Mike Rowe: The problem isn't jobs, its people willing to do the jobs
Rowe brings up some very interesting points:
1) We don't have an unemployment problem as much as an education problem.
2) How did we as a society buy into the notion that certain kinds of work were somehow frowned up more than welfare?
3) How do we go about re-instilling the value of work in society?
1) We don't have an unemployment problem as much as an education problem.
2) How did we as a society buy into the notion that certain kinds of work were somehow frowned up more than welfare?
3) How do we go about re-instilling the value of work in society?
Expiriences that most of us would avoid. I witnessed a boom in North Dakota that saw thousands of people leave their homes to live in very tough conditions because the wages were attractive enough. Free market baby!
Perhaps an end to betrayal of working people by conspiring industry and government would be helpful.
Start with the end to the banking cartel that manipulates the entire investment market and destroys the value of savings to line their own pockets. Working people are not as stupid as they are portrayed to be in most cases.
The corrupt relationship between union leadership and self-serving politicians has destroyed much tradecraft. The social justice warriors, seeking ever greater government dependence, and leveling the playing field between the hardworking and the idle have destroyed the ethical connection between trade professionalism and reward.
What is needed is outlawing government unions (the most corrupt and venal of the lot) and a national right to work law. A bit of tough love needs to be instilled in the educational system to make the little heads filled with pablum realize that life is a lot tougher when you're stupid.
simple, we give people no choice. We remove the safety nets formed by the US government and remove their hands from the market. Then we rehabilitate them to come back into the workforce. Present them with a choice, work or fall howling into the abyss. (would love to go farther but got to write an essay)
Every entry level job can lead to the next step up the ladder. The next step illustrates willingness and ability. There will be competition. knowledge and hard work will trump a degree and less willingness. If not, go to a firm that values skill and ambition. Jobs are available from the bottom to the pinnacle if one exhibits knowledge, ambition, skill, and a willingness to work hard. How much, you may ask, and the employer asks the same.It all boils down to just two things; The employees intelligence, and the willingness to apply that intelligence with the energy inherent in the work.
Then reduce welfare to such a degree that people cant gain weight if they are on it.
Reduce welfare, AFDC WIC etc if the children are overweight.
Stop EBT cards from buying an sort of processed food, soda etc. Everything has a bar code...this is no problem. Don't give me this bullshit about "Food Deserts" in the hood. The Koreans and Vietnamese that run convenience stores there will get whatever they need to to sell....if the customers will buy it.
I Mean...its for the children's long term health isn't it?
Apart from that, though, it's true. There are so many existing jobs that are interesting or sometimes not that interesting but at least not dangerous or grueling compared to the rest of history.
Consider how difficult it is to move to a new city to look for a job when you can't afford your own apartment, and you have to keep paying the banksters for 100,000 in debt from your college education (that may be of little value in the job market.)
Yes, young people have to be willing to take some risks to succeed, and, for all their "education", they have never learned how to evaluate risk vs reward.
Business needs trained people. Business will have to stop relying on the failed public education system (perverted against free enterprise) and train them to do the tasks they need.
I wasn't entirely ready to hit the ground running when I got my degree and few graduates are. However, business had entry level white collar jobs that trained people when I graduated 40 years ago.
Today the game has changed. Its relatively easy for big business to hire cheap labor overseas for many lower level tasks and a significant portion of what once were the good paying technology jobs. This is not the fault of the college graduates who have no jobs.
I work in business in the most outsourced portion of business there is: IT. And beyond IT, businesses don't outsource outside the US (except maybe payroll - which is a mess because of the laws involved, rather than the basic accounting processes). And the ones who chose to outsource their IT have largely backed down on that one as well because of language barriers, time zone problems, IP issues, etc. I don't think outsourcing is as big a deal as just the matching of skillsets. (That of course doesn't include the employment of illegal aliens, which also skew this whole conversation.)
To me, the bigger problem is that many graduates simply don't have employable skillsets to match the available jobs. I agree with Mike Rowe about this. There aren't many jobs out there for Humanities majors or Philosophy majors or "Womens Studies" majors (not including OB/GYN). There are tons for computer programmers and accountants. There are also plenty of jobs out there for HVAC technicians, plumbers, welders, machinists, and a host of other jobs requiring manual skills - but these are the jobs Rowe correctly identifies as being "below" the education establishment and for which there are no four-year programs. Even computer programmers rarely benefit by getting a Master's or Doctorate.
I think we'd be better suited as a nation to encourage more internship/apprenticeship programs. I think its absolutely ridiculous that one spends half of their life in higher education basically in remedial studies for English, Math, History, etc. - subjects that one should have become at least proficient in in grade school. I can't really think of a good reason why a baccalaureate program needs to be four years when if they just focused on the topical material it would be only two.
Indeed. I've been in many a discussion with people that fail to recognize the direct relationship between geographic mobility and social mobility - and they focus on the latter. This is, in my estimation, a big part of the "jobless recovery" that is avoided: being "upside down" in your house makes it very difficult to move. This is one of the "hidden" harms of little-to-no equity home loans. While the subprime market didn't default as much as the media proclaimed it did, what it did do is act as a major barrier for those people to move to where the are jobs and/or education for those jobs.
Rowe is spot on in "saying there are 'good jobs' means there are 'bad jobs'", and it is a significant factor. Regarding the lack of jobs for most of the degree holders I think we have some incredibly high evidence to support that: only 27% of people with a degree work in a field related to their degree. This includes someone with a Masters or PhD in music working as a guitar or piano teacher.
"I can't really think of a good reason why a baccalaureate program needs to be four years when if they just focused on the topical material it would be only two."
Agreed, and I'll add another aspect. In Europe they don't require anywhere near the "liberal arts" and social courses we do for degrees such as biology. They also don't have the absurd level of college sports we do. The cost of sports programs is significant. Drop the sports and extra "liberal arts" and even if the time remained the same, the cost would drop like a rock.
Bring the cost back down and you could have people going to school part time with a full or part time job to pay for it. And they'd be learning the real world in the process, rather than being coddled for another 5 years.
One last thing:
"There aren't many jobs out there for Humanities majors or Philosophy majors or "Womens Studies" majors (not including OB/GYN)."
Sure there are! In government. Kidding aside, I find it plausible that the correlation between the rise of those types of degrees and the rise of government jobs to consume that excess supply is actually causative.
It isn't an easy problem to solve. Especially when there are forces in government, education, and corporate looters who don't want the problem solved. The free market will have to solve it.
I know I thought the first 2 years of college were near a complete waste of time, and that was 40 years ago when the system was more responsive and very inexpensive by comparison to today.
After wasting 2 years I finally found out I was in the wrong major and the wrong college. Fortunately a better college for me was only a few miles away, and I found a day job that taught me more about my field of study than the college did. I learned to be an IT professional before IT was a major field of study.
Apprenticeship coming from the free market is a large part of the answer, and it should start after year 9.
The ACA adds another entirely new problem, now employers can't afford to hire more than 50 full time workers, employees are not only limited to 30 hours per week (income that can't support the worker) there is a regulation that the 30 hour worker can't work more than 1300 hours per year (I ran into this problem this year and was forced to take two months off so I didn't go over the allowed hours) which means that available work cannot be fulfilled by willing workers and their ability to earn has been reduced by more that 30% in order to comply with the law.