Oh god, we're back to "learn to code". While CS majors can't find a job no less. "Get training" like we are dogs or something. Import a half million economists and college professors is what we need. If economics professors had wages cut by three quarters I'm sure we'd have entire new schools of thought.
LPNs with less than a year education make good money because it's hard to pass the tests, they cull stupid people out, and because the work is very hard. High stress environments that require working as a team pay well, just like being a derrick hand on the floor of a drill rig.
Low wages are a function of supply and demand. We imported ten or twenty million workers, what the heck do you think that does to wages. The folks they imported don't speak English and are unfamiliar with local trades, but because they are bright enough, they can adapt, be productive, and make their employer money, they most certainly didn't go to any trade school.
Most any company can train a worker to be productive at most jobs in a couple of weeks and no one wants any workers over 45 years old. Reality. "retraining" is a make work project for people who can claim to be able to teach. Useless.
The only thing that will bring wages up is when comfortable elites get so scared of pitchforks they figure they better do something, when Trump and Bernie Sanders populism is looked upon as the good old moderate days.
That and the ruling class deciding we should be a service economy and not actually make anything. Great for lawyers and bankers, not so much for the masses.
All of this could’ve been said in two small paragraphs. There is nothing new presented in this lengthy column today. The problem is, we are already so far behind in achieving any of the objectives that it will be almost impossible to do so. This country is going to be irrelevant by the end of the century if not sooner.
A "labor agenda for the working class" that dismisses the concept of collective bargaining. Fortunately some Republicans -- Josh Hawley, American Compass -- support the right of private sector workers to have a seat at the table through collective bargaining, perhaps signaling a gradual realignment of the parties.
"Harold Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), threatened to "cripple" the U.S. economy through a potential strike in late 2024, specifically mentioning the shutdown of East and Gulf Coast ports. The union was seeking higher wages and PROTECTIONS AGAINST AUTOMATION...."
We already have an education bureaucracy whose job it is to teach future workers the basics of: reading, writing, and computing. That organization is failing its mission catastrophically. Faith in governments to address our problems is very low.
Why would anyone think that laws enacted by the peoples’ representatives should be ignored, on a range of issues such as crime, (illegal) immigration, and (non merited based hiring) DEI? Who gets to pick and choose which laws are enforced?
The disgruntled working class supports a different approach. They are trying a new party to see if it is any better than their traditional party.
This sounds like it was written for a world long gone. I agree that we need workers with these skill sets but create all these avenues and I'm guessing uptake would be minimal.
What about the fact that many of those young people are "unprepared" for anything beyond high school because they've been addicted to gaming for years? I know young women essentially raising their children alone because their husbands game most of the night and all weekend, showing up at work in a constant state of exhaustion. This sentence says a lot: "They are often told to get college degrees, which many find unappealing." And you make the assumption that a lifelong cycle of retraining every few years to stay ahead of technology is going to be "appealing"? The very fact that it has to be appealing, versus you need to make a living so suck it up (which most humans have done for all of human history) is a problem.
What about rampant drug use? What about a sense of entitlement? What about the fact that their reading and critical thinking skills are minimal and their concentration is fleeting? And that women outnumber men in colleges because they are more willing to do the work to get ahead?
The employers I know are discouraged about young people who will not show up on time or at all, will not work hard, do not understand that they can't get endless raises because their output has a fixed value in the market and their employer has to be able stay in business.
All of the above for training. A word about the community colleges as that is my background. They are currently following the road paved by the land grant universities and state colleges to the great detriment of the economy-seeking to upgrade their titles and missions in the pursuit of more state funding. State funding is a trap. When the economy sours, state revenues take a hit at the precise time that unemployed and underemployed people are seeking to upgrade skills. A much better model is business partnership with funding for the training and a direct pathway to employment. With this and Pells, you can get more tuition funding too. This unfortunately is contrary to prevailing ideology in CC sector so business has to step up which they won't do absent a heavy dose of economic nationalism.
Job displacement due to technoogy has been with the world a long time.
Neddermeyer, U. (1997). Why were there no riots of the scribes ?: First results of a quantitative analysis of the book-production in the century of Gutenberg. Gazette du livre médiéval, 31(1), 1‑8. https://doi.org/10.3406/galim.1997.1382
Oh god, we're back to "learn to code". While CS majors can't find a job no less. "Get training" like we are dogs or something. Import a half million economists and college professors is what we need. If economics professors had wages cut by three quarters I'm sure we'd have entire new schools of thought.
