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.
I don't like that class struggle rhetoric, but I do agree on your underlying point. I was in college when the WSJ published a long article by Citibank's Walter Wriston saying that we were heading into an information economy and the future was designing and marketing products, not making them.
I was what, 20 or 21 years old, and I read that two or three times, shaking my head at what I thought was the stupidity of the idea. And then it was implemented.
Class struggle is not just for Marxists. It is an element of both left and right populism as well. Maybe more as a lot of Marxism, especially as modified by Lenin is fake class struggle.
Marx was a very good critic, but his alternative was a disaster. My answer to that bullshit is Teddy Roosevelt's answer, which I have framed and posted on my kitchen wall. It is the American way, and it always will be.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Exactly my thoughts, with the exact same words! "Learn to code" is code for Dems who believe 1/2 the country possesses only the intelligence and skill to drive a plow horse.
If 10-15 million new MDs had crossed the border in 4 years, imagine what they would do to doctor compensation.
Also, no mention of historic inflation, spurred by insane government spending under Biden. Few were hopeless in 2019, before housing rose by 50% in 4 years, and a couple generations of kids, not born to wealth, were economically doomed.
The cure for lousy governance, is not more government. It is better government, that prioritizes the standard of living of all Americans.
Actually all we need to do is bring back shop class. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and most of my classmates weren’t college material, but my high school had a robust vocational education program. We graduated HS knowing how to rebuild engines, frame houses and/or weld. Skills that led to decent paying jobs right out of high school.
Trump removing competition from illegals accepting below market wages and horrible working conditions is doing far more than government or unions (who now represent more white collar workers) to bring blue collar wages up. This more than anything else sustains Trump’s popularity with blue collar workers.
I learned to weld (gas, arc, cutting), how to make a mitered box, and how to make a radio from scratch. Great skills to have, even if you don't use them much.
Yes, I agree completely on expanding vocational training in high school. The “go to college” pathway is fine for the most intellectually gifted, but the majority of high school students, especially boys, would do better with vocational training and learning basic “life skills” like personal finance, interviewing for jobs, etc.
I didn't get past the first paragraphs so maybe all of this is mentioned further down. Although it would then contradict the first paragraphs.
Don't know who Harry is, but the other side of the coin is, it is white collar jobs going to AI. AI can't weld, fix HVAC or plumb a house. At this point in time, trade jobs pay pretty well and when you don't owe tens of thousands for your education that is even better.
So, how about an article from Mike Rowe? He could put the left in touch with the reality of working folks and their lives.
While I agree with incentivizing blue-collar EMPLOYEES (not workers, which is a Marxist term we should never have adapted, especially a prof who should know better), the incentives must be for companies to apprentice and offer EXPERIENCE. The public is becoming rightfully wary of "education" in all forms. It has failed to deliver. Case in point: high school friend began working at an electric motor company in high school, mostly winding cord in motors. No higher ed. But within a few years he owned his own electric motor company in TX, which soon became one of the largest in the world. He employed dozens. There should be tax incentives for apprenticeships to AMERICANS only. No illegals.
Practically any business that employs more than a few people has the need for people with higher skills (particularly, in management) for which the pay is greater, based not on government edicts but on the fact that the supply of people with higher skills is limited and the demand for them is considerable. So, there are many opportunities for people in entry level positions to move up by demonstrating both good work habits and increasing skills.
As a matter of semantics, I hate the distinction between "working people" (generally meaning those who perform physical work not requiring a high level of education) and everybody else. That "everybody else" includes doctors, farmers. small business owners, engineers, lawyers, and (gasp) mid to upper level managers. They all perform useful work, and at least at the federal level, they pay substantially higher taxes when they earn more -- which is as it should be and is a fact routinely ignored by leftists for whom enough income transfer is never enough.
