I own a small plumbing company in Colorado. A year ago I took on two hires with absolutely no experience. Since I work in the field as well, I made sure to teach them something every day; I'd have them watch what I do as I explained to them not only how to do something but why. A year later, I can send them out on smaller jobs knowing they'll perform to my strict specifications. Because they are now skilled employees, their hourly wage rates have gone up 20% in six months, they now have a marketable skill and will continue to see wage increases as they continue to learn. On-the-job training is the key.
This is also a lost idea. Companies do not train people at all anymore. Every one of them only want to hire experienced people. But they also want to pay the experienced the same pay as a non experienced one. Theres a reason why there is a shortage of skilled workers. Everyone has realized these jobs dont pay fairly. They expect you to do physical back breaking labor that ruins your health for a wage you can barely afford to feed yourself with
Get some education learn 3D modeling software, and become a pro! Then you can earn a decent wage starting around $25 an hour, and top designers $100 an hour! Get educated for the jobs that exist!AND NO MORE physical back breaking labor that ruins your health for a wage you can barely afford to feed yourself with
@@robertmclennan5310 $25 hr is almost what min wage should be. I make more than that installing windows. You proved my point. Prevailing wage for window installers is $32.50hr. Where i live.
If minimum wage was $25.00 an hour Rents would be $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment. Eating at McDonalds would set you back $75.00 for one meal not super sized. Gas would be $7.00 a gallon, and no one would be any better off! Minimum wage jobs are intended for high school kids with zero experience.
3:00 He has a point. You can engineer a bridge all you want, but you still need all the welders, steelworkers, construction workers, etc to actually build it.
I finished trade school in 1987, I have 2 raised kids, a paid off house, decent savings, a pension and haven't made under 100k in 22 years. Not Bill Gates by any means but my trade (electrician) has served me well. And 0 college debt.
I graduated college with a business degree. Every college level job I could find did not pay well. My family was blue collar and trained in many trades. I took the trades route and did very well. An opportunity was available for a project manager. I landed the job because I was well rounded with trade experience and a business degree. I see so many college trained people in positions of management and leadership. These people are one dimensional and incapable of making sound decisions that affect the business and workers. Look around and you see examples of that everywhere, especially in our congressional leadership.
In the 60s,We had trades teachers in our high school ,electrical,electronics,metal,blue print reading,industrial math and wood shop ,I was on my 4th piece of property at 26, I’m glad I got into the trades
I've been a carpenter my whole life and I am 59. Never been out of work, except for a few lean times. Never had the respect of some. It's not a pretty trade, tho sentiment might think. I'd rather be a fireman. They get the girls lol. Had to move around a bit, but not much. Making reasonable moneys. Family doing well, two homes. Investments helped, but going the distance and finishing my apprenticeship got me good work. 2 children, nurse, and masters engineer. Hope you don't get cynical. Good luck.
Dave Haynes good on you. I respect people who work with their hands, its all elbow grease and the fact you were very successful makes it even more satisfying. Hope you can retire and enjoy the rest of what life has to offer
My husband, when I met him, was employed as a carpenter (and yes, he got THIS girl!) Unfortunately, his company downsized and stopped doing work in New England, and he (we) could not only not afford to move, our family situations would not allow. Thankfully he had other skills, and was hired by a previous employer (with whom he had done winter plowing.) He now works a job that requires his skills not only as a carpenter, but also as a heavy equipment operator, driver, loader, and engineer. All of that at less than half of the previous pay!
