Recent quotes:
Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women - The New York Times
“Traditional masculinity is standing in the way of working-class men’s employment, and I think it’s a problem,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins and author of “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America.” “We have a cultural lag where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the change in the job market,” he said.
Marketing guru Seth Godin once said, "Don't find customers for your products; find products for your customers."
Employers need to adopt a similar mindset: Don't find people for your jobs; create jobs for talented people.
There's far too much focus on jobs and matching people to them, and not enough focus on cultivating and developing the talents of capable people. There is not enough of building companies from personal interactions between managers and their professional communities, and too much of stuffing job requirements and keywords into databases.
The baguette as we know it dates to the 1920s and was a byproduct of a protective labor law that prevented French bakers from working between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. That made it impossible to prepare traditional round loaves by breakfast time. Bakers had to turn to a new kind of bread, whose thin shape made it faster to prepare and bake. The baguette—French for "little stick"—quickly became a breakfast essential throughout France.
You can think of unions in the 1950s as the only truck stop in the middle of an Arizona desert: they had quite a bit of bargaining power, because companies had little choice about doing business with them. Truck stops like that could make quite a bit of money, even serving very bad food. But post-Bretton Woods…well, it’s like picking up that truck stop and moving it to the corner of 42nd & 5th Avenue. You can insist on your rights all you want, but it doesn’t do you much good if all your customers desert for the guy down the street who will offer faster service at half the price.