Analysis , comment and opinion on article working on the railroad making a bad job good

Working on the Railroad: Making a Bad Job Good While compensating wage differentials are difficult Workers who take these jobs are the ones for whom to measure with precision, the theory in this chap- the conditions are least disagreeable. ter can often find general support in everyday dis- cussions of job choice. This example is based on a They had tried everyone, The Navajos were the newspaper article about the exclusive use of Nava- only ones willing to be away from home, to do the work, and to do a good job, jos by the Santa Fe Railway to repair and replace its [A Santa Fe recruiter] 9,000 miles of track between Los Angeles and Chicago. Lonely? No, I never get lonely. There is nothing but Navajo here. . . . We speak the same language The 220 Navajos were organized into two "steel and understand one another. . . . It's a good job. gangs." Workers did what machines cannot: pull [A steel gang worker with 16 years' experience] and sort old spikes, weld the rails together, and check the safety of the new rails. The grueling Hypothesis 2. The jobs are made appealing to the work was intrinsically unappealing: jobs lasted for target group of workers by raising wages well above only five to eight months per year; much of the those of their alternatives. work was done in sweltering desert heat; workers I wish I could stay home all the time and be with had to live away from their families and were my family. It's just not possible, Where am I going housed in bunk cars with up to 16 other workers; to find a job that pays $900 every two weeks? and the remote locations rendered the off-hours [A steel gang veteran of 11 years] boring and lonely. (Steel gang wages in the early 1990s ranged Two hypotheses about jobs such as these can be between $12 and $17 per hour, well above the derived from the theory in this chapter. These national average of about $10 per hour for "han- hypotheses are listed below, along with supporting dlers and laborers.") quotations or facts from the newspaper article. Hypothesis 1. Companies offering unappealing Data from; Paula Monarez, "Navajos Keep Rail Lines Safe," 7 Beach Independent Pres-Telaram. May 14 1902, DL