I started as machinist in training in 1972 @ $2.45 per hr.. After two years I was offered a tool & Die apprenticeship. I did my 4 years, apprenticeship and became a journeyman! My personal investment in tools needed approach $40,000 but my salary was $60,000 before overtime. A death at one company open the door as they needed a Tool & Die Designer to which I took 8 semesters in High school. So now I could design them as well as build them. Eventually I also took on Model Making and now I could Design the tool or Die, Build the product and make the sheet metal prototypes to exacting tolerances to fit the stages of the progressive dies. The more you know the more money you will earn! My best years in that field were in the low 6 figures. I perfected my model making skills and became a Designer/Master Model builder working for a small company named Motorola designing and building CB Radio's, Car Stereo Systems, and Automotive sensors. Bad recession hit Chicago in 1978 and I started searching out of state jobs. Come to Sunny California and build Wind Tunnel Models! Salary open, and Moving expenses paid! They flew to Chicago and interviewed, signed a contract. Starting Salary of $45.00 per hour and $10,000 in moving expenses. Learn to negotiate, be firm in your expectations, Ask about current salary and Top salaries. There are many websites that discuss the current salaries, so that is your starting points. There is no one that is going to pay top dollar to someone that has little to none experience!
Hi Dave, I always wanted to be pilot, but left school and did a carpentry apprenticeship. Became apprentice of the year and used my trade to pay for pilot training. The disciplines, problem solving and can do attitude allowed me to finish up as a check airman on 747-8 and many other types, for a world leading airline. Never have I forgot my roots though, and Mike Rowe is an inspiration. And I’m 63!
My Dad completed a 5yr sheet metal apprenticeship program in 3 yrs by going to night class twice a week instead of once a week. Twelve yrs later he opened his own business.
Lazy? Quality of life and life expectancy is meaningless? I've seen seniors who worked manual labor their entire lives: hint they are in constant pain.
People in America need to embrace "Skilled Gap-Technology" and understand that it is noble to be in the "Trades." Listen to the Mike Rowe message and realize the "Trades" is all about "STEM" and see Industrial Education as a Great Curriculum. Practical "skills is an ART" with a future. America has 6.2 Million Jobs...most pay over 35-40K. T J (Tom) Vanderloop, Welding Teacher, Shop/CAD Instructor & Author
Two basic problems with the magical thinking in the discussion: 1. They said the jobs are there but the training is not. But the companies aren't stepping up to take care of the training, they're expecting individuals in workforce to guess what skills they need for some future position (often while working already) and pay for their own training, either through university or bottom-of the barrel entry-level jobs. Well, OF COURSE there's a deficit in skills, because the only place to get the skills is at a company or a school. Companies aren't able to/willing to train workers because they've been convinced by Wall Street that the only path to profitability is short-term thinking, and public education is an anathema to Republicans. 2. Also, it's BS to say "there are 6.2 million jobs available and 7 million unemployed, so those unemployed just need to take those jobs". The six million unemployed includes a lot of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who have irrelevant experience and/or can't take the entry-level or physical labor jobs that are available.
The _incentive_ isn't there. Even the dirt-poorest individual nowadays can show up at the local church for a free meal and a bag groceries to take back to his dumpster, where he can get on RUclips with his government-bought trac-fone, and talk about all the cool things going on in the world; and y'all wouldn't know him from Donald Trump!
BS Excuses! Do your Due Diligence and check these companies out! Look at their products and services. Is it something you want to do? Check on line to see what the average salary is. Find out what qualifications one needs to have? Take a part time job that offers relevant type of experience! Get off the pity train!
The one big thing they don't seem to cover are the meager wages offered to do the work. What is the incentive for your work force if employers are NOT WILLING to pay a livable wage. No adult should be expected to work full time and not be able to put some savings away. We have idiots fighting a $10 dollar minimum wage when $20 dollars an hour won't even begin to cover rent and expenses. People who work hard should not have to get by on near poverty wages !
David Foster The cost of living is far lower in China than in the US. So menial work at low wages in China is better than what they had before, which is nothing. Within a generation, this will change, workers will become harder to find at those low wages and companies will move their factories elsewhere.
You can decree a $20 minimum wage, but then you'd just destroy the apprenticeships paying less than $20 an hour that lead to higher paying skilled labor jobs. Ok, don't think you should work for $10/$11 an hour? How about $0 an hour as a volunteering position instead? That's what you get with a higher minimum wage.
Ronald Macmaster Huh? Your entire comment was senseless. How would a 20/hr minimum wage destroy jobs that pay less than 20/hr? Uhhhhh those jobs would get the new MW, too.
there are alot of 'trades' which are growing in demand..such as plumbers, electricians and if we face natural disasters, there's a huge need for restoration, cleanup from floods and fires..
