices are up, and it seems that even the basic necessities are now more expensive than they've ever been. While this is certainly true in most places, it must be impacting the Lakewood communtiy all the more, considering how many of the residents are involved in full-time Torah study. I wish you and all the Lakewood families much hatzlacha in being able to support your families.

Now then, however, I do feel that there are several things that need to be pointed out about your letter. You don't state in your letter what type of work the wives in Lakewood are looking for, but my guess is that it is largely unskilled labor. The wages for unskilled workers will, of course, usually be lower than that of skilled workers. I highly doubt the doctors, medical technicians and computer programmers in Lakewood are earning only $10 an hour.

You have to understand that companies do not exist in a vacuum. Companies that employ workers usually have to compete with other companies who provide similar or identical products or services. In order for a company to exist, it must remain competative with others in their field. If I produce widgets at $10 each and my competitor comes along and is able to produce them at $8 each, I will have to do one of two things -- a. find a way to produce my widgets at a similar cost or b. go out of the widget business.

As such, if the women in Lakewood earn $10 an hour, it is because that is what the market will bear. Employers have to find people that will do the job properly at the lowest cost. If I need a secretary (a common example of an unskilled laborer) I will find one that can do the job at the lowest cost. If your wife doesn't want to work for $10 an hour, but I know that there are ten other candidates who will, then there is no reason for me to hire your wife.

In short, if I'm paying $10 an hour for a secretary, it is because of the following two reasons:

1. There are enough candidates who are capable of and willing to do the job properly for $10 an hour.

2. If I only offered $9 an hour, the candidate pool would shrink to the point where it would be too difficult to find someone who can or will do the job properly.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love to hire your wife at $20 an hour and help support your Torah lifestyle. But (and forgive me for saying so) the marketplace doesn't care about your Torah lifestyle. My competitors (many of whom are not Jewish) don't care about your Torah lifestyle either. They're not going to raise thier prices to match mine because I have the extra cost of hiring a Lakewood wife. Since they're not going to raise their prices, I can't afford to pay extra to hire your wife. To do so would make my company uncompetative.

Now then, is there any solution? Of course there is. While we all recognize that our parnassah comes from HaKadosh Baruch Hu, we also all recognize the fact that we have to put in the proper hishtadlus. And that doesn't just mean showing up in the morning, doing the job and going home in the evening. It goes far beyond that.

You write in your letter that you don't want to get into a whole hashkafa debate about whether or not a girl should get a degree. But, in reality, this isn't about degrees... it's about job skills. If your wife (or anyone else, for that matter) has a valuable skill that they can bring to the marketplace, then they can command a higher salaray. The general rule is that the rarer the skill (and the more in demand that it is), then the higher the salary the person can command. In many cases this means a college degree, but it does not necessarily have to be so. Allow me to give you an example:

When I started out in the workforce, I was earning only $10 an hour. I was young and newly-married. While I had some skill at using computers, it wasn't anything terribly specialized. I knew how to use WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 (am I dating myself?) and some other basic computer programs. In short, while I had some marginal computer skills that placed me higher than a "shlub off the street," I was still certainly in the category of unskilled labor. As such, I earned a meager salary for a few years.

It was only later on that I began to realize that if I wanted to earn a higher salary, I would have to make myself more desirable to employers. So, I went out and learned some computer skills that are more uncommon. I went to an adult education center and, for the next year, took eight courses in computers covering programming and databases. As a result, because I invested in my human capital, my value in the market place went up and I was able to command a much higher salary.

Human capital is basically what you have if you were dropped off on a street corner with nothing more than the clothes on your back. Just to give you an example (albeit an extreme one), consider what would happen if two people were put in that situation. Let's suppose that Bill Gates and I were both stripped of all our possessions. He loses his billions, his mansion, his Microsoft stock -- everything. Me -- well, I lose my house, whatever savings I have in the bank, my 401(k), etc. We're both dropped off on a street corner with nothing more than the clothing we're wearing. Which one of us will be better able to provide for our families? The answer is Bill Gates, because he has more human capital than I do. He has skills and contacts that I don't have. He has years of experience in running a multi-billion dollar corporation. I don't. The combination of skills, contacts, experience that he has is worth far, far more on the labor market than mine. As a result, he will (in all likelihood) find a job faster than I and earn a higher salary than I.

The best way to improve your earnings for the long term is to invest in your own human capital. Tell your wife to go out and learn a skill that will make her more valuable to employers in the Lakewood area. That's the *best* way to ensure that she will be able to command a higher salary. Is it a quick fix? No, of course not. It takes time and money. It took me over $5,000 and a year to take the computer courses I mentioned above. It was very difficult -- my family had to make significant sacrifices for me to be able to scrape together the money for those courses. However, with the higher salary I was able to command when I finished, I earned the money back within a year. I'm now further investing in my human capital in two ways: a. I'm always looking to improve my skills at a database administrator/programmer and b. I'm going back to school for an advanced degree. You can rarely go wrong by investing in your human capital.

If you want your wife to earn more than "bubkis" then she has to be able to bring valuable skills to her employers. However, if she is indistinguishable (in a professional sense) from thousands of other women in Lakewood, then no employer can pay her more. She has to work on setting herself apart from the crowd. There's a reason that Maria only earns $10 an hour -- because anyone can learn very quickly how to scrub floors. Likewise, almost anyone can learn very easily how to answer phones. It's only when the skills become rarer and more valuable that the salaries start to rise.

Wishing you much hatzlacha,

The Wolf