Exactly. It's one of the reasons Marx was wrong about everything. He considered singers, musicians, actors, bank tellers, designers, editors, and a million other jobs as "non-worker." Say what? In my rock and roll days I played 5 hours a night, 6 nights a week and I played hard. It was WORK.
I see no rationale for supporting management personally. In the FAA, those who couldn't control airplanes went into management. The military is definitely over staffed in the middle and upper ranks. I'm hard pressed to find anything a human management person can do that is needed that AI can't.
Finally, I would point out, you don't need management to oversee AI or robots. They can't fix them or program them. More than likely, they couldn't even grasp what it is and what it does. When large corporations downsize who are some of the first to go? Middle management.
Most elected officials are essentially "managers." Would you do away with them too? And as to AI, who is going to decide what functions it is to perform and program it? Will AI become like a "supreme being" performing every function now performed by human managers/leaders? I hope not.
Rather than "working people" which includes Bezos and Musk, I prefer "working class" which in the United States means without a bachelor's degree. Statistically the working class makes much less money, has much less job security, more injuries, and a shorter life span.
Working class did not traditionally mean anyone without a college degree (which actually means with less then a bachlelor's degree). In the United States, a huge chunk of lower to mid level managers and adminestrators in many industries, as well as of sucessful small business owners, lack university degrees. They are not as many as they once were but are still a large minority of the white collar middle class, and are a majority of it in much of the United States outside of large coastal metropolitan areas.
This is also where AI will probably have the most devastating impact first, but it will strongly reverberate into the working class as those people flood into service and retail and less skilled blue collar occupations. It may greatly increase regional inequality as well, because these generally well compensated employees are much less consentrated in the most affluent and educated US regions then are University degreed degreed professionals. Small business ownership may be strongly negatively effected too because most small business owners in most of the US also lack college degrees but quite often earn much or most of the money needed to start their business first by working as managers, where they also gain important business operation skills.
There are also still a large number of well paid and highly skilled semi professionals and skilled blue collar workers without college degrees (electricions, firefighters, police, welders, mechanics, heavy equipment operators, machinists, surveying technitions, LPN's and LVN's and many other healthcare workers, and many more) trained in career based programs both public and private. These people tend to have characteristics associated with both the working class and the middle class (even upper middle class).
And then there are those with a bachelor's or even higher degree who end up chronocally working in blue collar or service jobs long term, who's class identity is often especiaslly nuanced or complex but is often far from staight up middle class, espcially if struggling financially.
But today, working class means without a bachelor's. Yes there are managers, many small business owners, some work the trades though elites imported 10 million scabs last administration. Some who have a degree like to call themselves working class, because they can't get hired or keep a job, but they aren't.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class_in_the_United_States
No, working class does not necessarily mean without Bachelor's degree (not any college degree, just Bachelor's or higher) in the US today. That definition is how elite media discourse has framed it in recent years, but it is not how many people use the term even now, nor is it a proper definition of the term, which refers to occupational+overall econonomic power.
Some college educated people have blue collar careers or have simply accepted that white collar work isn't for them. They are not the same as the 20 something or even 30 something with a degree who is still ambitious but takes a long time making it into the professional world, usually do to some sort of personal hardship or mild disability or personality trait. Most do make it in time but far from all, -those who don't often become part of the former group. Such career workers are also not the same as those with severe personal problems or hardships who are bairly managing to get by despite their degree.
But yes, the last adminestration deliberatly imported a huge number of people outside of normal means, more then a few of which are now homeless but whom otherwise have indeed disrupted the labor and housing markets for many. This travesty and most western "progressives" and leftists refusal to aknowledge (or even to see!) this as a problem, shows just how much they do not represent most working class Americans at this point, and have become outright delusonal about the real economy.
But perhaps, frighteningly, those towards the top of the left at least, do appear to see one thing more clearly then even most of us (speaking as an USA born citizen college dropout myself) do. And that is, that the native born first world working class in general (except for children of Immigrants, who get a one generation partial pass), simply has no long term place in their idea of a globalized high tech world. And they want us gone, but of course they cannot (yet) just come out and put it quite like that... Many immigrants see this too but from a differant perspective, regardless of what they might think or feel about it.