Many people believe that they are able to "slide into" a high paying job. I taught HS math for a couple of years and some of these kids lamented that there are no shop classes anymore. These kids are very passionate about trades such as carpenters, welders, hvac techs etc. AI is not a replacement for actual work just as power tools didn't replace workers.
Shop should be mandatory. Not everyone will go into trades, of course, but the skills are useful. I wish I had taken shop in high school. Then I wouldn't have had to teach myself how to fix all the things that break around the house.
Mobility and migration as it relates to securing a job have been fatally injured during the past ten years. As a well seasoned and experienced job seeker, I was forced to give it up and hunker down in place because of the debt incurred during overextended and fruitless job hunting. The "sedentary" nature of the American worker these days is a condition enforced upon the worker by the overall extraction economics of the neo-liberal age economy. There is your answer Mike Rowe, free market capitalism run amok.
coolmodelguy Why is it neo-liberalism...when both parties are complicit in letting wall street become a closed profit market for the rich. Especially the Republicans when it comes to protecting the Rich. And it's sad when you have so many HARD WORKING PEOPLE who make the money for the rich folk and they are getting paid pennies!
D W - Both parties are complicit as you wrote, and both are infested with the neo-liberal economic concept. From this point forward I will not willingly vote for any candidate for office that is beholden to the wealthy campaign donor class. This is the only way we as citizens have the power to change what our society has become. As far as your question is concerned "Why is it neo-liberalism?", that is too complex for me to answer easily. What I can point to is the economic policy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, which was adopted gospel by Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Clinton and Obama. Neo-liberal economics has hollowed out and devastated the working middle class of Americans over a 40 year period, my entire working lifetime. Not so much fun finding out over the past year, that everything I was taught and believed regarding the economy and my place in it . . . was a con job to enrich the oligarchs and enslave workers with overwhelming debt.
You need to decide which side of automation you want to be on. The side that gets displaced by machines or the side that fixes the machines. I chose to fix them long ago.
Mike Rowe's point about the loss of worker mobility might be related to the rise of the dual wage earner family. Both spouses need to want to move to where the work is but if one has a great, or even merely good, job the move carries important risk.
After leaving the military (cavalry scout), I found a job with a valve manufacturing plant. I rose rapidly thru the ranks, supervising the guys whom trained me. I put in my notice because of my mom's deterioating health and I was moving west to be closer to my mom. The president of my company decided that my position should be a college graduate position. After my boss had interviewed many college graduates for my position, he told me these college graduates were total idiots and he no longer expected me to stay and train my "smarter" replacement...
People don't move anymore because moving costs money. We used to be able to sell a house and move, but now no one can come up with a deposit to pay a new landlord in a new city. Of course labor can't move. It's not that people are too lazy to move, they just don't have the resources to make it possible, even if there were a job somewhere that paid almost as much a the minimum wage should be.
orgone conclusion - It stops being "maybe you planned your life stupidly", when the same phenomenon happens to millions of people across all social and economic spectums. Once again, you are guarding the system, doing a con job on behalf of the oligarchs for free.
coolmodelguy exactly. It's so pathetic. Nothing lower than middle and lower class people who spout about "job creators" and who defend the 1%. I imagine all those people have very low self esteem and are extremely uneducated, thinking they'll stroke it rich one day.
I live in Alberta, Canada where the oilsands is being developed by fly in, fly out labour from across Canada, the skilled tradesman is being flown to the job spreading the wages across Canada. Workers including executives don't have to move to get to the job, they are taken to the job and flown home after a 14 to 21 day shift. I have also noticed that employers want trained workers, they should be providing more on the job training. Let the education system what it is supposed to do, provide people who can read, write, do math, and problem solve.
It would be great to move to find a good job. But in my case I just don't have the money to just up and move. No company is going have a place for me to stay. So what do I just sleep in my truck till I find a job.
