Success Is Earned

The Issue: Students taking up trade courses in our schools.

Our View: Where have they all gone?

Since the days of the old Saipan Intermediate School (later Hopwood Sr. High) on to Marianas High School and the Northern Marianas College, local students have taken vocational courses learning skills in the various trades.

It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that the Northern Marianas Community would be equipped with skilled tradesmen in plumbing, electricity, carpentry, masonry, plastering, cabinet work, among others.

But such isn’t the case. These trades jobs have since been treated as solely reserved for guest workers from foreign countries. Such an attitude has bred very poor work ethics among locals who are better off as productive citizens than collectors of food stamps coupons.

Such poor work ethics has in recent years collided with the dire reality that there aren’t anymore jobs in the public sector. In other words, with the plummet in revenue generation over the last three years, so did the scarcity of public sector jobs. With such rude awakening, we now find hundreds of locals clamoring for jobs, any job, in the private sector.

Unfortunately, when 2000 plus businesses shut their doors as a direct result of the Asian Crisis, so did the number of available jobs in hotels, construction companies, tourist-related businesses, among other industries here. Unemployed locals who have been idle for years have run into another rude-awakening–as food stamps recipients they have less than three years to get off the program.

There’s no one to blame for this self-inflicted hardship what with the well honed mentality for more than 50 years that a government job is the surest form of success and permanent employment. Politicians and bureaucrats know it but none has ever had the gall to pare down an over bloated public payroll. In fact, more perks were dished out, perks that are politically correct but financially bankrupting in every sense of the word.

We’ve come to that juncture in our developmental history when we must buckle down to accepting the fact that success is earned and never handed down on a silver platter. Whatever job openings are available, we say take it now and begin that long road to learning and honing lifetime skills while earning a living. Without skills, you must accept the minimum wage of $3.05 an hour. If this is too cheap, you should have tried the $.20 and later $.33 an hour most retirees today had to endure under the old TT Government. If we may reiterate: Success is earned and there’s no two ways about it either. Si Yuus Maase`!