Our own elites have made it us against the rest of humanity in other words, save for any also deemed obsolete middle class and business people in our countries that we might make aliences with. Such a coalition is exactly what brought us Trump, who has closed the southern border to illegal crossings for the most part, which most Dems won't aknowledge as they said it couldn't be done. And of course they keep suing him to try to open it up again... Trump has also changed trade policy dramaticilly as well. But such insecure isolation combined with us being the low hanging fruit, so to speak, of a now decaying western Imperialism, also do not portend well for our future. Just being realistic.
Continued automation and now AI also threaten everything, and Trump is also speeding up AI development and is a stooge for Israel... These are some of the main reasons I could not support him though also not supporting his main apponants. Sadly, Trump also seems to be blowing much of his appeal to independents with both some of his overdrawn hyper partisan theatrics and very real foreign policy and domestic human rights concearns, which could give an un-reformed Democratic party a path back to power with disasterous consequences. The main thing that might prevent that, but only maybe, is just how pathetically weak, institutionalist, internally authoritarian, and self sabotaging the Democratic Party and most of the US left has become in recent years.
I don't care about the semantics. Workers, employees, whatever. I am also not anti-education. Very, very strongly the opposite. I think the issue with education in recent decades is that it became twisted toward indoctrination. Basics have been devalued. At the elementary level, you teach how to process; at the secondary level, you should teach how to reason.
My favorite example there is elementary mathematics. From time to time (since I don't have kids) I will see how they're teaching arithmetic. Look: You have to drill on the addition and multiplication tables, period. You have to teach long division, period. I strongly suspect that the move away from those things has been driven by bored, over-intellectualized, overly theoretical "education departments" in "leading universities."
It's tempting to get angry and want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Another Look: Hard work doesn't pay by itself. We pay for smart work, and hard work is a necessary but not sufficient part of smart work. To work smart, education is absolutely critical. My undergrad degree was from the U of Wisconsin, 1979, and the older I get the more I value it. I quote:
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."
These days, it's time to do a bunch of sifting and winnowing. As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a season for everything. We are entering an age of reform, and education should be high on the list. The basics need to be re-discovered and reinvigorated. I happen to think that we can probably do without much study of 19th century English literature, which used to be seen as part of the basics, but get back to basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the foundation for everything.
If someone cannot read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide without machine assistance, that someone will always be a slave. No one should ever forget it. Other basics: attendance, behavior. Past that, I think there are too many electives. Too easy to take those "gut" classes while ignoring the subjects that everyone should have to take.
Start with improving public schools. (I was at a fast food place the other day, paid cash, and had to help the cashier AND her supervisor make change). Kids aren't even showing up at school and they receive A's, B's and C's and are passed to the next grade. How are you going to train these kids to work in a skilled field?
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.
with the emphasis on education to produce tradesmen and women, most of your problems become moot. It is the failed education system that produces the losers of today. I would guess you're not of the "working class" and never to talk to anyone of them? Change is what makes working interesting and not doing the same thing over and over again for the rest of your life. Different challenges every day and being personally responsible for crafting the system that works for that particular job or a fix you need to come up with. If you get your car serviced, ask the ones who work on it to show you how what they use and what they have to fix. I own a Toyota Highlander, there are 81 computers on that vehicle, and it is not even the topmost model. My daughter just bought a Range Rover. There are no knobs, levers anything, but a CRT on the dashboard.
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.
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.
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.
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...."
The major issue being unions have not kept up with the times. Their leadership is as old as most of our elected leadership and are wed inexplicitly to the Dems. having been none of the creators of the new controller's union after Regan had PATCO decertified. We were idealistic but it was working. I'm not sure it is any more. Otherwise, the profession wouldn't be so understaffed and equipment so antiquated.
The unions signed their own death warrant in the 1970s and '80s when they didn't organize white collar workers, especially in the rising electronics industry, and instead took the path of least resistance: government employees. I remember when it happened, and how my father back at the dinner table in the early 1970s said the unions would die because they weren't paying attention to services.
Automation, including the advance of AI, should not be included as part of the excuse as advancements in technology are ubiquitous and ongoing. It is only the pursuit of globalism driven by corporate and Wall Street greed, that included the massive mistakes of NAFTA and China in the WTO with MFN status, that was a discretionary policy direction.
And our Professional Managerial Class that pushed it for corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy... well they are criminals in my opinion. They have stolen from the American people... stolen economic opportunity while driving up the cost of living to the 6th highest in the nation. The top 10% own 80% of the stock market. The bottom 80% own 8% of the stock market. The top 10% have 70+% of all the wealth.
It is a giant theft ring and it needs to be eliminated.
I remember Bill Clinton talking to a bunch of recently unemployed steel workers that, don't worry, you will find new jobs in tech manufacturing. Poof goes those jobs too. We invented most of the computer and network technology and originally produced the products. Now we produce almost nothing. Apple computer has been spending about $60 billion per year to train China to take over all our tech. It has been fabulously successful for China and Apple and Apple shareholders... but really nobody else in the US as the iPhone sucks compared to the Samsung.
Cheap Chinese and Mexican crap goods at Walmart, Costco and Amazon are not the American dream.
There has been a real crime done to the American working class... and we have yet to string up the people responsible. And after them are the people that continue to oppose the needed reforms to re-shore American industry and manufacturing.
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.
I don't like that class struggle rhetoric, but I do agree on your underlying point. I was in college when the WSJ published a long article by Citibank's Walter Wriston saying that we were heading into an information economy and the future was designing and marketing products, not making them.
I was what, 20 or 21 years old, and I read that two or three times, shaking my head at what I thought was the stupidity of the idea. And then it was implemented.
Class struggle is not just for Marxists. It is an element of both left and right populism as well. Maybe more as a lot of Marxism, especially as modified by Lenin is fake class struggle.
Marx was a very good critic, but his alternative was a disaster. My answer to that bullshit is Teddy Roosevelt's answer, which I have framed and posted on my kitchen wall. It is the American way, and it always will be.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Lenin actually had to govern a rather difficult country unlike Marx. Marx apparently took his theories to the Paris Commune who sent him packing.
We are Americans. We are the New World. I don't give a damn about some Paris Commune. The god damn French gave the world Pol Pot.
Exactly my thoughts, with the exact same words! "Learn to code" is code for Dems who believe 1/2 the country possesses only the intelligence and skill to drive a plow horse.
If 10-15 million new MDs had crossed the border in 4 years, imagine what they would do to doctor compensation.
Also, no mention of historic inflation, spurred by insane government spending under Biden. Few were hopeless in 2019, before housing rose by 50% in 4 years, and a couple generations of kids, not born to wealth, were economically doomed.
The cure for lousy governance, is not more government. It is better government, that prioritizes the standard of living of all Americans.
Actually all we need to do is bring back shop class. I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and most of my classmates weren’t college material, but my high school had a robust vocational education program. We graduated HS knowing how to rebuild engines, frame houses and/or weld. Skills that led to decent paying jobs right out of high school.
Trump removing competition from illegals accepting below market wages and horrible working conditions is doing far more than government or unions (who now represent more white collar workers) to bring blue collar wages up. This more than anything else sustains Trump’s popularity with blue collar workers.
I learned to weld (gas, arc, cutting), how to make a mitered box, and how to make a radio from scratch. Great skills to have, even if you don't use them much.
Yes, I agree completely on expanding vocational training in high school. The “go to college” pathway is fine for the most intellectually gifted, but the majority of high school students, especially boys, would do better with vocational training and learning basic “life skills” like personal finance, interviewing for jobs, etc.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-we-need-more-vocational-education
I didn't get past the first paragraphs so maybe all of this is mentioned further down. Although it would then contradict the first paragraphs.
Don't know who Harry is, but the other side of the coin is, it is white collar jobs going to AI. AI can't weld, fix HVAC or plumb a house. At this point in time, trade jobs pay pretty well and when you don't owe tens of thousands for your education that is even better.
So, how about an article from Mike Rowe? He could put the left in touch with the reality of working folks and their lives.
While I agree with incentivizing blue-collar EMPLOYEES (not workers, which is a Marxist term we should never have adapted, especially a prof who should know better), the incentives must be for companies to apprentice and offer EXPERIENCE. The public is becoming rightfully wary of "education" in all forms. It has failed to deliver. Case in point: high school friend began working at an electric motor company in high school, mostly winding cord in motors. No higher ed. But within a few years he owned his own electric motor company in TX, which soon became one of the largest in the world. He employed dozens. There should be tax incentives for apprenticeships to AMERICANS only. No illegals.
Practically any business that employs more than a few people has the need for people with higher skills (particularly, in management) for which the pay is greater, based not on government edicts but on the fact that the supply of people with higher skills is limited and the demand for them is considerable. So, there are many opportunities for people in entry level positions to move up by demonstrating both good work habits and increasing skills.
As a matter of semantics, I hate the distinction between "working people" (generally meaning those who perform physical work not requiring a high level of education) and everybody else. That "everybody else" includes doctors, farmers. small business owners, engineers, lawyers, and (gasp) mid to upper level managers. They all perform useful work, and at least at the federal level, they pay substantially higher taxes when they earn more -- which is as it should be and is a fact routinely ignored by leftists for whom enough income transfer is never enough.
Exactly. It's one of the reasons Marx was wrong about everything. He considered singers, musicians, actors, bank tellers, designers, editors, and a million other jobs as "non-worker." Say what? In my rock and roll days I played 5 hours a night, 6 nights a week and I played hard. It was WORK.
I see no rationale for supporting management personally. In the FAA, those who couldn't control airplanes went into management. The military is definitely over staffed in the middle and upper ranks. I'm hard pressed to find anything a human management person can do that is needed that AI can't.
Finally, I would point out, you don't need management to oversee AI or robots. They can't fix them or program them. More than likely, they couldn't even grasp what it is and what it does. When large corporations downsize who are some of the first to go? Middle management.
Most elected officials are essentially "managers." Would you do away with them too? And as to AI, who is going to decide what functions it is to perform and program it? Will AI become like a "supreme being" performing every function now performed by human managers/leaders? I hope not.
Give me a rational reason to keep the vast majority of them.
AI, at this point is tailored to the functions it is intended to serve.
It is programed to perform by it's creators and soon, AI will create AI.
Yes.
Hope is useless. It won't change what it is coming.
Rather than "working people" which includes Bezos and Musk, I prefer "working class" which in the United States means without a bachelor's degree. Statistically the working class makes much less money, has much less job security, more injuries, and a shorter life span.
Working class did not traditionally mean anyone without a college degree (which actually means with less then a bachlelor's degree). In the United States, a huge chunk of lower to mid level managers and adminestrators in many industries, as well as of sucessful small business owners, lack university degrees. They are not as many as they once were but are still a large minority of the white collar middle class, and are a majority of it in much of the United States outside of large coastal metropolitan areas.
This is also where AI will probably have the most devastating impact first, but it will strongly reverberate into the working class as those people flood into service and retail and less skilled blue collar occupations. It may greatly increase regional inequality as well, because these generally well compensated employees are much less consentrated in the most affluent and educated US regions then are University degreed degreed professionals. Small business ownership may be strongly negatively effected too because most small business owners in most of the US also lack college degrees but quite often earn much or most of the money needed to start their business first by working as managers, where they also gain important business operation skills.
There are also still a large number of well paid and highly skilled semi professionals and skilled blue collar workers without college degrees (electricions, firefighters, police, welders, mechanics, heavy equipment operators, machinists, surveying technitions, LPN's and LVN's and many other healthcare workers, and many more) trained in career based programs both public and private. These people tend to have characteristics associated with both the working class and the middle class (even upper middle class).
And then there are those with a bachelor's or even higher degree who end up chronocally working in blue collar or service jobs long term, who's class identity is often especiaslly nuanced or complex but is often far from staight up middle class, espcially if struggling financially.
But today, working class means without a bachelor's. Yes there are managers, many small business owners, some work the trades though elites imported 10 million scabs last administration. Some who have a degree like to call themselves working class, because they can't get hired or keep a job, but they aren't.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class_in_the_United_States
No, working class does not necessarily mean without Bachelor's degree (not any college degree, just Bachelor's or higher) in the US today. That definition is how elite media discourse has framed it in recent years, but it is not how many people use the term even now, nor is it a proper definition of the term, which refers to occupational+overall econonomic power.
Some college educated people have blue collar careers or have simply accepted that white collar work isn't for them. They are not the same as the 20 something or even 30 something with a degree who is still ambitious but takes a long time making it into the professional world, usually do to some sort of personal hardship or mild disability or personality trait. Most do make it in time but far from all, -those who don't often become part of the former group. Such career workers are also not the same as those with severe personal problems or hardships who are bairly managing to get by despite their degree.
But yes, the last adminestration deliberatly imported a huge number of people outside of normal means, more then a few of which are now homeless but whom otherwise have indeed disrupted the labor and housing markets for many. This travesty and most western "progressives" and leftists refusal to aknowledge (or even to see!) this as a problem, shows just how much they do not represent most working class Americans at this point, and have become outright delusonal about the real economy.
But perhaps, frighteningly, those towards the top of the left at least, do appear to see one thing more clearly then even most of us (speaking as an USA born citizen college dropout myself) do. And that is, that the native born first world working class in general (except for children of Immigrants, who get a one generation partial pass), simply has no long term place in their idea of a globalized high tech world. And they want us gone, but of course they cannot (yet) just come out and put it quite like that... Many immigrants see this too but from a differant perspective, regardless of what they might think or feel about it.
Our own elites have made it us against the rest of humanity in other words, save for any also deemed obsolete middle class and business people in our countries that we might make aliences with. Such a coalition is exactly what brought us Trump, who has closed the southern border to illegal crossings for the most part, which most Dems won't aknowledge as they said it couldn't be done. And of course they keep suing him to try to open it up again... Trump has also changed trade policy dramaticilly as well. But such insecure isolation combined with us being the low hanging fruit, so to speak, of a now decaying western Imperialism, also do not portend well for our future. Just being realistic.
Continued automation and now AI also threaten everything, and Trump is also speeding up AI development and is a stooge for Israel... These are some of the main reasons I could not support him though also not supporting his main apponants. Sadly, Trump also seems to be blowing much of his appeal to independents with both some of his overdrawn hyper partisan theatrics and very real foreign policy and domestic human rights concearns, which could give an un-reformed Democratic party a path back to power with disasterous consequences. The main thing that might prevent that, but only maybe, is just how pathetically weak, institutionalist, internally authoritarian, and self sabotaging the Democratic Party and most of the US left has become in recent years.
I don't care about the semantics. Workers, employees, whatever. I am also not anti-education. Very, very strongly the opposite. I think the issue with education in recent decades is that it became twisted toward indoctrination. Basics have been devalued. At the elementary level, you teach how to process; at the secondary level, you should teach how to reason.
My favorite example there is elementary mathematics. From time to time (since I don't have kids) I will see how they're teaching arithmetic. Look: You have to drill on the addition and multiplication tables, period. You have to teach long division, period. I strongly suspect that the move away from those things has been driven by bored, over-intellectualized, overly theoretical "education departments" in "leading universities."