Kyle Beck I had to travel for my trade and I slept in my truck to pocket the per diem $$$ lol I loved it... even woke up a couple mornings with my sleeping bag frozen to the floor of my rig... I loved the hard work from an early age and over did it and now at 40 and disabled trying to get by on 1/4 of what i made while working... single dad with 2 teenage daughters. The car insurance pretty much clears my acct every month lol
Moved from Chicago to los Angeles in 1979, and slept in my van! Family stayed in Chicago until I could locate housing. Nothing worth having comes easy!
Lane Sterenberg nailed it. Other than that, I feel where he's coming from. If wages were keeping up with inflation we wouldn't even be having this conversation
Have to start some where! New employee with no training and you expect a CEO's salary? Companies are starting to offer on the job training but you need to sign a contract! It is written in favor of the employer to guarantee 100% participation of the employee to live up to his part of the contract!
1) CEOs aren't paid a piddly 15 bucks an hour from which a huge slice is grafted by shifty insurance plans. 2) Real job training that ensures an escape from abject poverty is as rare as hen's teeth these days.
Need a better incentive for labor jobs... the disability part of it sucks and will be discouraging for the younger generation watching the older generation suffer... we build this world then get tossed to the curb once we get broken. There is no such thing as the golden years for construction workers
I do not see Mike taking a dirty job and do it 40 hrs a week for years. He only has to do a dirty job for a couple of days then he moves on. He does not practice what he preaches. If you want people to do dirty jobs pay people money and security instead of, low wages and uncertainty. Unless you are working a skilled job for a heavily subsidized defense contractor you are not going to afford a suburban home with a couple of kids and a stay at home wife. If you wind up working for a smaller manufacturer you will get low pay, expect to live in a rental or a house trailer worth no kids and a working wife, and have your job move to a right to work for low pay state. Before the new management decided to destroy GE they moved all their manufacturing to Mexico or non-union Texas. That temporarily improved their stock price and destroyed a thousand skilled jobs and economic security. Dirty Jobs indeed.
6mil jobs, but how many of those meet a living wage? Why would I pack up and move for a job that still leaves me unable to pay the bills? I can not pay the bills at home and I don't have any moving expenses that way. We've effectively 6 million jobs no one wants because as the cost of living has increased, wages stagnated. Make another 6 million jobs that leave people broke and youll have 12 million I filled jobs, why work to be broke if you can not work to be broke?
Kevin Preston MIT has provided a living wage calculator. It shows a given amount needed to sustain for the cost of living by city, metro area or state. livingwage.mit.edu
Kevin Preston well, if you're curious, just look at the last payraise congress gave themselves. They did it, they claim, cuz they needed what they called a 'living wage' I guarantee you it's so much more than most of us make. They gave themselves a badass salary, a badass raise. Meanwhile, trump halts all payraises in the government. That's a good way to lose skilled people. But what do I know? I'm just some guy.
VP Perf: You have a computer so do some research! Search for jobs in nearby states. Compare cost of living to wages that will be paid. It is called "Due Diligence!" The jobs are out there if you have the knowledge, and experience!
We have 18 and 19 year olds that consider a shovel ready job, is above their pay grade. Like if they could land a 100k job right out of high school? Then there is lazy people. Not saying there isn't anything wrong with lazy people, they will always find a easy way to do certain jobs that actually gets the job done, quickly and more efficiently, I'm talking about the people that are lazy with no ambition in life.
Apprenticeship Programs, Apprenticeship Programs, Apprenticeship Programs, That pay. Young people want these jobs, but they don't pay anything when you show up to the job site untrained. It used to be these trade skills paid good money, maybe not on the first day, but you didn't have to wait for the boss to die to get a pay raise. Now no one wants to pay. Why work yourself to death if you don't get paid any more than you would working an easy job. It doesn't effect me, because I'm older, but young people in blue collar potions aren't being offered any wages.
i'm 66 trying to retire. my job is not hard to learn, but the young man hired to replace me nearly a year ago is still unprepared to take over. he is 1/3 my age, feels entitled so doesnt work very hard, has a huge disconnect with WORK AND LEARN the job first. wants it handed to him but unwilling to work for it. i tried to tell them a month into hiring him that he wouldnt work out... now they are seeing it. too bad.
