MaryLou Holsinger – 1/16/09

This page was last updated on January 17, 2009.

Lawmaker wrong to snub retail jobs; MaryLou Holsinger; Beaver County Times; January 16, 2009.

An editor’s note asserts, “The writer is an employee at Boscov’s in Center Township.” In the interest of full disclosure, I was one of this store’s (then Horne’s) original three stock boys during the summer of 1970.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“We live in Beaver County where a majority of us are either a two-income family or a single-parent family.

“Whether that job is at Boscov’s or at Nova Chemicals, it is a family-sustaining job.

“I take it as a personal insult to me and my fellow coworkers that state Rep. Jim Christiana thinks that retail is a meaningless job.”

[RWC] Mr. Christiana didn’t say “retail is a meaningless job.” Indeed, as a car salesman, Mr. Christiana himself was in retail before he won his seat. According to the Times article “Betting on Boscov’s to bounce back” (Michael Pound, 1/10/09), Mr. Christiana said, “We’re talking about retail jobs, and they’re not the kind of family-sustaining jobs I think we should be after. We should be arranging loans like this for Nova Chemical or Alcoa because they’re both struggling, too.”

Though he ran as a Republican, the opinion expressed in the above comment by Mr. Christiana is what we typically hear from Democrat politicians. How many times do we hear anything other than manufacturing jobs don’t count because they aren’t “family-sustaining?”

The second point where Mr. Christiana stepped in it, at least from this conservative’s view, is when he said “[w]e should be arranging loans like this for Nova Chemical or Alcoa.” As much as it may hurt, failing businesses must be allowed to fail. Forcing winners to subsidize losers only prolongs the inevitable and can turn current winners into losers themselves.

I hope this doesn’t mean Mr. Christiana is another Republican in name only.

“All jobs are important to the people who hold them and their families.”

[RWC] I agree 100% with this sentiment.

“We all work to better our family’s position in life.”