Everything.
First of all, nobody’s going to work for a boss like that if they can help it. The feedback from potential employees is even more explicit:
“Nobody owes anyone else their labor.”
“I’d be happy to get off my butt and show him exactly where he can kiss it.”
“Sounds like desperate billionaires crying that no one wants to work for minimum and no benefits.”
But mainly the billboard, put up in the Kansas City area by a group of business owners (see story here), is too simplistic — and the creative work of unimaginative simpletons. It offers no answers to people who are worried about catching Covid-19, or can’t get child care for their young children, or have other barriers to employment.
And, of course, the 700,000-plus dead won’t return to work.
Opposing legal immigration doesn’t help solve America’s labor shortage.
Labor practices like this don’t encourage people to work. Nor do unpredictable work schedules, overwork, burnout, or assaults by unruly customers and patients.
And then there are people who apply for job after job, but despite employers’ assertions they can’t get workers, they aren’t hired.
Whatever the solution to America’s labor shortage is, this billboard isn’t it. And there’s this conundrum: Will these employers really hire the people their message seems to be targeting — lazy, unmotivated people, who don’t want to work?
I don’t think so. The billboard just seems like a mindless, ill-considered rant. But in a way, it’s honest; America, for all its lip service to the virtues of work, is a country that often disrespects and mistreats its workforce. This billboard simply brings it out into the open.
It is an advertising campaign. Ultimately does it get people to apply for jobs, and those jobs to be filled. America has this streak of puritanism, and that means if you are not working, praying or sleeping you are sinning. So the sign may work. Managers and bosses do tell employees in the work place to get to work. It is their job. The bottom line is if the sign gets jobs filled it will be around awhile, if not expect it to be replaced in a month. [Edited comment.]
I gotta wonder if you’d know a lousy ad when you saw one.