If we put our hearts back into infrastructure the apprentiships with manifest as the jobs become available. We must have both. High and low tech. People cannot move... it's too expensive. Affordably house them, move them and they will come. Corporate greed is killing our society, not the individual.
Apprenticeship are expensive for employers! Are you willing to sign a 10-year contract agreeing to give 100% every day? If you fall short are you willing to pay a hefty fine for breach of contract? Are you willing to invest your earnings into high-end tools and instruments needed?
Your Lazy! No Balls to find something that you Love to do! No Balls to take a chance on investing in your own time in bettering yourselves. I guess it's time to move into Mommy's basement! Best case scenario is start your own company!
WHAT A POINT YOU MAKE MIKE...STAY ON POINT SIR..YOU ARE SO RIGHT..COLLEGE IS NOT THE ANSWER.. YOU STAY REAL..YOUNG MAN...OUR COUNTRY NEEDS PEOPLE LIKE YOU..
when he said radio would replace newspaper.. you're right radio didnt have "enough" to replace the newspaper.. but now newspaper is DYING. It's all about online now. Online websites, youtube, etc... Newspaper is becoming obsolete. This is shown through how each company in terms of paper vs other media outlets have outperformed it and continues to outperform every year.
radio, newspapers are just the "paperbags" in which we, the consumers, get what we really want --- the content. these paperbags are irrelevant, its the info that is important, the stories, the gossip, the data that we need to stay up to date in this world. that is what will always be needed. the way that we receive it will change. today it might be thru social media, but in the future that may also become obsolete, but what will always stay the same is the craving for the stories, the news, to be kept in the know of what is happening because deep down inside we are all just busybodies wanted to be all up in everyone's business
I've migrated often (I have a e-commerce and digital marketing management background) and have definitely prospered. The digital economy has been good to my family.
I know of Americans working overseas and are getting $84,000 a year tax-free, and they do not really do anything! Contract workers for the Military-Industrial complex, No kidding. Perks galore.......
Do you even know what the Military Industrial Complex means/is about??? I'll give you a hint - it's not a good thing, as much as you think/believe or were told.
As soon as I graduated from college in '91, I moved out of my dying industrial home town to San Francisco where I knew that I would ultimately have been job prospects. SF was expensive and it was not easy but I eventually was able to work my way into the IT industry. Any success I've had can be traced back to that decision to leave. So I agree that people need to go where the jobs are. Our ancestors knew this so I don't know why this is such a controversial strategy. It worked for me. I could have stuck it out in my home town and suffered and complained but that wouldn't have been benefited anybody.
Here in Michigan hilo technician are a huge need. Great money and home every night. 2yr degree and your off making no less than 85/90 per yr with little overtime. With overtime 115/150. All depends on how much you wanna pay Uncle Sam at the end of the yr.
Mike I just watched your testimony to Congress?? Well it doesn't matter who you where testifying to it was obvious to me that you were the smartest person in the room, and funny too, I'm a retired trucker always watched your show (when I wasn't at work) big fan, thank you for speaking up and common sense!
Corporations don’t value their employees particularly the blue collar employee. There is an insistence that a guy or gal who wears work boots shouldn’t make a six figure salary even if they work overtime.
I owe my current situation to a combination of streamlined living and good fortune. My mom was a public school teacher and my dad inherited a family home improvement business that never became truly profitable. They worked their keisters off so that my sister and I could go to Catholic school almost entirely K-12 and then college. I got a degree in English, worked an armored car job for six years. Moved to a new city (same state) and bought my sister's old place when she moved into a house. Now I work at a printing press --- combination of physical labor and some computer work. Good job, training, benefits --- best I've ever had. I'm an uncle now, but single myself with no kids. I don't know what the future holds. I have a stock portfolio too, so I really can't complain.
The country is poised for building many more privatized prisons, returning to the practice of incarcerating people for debt in addition to addiction and other 'sin' crimes, anything imaginable to remove large numbers of people from the general population, warehouse them with their basic survival needs and nothing more, and make tons of money off it.