LPNs with less than a year education make good money because it's hard to pass the tests, they cull stupid people out, and because the work is very hard. High stress environments that require working as a team pay well, just like being a derrick hand on the floor of a drill rig.
Low wages are a function of supply and demand. We imported ten or twenty million workers, what the heck do you think that does to wages. The folks they imported don't speak English and are unfamiliar with local trades, but because they are bright enough, they can adapt, be productive, and make their employer money, they most certainly didn't go to any trade school.
Most any company can train a worker to be productive at most jobs in a couple of weeks and no one wants any workers over 45 years old. Reality. "retraining" is a make work project for people who can claim to be able to teach. Useless.
The only thing that will bring wages up is when comfortable elites get so scared of pitchforks they figure they better do something, when Trump and Bernie Sanders populism is looked upon as the good old moderate days.
That and the ruling class deciding we should be a service economy and not actually make anything. Great for lawyers and bankers, not so much for the masses.
All of this could’ve been said in two small paragraphs. There is nothing new presented in this lengthy column today. The problem is, we are already so far behind in achieving any of the objectives that it will be almost impossible to do so. This country is going to be irrelevant by the end of the century if not sooner.
A "labor agenda for the working class" that dismisses the concept of collective bargaining. Fortunately some Republicans -- Josh Hawley, American Compass -- support the right of private sector workers to have a seat at the table through collective bargaining, perhaps signaling a gradual realignment of the parties.
"Harold Daggett, president of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), threatened to "cripple" the U.S. economy through a potential strike in late 2024, specifically mentioning the shutdown of East and Gulf Coast ports. The union was seeking higher wages and PROTECTIONS AGAINST AUTOMATION...."
We already have an education bureaucracy whose job it is to teach future workers the basics of: reading, writing, and computing. That organization is failing its mission catastrophically. Faith in governments to address our problems is very low.
Why would anyone think that laws enacted by the peoples’ representatives should be ignored, on a range of issues such as crime, (illegal) immigration, and (non merited based hiring) DEI? Who gets to pick and choose which laws are enforced?
The disgruntled working class supports a different approach. They are trying a new party to see if it is any better than their traditional party.
This sounds like it was written for a world long gone. I agree that we need workers with these skill sets but create all these avenues and I'm guessing uptake would be minimal.
What about the fact that many of those young people are "unprepared" for anything beyond high school because they've been addicted to gaming for years? I know young women essentially raising their children alone because their husbands game most of the night and all weekend, showing up at work in a constant state of exhaustion. This sentence says a lot: "They are often told to get college degrees, which many find unappealing." And you make the assumption that a lifelong cycle of retraining every few years to stay ahead of technology is going to be "appealing"? The very fact that it has to be appealing, versus you need to make a living so suck it up (which most humans have done for all of human history) is a problem.
What about rampant drug use? What about a sense of entitlement? What about the fact that their reading and critical thinking skills are minimal and their concentration is fleeting? And that women outnumber men in colleges because they are more willing to do the work to get ahead?
The employers I know are discouraged about young people who will not show up on time or at all, will not work hard, do not understand that they can't get endless raises because their output has a fixed value in the market and their employer has to be able stay in business.
All of the above for training. A word about the community colleges as that is my background. They are currently following the road paved by the land grant universities and state colleges to the great detriment of the economy-seeking to upgrade their titles and missions in the pursuit of more state funding. State funding is a trap. When the economy sours, state revenues take a hit at the precise time that unemployed and underemployed people are seeking to upgrade skills. A much better model is business partnership with funding for the training and a direct pathway to employment. With this and Pells, you can get more tuition funding too. This unfortunately is contrary to prevailing ideology in CC sector so business has to step up which they won't do absent a heavy dose of economic nationalism.
𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐬 ?
Job displacement due to technoogy has been with the world a long time.
Neddermeyer, U. (1997). Why were there no riots of the scribes ?: First results of a quantitative analysis of the book-production in the century of Gutenberg. Gazette du livre médiéval, 31(1), 1‑8. https://doi.org/10.3406/galim.1997.1382