I found your edition of Jan. 21 interesting:

“Workers’ Compensation a bonanza”

“American workers lazy”

“Companies report they can’t find good workers”

So, our basic problem is that we have given birth to a population of lazy, accident-prone malcontents with high material aspirations and our education system has failed? Bull feathers!

In 40 years of working experience on three continents, including four states in the United States, I have rarely found a lazy worker. I have found many cases of inept management who treat workers as commodities and who don’t have a clue on the subject of motivation; who run dirty, ill-equipped plants for short-term profit and consider any training as the first expense to be cut when profits drop, and the worker as the next expense to go.

Workers’ Compensation will be a bonanza for doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies until management clean up their processes, equip their plants with safe equipment, and institute good methods and disciplines. Nobody in his right mind wants an industrial injury; the vast majority of people want to work — and want to enjoy their work.

How many so-called “accidents” are created by the pressure to get more output from out-of-date equipment in order to satisfy management’s desire for a fat year-end bonus or a promotion? How many “accidents” occur to workers who are just bored with their jobs which have no excitement, no interest, and no future? Who are looking over their shoulders for the next layoff? Who are dreaming of winning the Megabucks?

Let me say a few words about education.

As I see it, we have schools run by school boards comprised of local citizens whose only experience in education is their past experience as students and who rarely, if ever, have been in a classroom since that time. They are managed by school superintendents whose chief job is to manage the financial budget and who also rarely enter a classroom. We have teachers who attempt to educate pupils according to the latest fashion and we have students who just cannot wait until they are old enough to own an automobile and get a part-time job under the golden arches.

Following these are the parents who all want their kids to go to college but don’t know where the money is coming from, and who spend their evenings watching “Wheel of Fortune” while the kids are out selling hamburgers.

Meanwhile, our Legislature is cutting school appropriations, decimating our university, and creating a jobs program.

If that is the “education system” then employers should not have high expectations for its product — unless, of course, they manage a fast food restaurant.

Is our education system failing? No, we are failing our education system. All of us. Ron Woodvine, plant manager Anzac, Bangor