Audrey Muzingo - Exactly correct. This is a disgrace when for a fraction of the cost these incarcerated people could have been issued with a UBI (Universal Basic Income), which would have most likely eliminated the possibility of having a negative encounter with law enforcement. But social justice over the "justice system"? Never in America! (We have to change attitudes in this country.)
A "War On Debt" could easily replace the war on drugs, and would be far more lucrative. Debt affects far more people, and the supply-demand-penalization-via-incarceration triangle would be entirely American corporate, unlike drugs. I could be such a persuasive villain if I didn't have this pesky thing called a soul. Others don't though, and it's just a matter of time before they try to get this ball rolling. It's up to us not to let them.
What we need are more on the job mentor programs willing to help new worker learn the skills to do the jobs instead of telling them to "go to college" and accrue debt plus squander 4-5 years to get the skills.
...but if you cannot afford to move? I am willing to move but I need to know I am going to make enough money to pay rent, health insurance, food, car insurance, and medicine!
People buy into a lie, easily and it gets easier to believe you need more. There is what you want and what you need. And when you break down what you need, you actually need far less. People, unknowingly maybe, lie to themselves about what makes them happy.
Eny one who thinks that the one two punch of advance A.I and automation won't have a major impact on the labor market is delusional. You can stick your head in the sand 6 feet deep if you want but you can not stop change By refusing to acknowledge it. This time it really will be different.
In spite of Elon Musk's starry-eyed daydreams, AI robots would be a cinch to take out in the rebellion their overbearing presence would surely instigate.
There is also much more bureaucracy involved today to relocate for jobs. I hold 5 professional licenses in 3 states, but if a job becomes available in a state i am not licensed in, it is difficult, and in some cases impossible to relocate to a given state.
This is an interesting discussion, well worth having, but I think it misses an essential point about the nation today. When I was a kid, 60 some years ago, my father supported our family, bought a home, etc., on his sole income. Today, real income has fallen hugely by comparison. We became stalled decades ago. Now, even two average incomes cannot cut it. The reason is that the top 1% hijacked the system and have half of all the nation's wealth and the gap is growing wider. Meanwhile, the nation's infrastructure is collapsing and Trump's privatization scheme will only make it worse. The people have to take their nation back.
Gezz people you have a phone, you have a computer, you have the internet! Do your Due Diligence prior to traveling to a new town and find out what positions are available! Send your resume', ask about a telephone interview! There are good jobs out here for QUALIFIED people! Your not Qualified, then get Qualified!
I have always encountered a pressing obstacle when job hunting: experience. The job providers don't have the money to train an individual into experience. That should never happen. Our education system is severely inadequate in preparing our citizenry for the continuance of our economy. Our education system needs to keep everything about acquiring literacy and critical thinking skills but the students need to be work-ready when they graduate because employment upon experience is not working.
I completely agree with Mike that STEM should become STEMS, to bridge the skills gap. I also agree that people don't want to travel for the jobs they desire, or can't-I have trouble getting out of Michigan myself, and I've worked at one of the jobs featured on Dirty Jobs. Americans are willing to work for jobs they fear are going to be phased out by technology, which is a viable fear. A lot of the simple jobs-like cashier-have already been phased out in places nationwide, replaced by kiosks in Canada.
I agree mostly with Mr. Rowe, but the last administration talked a LOT about training/retraining the work force of the future. When HRC talked about replacing coal and retraining the miners to work in the new energy field and people lost their freaking minds.
and yet there are still more people than jobs, even if all jobs were filled tomorrow. -_-. this is why it's so hard to find one, especially at the entry level.
hes a baseball player or something. i like him but why is he being asked this question? People are already losing their jobs to automation. Uber is betting on 10 years.
Just moving to a "new" location before having a job is problematic. Housing you can afford on what type of job? Drag a family to new location with no job or one job for two job household? Drag your family away from family period? All costly questions . Been there done that. Much harder than theory....
Automation is going to effect white collar jobs FAR sooner than all of blue collar. Only because the cost of implementation for blue collar is cost prohibitive due to the requirements they physically need to meet.
No jobs locally? How is plumbing, heating and A/C, electrical, auto repair not available in any city? I went anywhere I wanted to and always had work. I comfortably retired at 62.
Robots are going to decimate jobs. There won't be a pilot in every plane or a driver in every truck. They're going to be like drone pilots, one driver for a multiple of vehicles, on standby in case of emergencies, connected via the net...
Eden's Aquaponics But you just know that one day some greedy corporation will find a way to cut costs even more by removing some of that human redundancy if they can get away with it. As for your point about delivery parcels, the robots will take care of that with barcodes and scanners, the internet of things, etc.
Everyone talks about losing their jobs and not getting paid enough but no one has addressed the more pressing problem. The biggest issue is the cost of living ;buying a house . Living where the jobs are at is too expensive. Because of this getting paid ever and ever so much more money the cost of living rises but the wage actually has been stagnant versus the cost of living. We need to address affordable housing and affordable public first.
In JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, the people who found good jobs and better lives were the ones who left Kentucky (en masse) for Ohio. The ones who stayed, stagnated and suffered.
I can tell you why people don't want to move to another job. It all comes to the push for home ownership started in the early/mid 20th century. Selling a home and buying a new one can be a huge ordeal and expensive. And we have massively encouraged people to create deep roots and settle in. This is changing some with the younger generation, I just don't know if it is significant yet.
The real estate market is so high, nobody can afford to move, or afford to live where there are jobs. The US is about the only country in the world that allows foreign companies or foreign investors to buy real estate here. But you can't even buy a hot dog stand in Mexico unless you are a Mexican citizen.
The most prolific writer of the New Testament, Paul supported his ministry as a Tentmaker even though his family was wealthy( his father was a Roman Tribune). A trade skill was required by tradition for your own benefit. There are many formally wealth on skid row.
It's... hard for a lot of poorer Americans to just get up and "move where the work is" when the act of moving is not tied to the absolute certainty of work. Especially with family and kids to support, roots laid down, a spouse that is working, etc...
Transportation has been destroyed by over policing and draconian driving laws. Self driving cars are gonna bankrupt driving jobs of all kinds. Elimination of the driver saves on policing also.
The problem with Mike Rowe's view on these things, which are insightful, those who seem to agree with him most are the ones seeking to strip money from public education, and to keep these "low skill" jobs low pay jobs. One of the tragedies of capitalism is that as you grow as a capitalist society, we need all in it to spend. This is why, truly why, welfare exists, and as we increase in population in our capitalist utopia, which it truly is, all of us will need to have more money to put into our wants based economy to keep ourselves moving forward, and that will mean more need for social safety nets, more need for higher wages, more need for low interest, more need for more wants. You want to get these jobs back, which in the end they never really left, you need to raise the wages at these jobs. They say they can't afford it, but can they afford to not have a work force? If you could make $50,000+ a year starting as a tradesman, working for an employer, then these skills based programs would be flooded. Till we put our money we
Rowe is missing one HUGE issue - the availability of American workers who are not high on drugs or drunk. There is an epidemic of substance abuse in the working class that has to be addressed before anything starts moving forward.
how many of that 6.2 million are fair wage full time jobs worth up rooting your self or family for ? thinking many are part time no benefits jobs at large chains
We can all make excuses of why not to take a chance! All the 6.2 million jobs are real and if you are qualified pay very well! People with small brains .....think small!
I don't know where your from but the jobs that you need as trade pays really well Bath iron works in Maine is looking for workers and will train them and the pay is 20 to50 dollars an hour they are union. If you work for s electrical companies its pays very well manufacturing jobs pay well with good benefits. Do some research and find out what jobs are available
Where are these jobs? What type of jobs? I'd like to know. Also I have found many jobs are not secure. Had a friend that moved to a new city for a job and within a few months was laid off because the company was downsizing. Now he is a city where he doesn't want to be.
Some of us having AAS degrees and experience and are willing to move to a new area for a job. Maybe businesses need to take a chance on people. They might surprise them.
