As I was making my daily sojourn up Las Flores Canyon Road this morning, I passed 12 signs, only to come upon one guy with a weed whacker cutting back roadside overgrowth. With him were three guys standing next to a tractor and another guy in the driver’s seat. Two more dump trucks parked in wait. Two guys were on either side of the lonely worker directing traffic. Another guy sat in a truck full of signs, as it was obvious he had done his job of placing the expensive, spring load stands. So, that makes five guys standing around shooting the breeze, two directing the two-lane traffic of perhaps 60 cars that may come through here each morning, one guy keeping a tractor seat warm and another in his fancy sign truck. All of them were in full, beautiful matching safety-first uniforms.Â
As someone who works very hard for her money and pays an exorbitant amount of real estate, business and personal taxes, just the taxes I pay probably employ several of these guys’ annual salaries. Maybe I chose the wrong career and could have worked for CalTrans and put on a uniform and stood around with my buds on a rural Malibu road while one poor sap knocks down weeds with this lowly weed whacker. I’m betting that the guy doing the work wasn’t even being paid — he was probably doing community service to work off a bad choice he made.Â
This work ethic is embarrassing. The fact we are paying these guys to do this really upsets me. Here’s a thought — imagine if all eight of those guys were actually doing the work. What might happen? They’d still get paid and Las Flores Canyon (and every other canyon in Malibu) would be weed free in maybe a couple of weeks.Â
I hear complaints all the time that the wealthy need to better share. I have news for them — the wealthy got wealthy because they work hard. We live in this neighborhood because we work our tails off to be here and we work hard to pay our taxes. If we’re talking about fairness in life, let’s adjust our idea about work ethnic and then see what happens.
Alyson Dutch