[date Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:56 AM]
PN:
Has anyone seen “Dirty Jobs” on Discovery channel?
Mike Rowe is the prime motivator behind the program and the figurehead / participant / host in each episode.
Mr. Rowe recently gave testimony to a US Senate Committee. Here’s a short quote from his prepared presentation (at discovery.com):
……………………….Dirty Jobs is first and foremost an entertainment program. It does however, have a mission statement, and every episode begins the same way. “My name is Mike Rowe, and this is my job. I explore the country looking for people who aren’t afraid to get dirty. Hard-working men and women who do the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us.”………………………..
……………………….So I referred him to the mission statement of the show and added, “once upon a time, our country was filled with people who weren’t afraid to get dirty. Times have changed. The definition of a ‘good job’ has changed.”I went on to suggest that the skills gap might not be a “problem,” but rather a symptom of something much more fundamental; a societal disconnect with work, brought about by the rapid transformation of a manufacturing-based economy into one dominated by financial services and technology.
A well thought out lucid analysis of where the culture has taken us in the last 40 years. Here is a link to the complete submitted testimony:
http://impact.discovery.com/press/testimony-mike-rowe-us-senate-committee-commerce-s/
However, Mike’s actual presentation is different, and more powerful: