MikeRow: How to Make The Skills Gap Wider, with WalletHub and Channel 10 News.
When people ask me why millions of good jobs remain unfilled while millions of able bodied Americans remain unemployed, I try to alternate my responses between a decline of work ethic, an onslaught of unrealistic expectations, and our irresistible desire to reward bad behavior. But I think the biggest reason so much legitimate opportunity goes unloved, is due to our bizarre obsession with separating “good jobs” from “bad jobs.”
Right now, we don’t have very many of either.
Democrats have no work ethic
How come I never see PSAs for vocational schools? Oil field welders here can make over $30/hour plus OT & great benefits. Unleashing our domestic energy production and removing subsidies for all sources would set the monster that is American ingenuity and productivity loose. Why do union pipe fitters and oil rig workers et.al. allow their leadership to continue to support REgressive policies that are destroying these opportunities?
By lowering manufacturing costs with lower energy costs, you can off set to some extent, the advantage low labor cost countries use to steal our jobs.
Further the welder or carpenter is doing, yaknow, actual work. Those newly created jobs keep the money here in the US.
Yes we’re gonna pay more for just about everything but the slight increases in upfront cost will more then be offset by lowering the enormous(and largely hidden) back end costs of maintaining our over worked schools, prisons, hospitals, open spaces and other infrastructure.
Further true inflation(10%+) will come down when this river of fairy dust money stops.
We hire Welders, Machinists, Tool and Die makers, Carpenters. These are not entry level jobs. Some assembly work is entry level. The other positions are skilled and we require schooling (which we pay for) to go along with our own on the job training.
Down in northern Arkansas a Plumber wanted to start an apprentice-like operation at the local high school to train students in the esoterica of Plumbing and was told to kindly fuck off – that high school was “academically oriented.”
Never heard how it ended (this was 2 years ago).
izlamo delenda est …
We partner with the local High Schools to the extent they will allow. They talk a good game. We offer On the Job training for welding over summers and nights, Summer help jobs in all areas. We have given schools Robotic Welding Cells. We have offered them Laser Cutting cells, CNC Machining Centers. We also conduct training for the teachers and the students when they do take us up on these things. As well as maintenance of the machinery. Too often these types of careers are looked down upon by much of the faculty with no real viable alternative offered. We are always growing, always looking for new people. We have worked since 1999 on this and are only now getting any real response from the schools. Work site tours. School job fairs. Summer jobs. Night jobs.
You can find them. They are still there. The good ones that don’t want anything handed to them. The ones that want to make/find their own way in life.
My husband is a police emergency dispatcher for San Jose Police Department. He will have a laugh at the job being considered near the bottom of the barrel, according to that list! it actually pays well, considering the level of education required. He gets good benefits and the job is as secure as anything can be in the current economy. It is NOT, however, an easy job. It is a demanding job and some days he comes home wiped out. He has to keep track of the officers on his channel, three computer screens of activity in the other districts and keep in communication with those dispatchers and call takers. He EARNS that money and benefits. I might add that he is one of the best dispatchers I’ve ever known. He dispatched me when we both worked for another large police department so I know how he handles it; calm, cool, attentive and able to multi-task and keep track of everything, even when all hell breaks loose! 😉
I used to watch Dirty Jobs religiously and admired Rowe for showing that, academia’s disdain and prejudice to the contrary, the people who made America work loved what they were doing and they were infinitely more valuable than all the environmental lawyers and marine biologists coming out of college.
As the years pass, Rowe only grows more admired around my house.
It’s par for the course for Progressives, they love to “hashtag” activism and work…they don’t actually DO anything (but whine and protest) and look down upon both those that actually do something…and those who would encourage personal responsibility and action.
I shake the dust off my feet at them.
Also might want to check into that never-reported requirement for bullshit bilingualism.
Years ago, my mother, who lived in a mobile home park with a tiny postage stamp yard asked a neighborhood teenager if he would rake her leaves for $10. Maybe a 15 minute job for a teenager. He replied, “Lady, I hope I never have to do so much work for so little money”
I’d like to know whatever happened to that kid.
Mr. Mxyzptlk,
He’s presently the Preznit of the Untied States.
Still lazy and worthless …
izlamo delenda est …
The Left has done everything it can to eliminate the Manly Man.
The Manly Man says “Hell Yes” when others ask for particulars.
The Manly Man will develop a mean look while you are explaining your predicament that you asked for help with, this is because his face has shut off because his brain requires all his faculties right now.
The Manly Man wants to do it because nobody else has. No other reasons are necessary.
The Manly Man thinks cold, hot, rain and wind insects and hardships are sent to personally test and annoy him.
The Manly Man has many, many skills and enjoys their deployment.
The Manly Man is Chivalrous and Kind because to do less is beneath him.
Interesting to see that my dad’s original vocational choice ranked #104. He always said toolmaking is a great job for smart people who like to get screwed over salary-wise.
These “lists,” and I’ve seen many of them, are way too “one size fits all” to be of any value in the real world. Two reasons: no job is perfect, and every job has appeal to some people, for various reasons. Vocational choice is a very complex matrix that involves shrewd calculations–including being able to decide that what’s “bad” about a given job is something that you could live with. But our educational processes are so utterly deficient nowadays that student don’t have the inellectual tools for decision-making at any level. Job dissatisfaction and divorce rates are only two measures of this deficiency in the young.