Rousseau and My First Job

       After talking about Rousseau’s ideas about civil man vs. natural man in lecture I started to think about ways it affected the way my life is.  From my childhood to going to college there are traces of Rousseau’s theory in why my life is the way it is.  One thing I thought would be fun to analyze was my first/summer job.

 For the most part I love my summer job.  I work at the Cadillac 5, a local movie theater in my town in Northern Michigan that is part of the Goodrich Quality chain.  I worked there for three years and have had a lot of fun times and made a lot of friends at the movie theater.   I’ll be honest though the only reason I spend a good deal of my days off scooping popcorn and sweeping up messy theaters is for the free movie pass and the $8.50 an hour that helps pay for things I want to do and things I need to buy to survive college.  I got to thinking this situation was a pretty good example of Rousseau’s civil man.

When I first got the job when I was 16, like most teenagers, I was happy to finally have a job.  The chance to earn some cash and not have to rely on Mom and Dad as much was a liberating thought.  Though I think working at the theater is a whole lot better than any other job I could have gotten it still isn’t the most glorious job in the world.  Here I am wasting beautiful summer days inside working when a lot of that time the “natural man” that is a part of me would rather not be living by a work schedule and doing a such a low paying and not very important job.  So why do I, and many other people my age, continue to spend our free time this way and how are we motivated to do so?  Why are we convinced that because of our age we are “supposed” to get these minimum wage jobs? 

Though it just seems like a normal thing to have a temporary and normally crappy first job I think Rousseau’s ideas would say that this civil society.  In lecture we talked about a man who owned a lot of property needing people to help him and that these positions he had to offer had to offer some sort of motivation such as wealth, power, higher status, etc.  I thought back to the training videos that we had to watch and a one portion really stuck out to me.  The video dedicated an entire portion to convincing new employees that their job was important in the movie watching experience almost as important as the people who were involved in making the movie (I asked myself why I wasn't getting paid as much as them then).  It went on to tell about all the famous people that got their start working as a movie theater usher.  I began to see this as propaganda; a free way for employers to motivate their workers to work better for them with the promise of a higher status and the possibility to gain a higher power in the future.  How effective this really is in making employees work harder for no more money.  Do I plan on calling out the owner of the theater chain on this and demanding more money for my job,? No.  But I thought it was interesting that Rousseau’s ideas about civil man and why he lives the way he does could be seen every summer when desperate high school and college kids work their free time away for the amount of money they receive.  I’m interested in what you guys have to say about this and if there is maybe another example of Rousseau’s thoughts projected in other situations involving your summer jobs.   

Here's a video that this version of the McDonald's training video from 1972 that I thought did a good job of making a simple teenage job of working cashier at McDonalds seem like a very important part of the experience of eating at McDonalds.