It's tempting to get angry and want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Another Look: Hard work doesn't pay by itself. We pay for smart work, and hard work is a necessary but not sufficient part of smart work. To work smart, education is absolutely critical. My undergrad degree was from the U of Wisconsin, 1979, and the older I get the more I value it. I quote:
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."
These days, it's time to do a bunch of sifting and winnowing. As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a season for everything. We are entering an age of reform, and education should be high on the list. The basics need to be re-discovered and reinvigorated. I happen to think that we can probably do without much study of 19th century English literature, which used to be seen as part of the basics, but get back to basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the foundation for everything.
If someone cannot read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide without machine assistance, that someone will always be a slave. No one should ever forget it. Other basics: attendance, behavior. Past that, I think there are too many electives. Too easy to take those "gut" classes while ignoring the subjects that everyone should have to take.
Start with improving public schools. (I was at a fast food place the other day, paid cash, and had to help the cashier AND her supervisor make change). Kids aren't even showing up at school and they receive A's, B's and C's and are passed to the next grade. How are you going to train these kids to work in a skilled field?
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.
with the emphasis on education to produce tradesmen and women, most of your problems become moot. It is the failed education system that produces the losers of today. I would guess you're not of the "working class" and never to talk to anyone of them? Change is what makes working interesting and not doing the same thing over and over again for the rest of your life. Different challenges every day and being personally responsible for crafting the system that works for that particular job or a fix you need to come up with. If you get your car serviced, ask the ones who work on it to show you how what they use and what they have to fix. I own a Toyota Highlander, there are 81 computers on that vehicle, and it is not even the topmost model. My daughter just bought a Range Rover. There are no knobs, levers anything, but a CRT on the dashboard.
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.
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.
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.
I'm afraid the move to AI is a much more serious risk than the invention of the cotton gin, steam engine, or the typewriter.
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...."
The major issue being unions have not kept up with the times. Their leadership is as old as most of our elected leadership and are wed inexplicitly to the Dems. having been none of the creators of the new controller's union after Regan had PATCO decertified. We were idealistic but it was working. I'm not sure it is any more. Otherwise, the profession wouldn't be so understaffed and equipment so antiquated.
The unions signed their own death warrant in the 1970s and '80s when they didn't organize white collar workers, especially in the rising electronics industry, and instead took the path of least resistance: government employees. I remember when it happened, and how my father back at the dinner table in the early 1970s said the unions would die because they weren't paying attention to services.
Automation, including the advance of AI, should not be included as part of the excuse as advancements in technology are ubiquitous and ongoing. It is only the pursuit of globalism driven by corporate and Wall Street greed, that included the massive mistakes of NAFTA and China in the WTO with MFN status, that was a discretionary policy direction.
And our Professional Managerial Class that pushed it for corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy... well they are criminals in my opinion. They have stolen from the American people... stolen economic opportunity while driving up the cost of living to the 6th highest in the nation. The top 10% own 80% of the stock market. The bottom 80% own 8% of the stock market. The top 10% have 70+% of all the wealth.
It is a giant theft ring and it needs to be eliminated.
I remember Bill Clinton talking to a bunch of recently unemployed steel workers that, don't worry, you will find new jobs in tech manufacturing. Poof goes those jobs too. We invented most of the computer and network technology and originally produced the products. Now we produce almost nothing. Apple computer has been spending about $60 billion per year to train China to take over all our tech. It has been fabulously successful for China and Apple and Apple shareholders... but really nobody else in the US as the iPhone sucks compared to the Samsung.
Cheap Chinese and Mexican crap goods at Walmart, Costco and Amazon are not the American dream.
There has been a real crime done to the American working class... and we have yet to string up the people responsible. And after them are the people that continue to oppose the needed reforms to re-shore American industry and manufacturing.
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