Lissa, you are completely right, I only worked 44 years in automation and the last 10 years in automating air traffic management, including fully automated landings of aircraft. Of course even you don't believe that the maintenance of those robots will take as many persons as the number of workers replaced on those production lines by those robots since the fifties. Robots are not like humans, they never complain, work 24/7, don't make errors and only need some limited time for preventive maintenance once in a while.
From experience, they most definitely don't work 24/7. In the auto body shop at the assembly plant I work at, we can only run them for 6 days and then we have to shut the whole shop down for 12 hours of maintenance work. And they do make mistakes. You have to watch them closely, because if they do make a mistake they'll make the same mistake 1000 times a shift. Unlike humans, they don't learn from them. They just repeat the same actions no matter what.
:ToggleSwitch. We are not yet there, but the signs are clear. We will have partly to decouple income from work (basic income), pay for work that is now done by volunteers or house wives/men and reduce the number of working hours per day for most people. That automation will not only replace blue-collar jobs, it is already replacing white collar jobs (bank clerks) and service jobs (Wallmart and Starbucks). The BNP of the USA is still growing like in the past, so the USA will have money enough to solve the problem, but you will have to change the rules for 'paying' people. The alternative is that you create an even larger angry under-class without any future and hope, that at a certain moment will vote for fascists and/or will start using force. A rerun of France 1789 and they will hang all oligarchs and elitists from the lantern posts. You have the choice "the end of capitalism in the big ugly Kladderadatsch as predicted by Karl Marx" or a huge reform of capitalism, larger then the one done by FDR in the thirties.
I love Mike Rowe and what he is about. But the reason we are teaching kids to go to college is because we want them to achieve their fullest potential. I'm in college right now and this summer I'm working maintenance at a golf course and all of my coworkers are middle to late aged blue collar workers who raise families. All of these guys are struggling to finance all of there kids through their childhood and are hoping to send their kids to higher education so they could work the careers that they wish to do and have a comfortable enough living to live without financial burdens. Mcdonalds and the 9800 jobs he was talking about are always hiring so why teach a kid to strive to work for a job at 50 years old, when he was capable of working that job at 16 with minimal training. Not to mention that more skilled jobs that require hard work and dedication are more full-filling to work than a job that you know a lot of other people are capable of doing an
Big problem is folks don't want to travel for work as a tradesman. I'm a welder who has not worked close to home in 15 yrs because the place I chose to call home doesn't have the pay I need to live. Now having said that I've recently changed to a job close to home so I can spend more time with my family and took a huge cut in pay. So I live a bit more frugal then before. Its all about looking forward, that's why I worked on the road for so long, so I could stash my retirement back early and get it growing on its own . now I work 40 hrs a week instead of 70 to 80 a week.
People move all of the time. That's why it costs so damned much to live places that have jobs like Austin, Texas. So yeah, you move to where there is work and you pay a shitload to live there, and in the end, you've barely gotten ahead if you've gotten ahead at all. We need to talk about what pertains to most people, not the very small number that may, for example, be able to move to some region of North Dakota to make money with natural gas extraction and find it financially lucrative.
Lets see... shorter career (cant be a field tech as you get older), pays less, harder physically (and takes a toll), plus get looked down upon. And people wonder why?
Mike Rowe was Trump voter.. “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H. L. Mencken
Good GOD. People own homes and often have people they love and must care for in a general locale, also a spouse's job can be a factor. How freaking condescending can these 2 be?
Been a huge fan of Rowe but that has changed. The sheer disdain here for people being unable to "migrate" is elitist b s. You can just snap your fingers and sell a home? You can uproot children or elderly parents? Till when? The next corporation screws you over? The more I listen to the tone of this the more I think it should be exhibit one a lecture entitled "The Arrogance of the Republican Mind."
Paul Blair Oh, that's too bad. But it helps to make sense of their attitude- blaming workers for being unskilled or in useless bachelor degree student loan debt. Where are the good technical schools? Places like Germany plan training.
In the "good old days" around the USA's founding, most jobs were agriculture related and had to be done locally due to the lack of shelf lives and easy transportation. These days, services and products are highly specialized with the products of a plant being able to cross the globe out of a few dense factories. Jobs are also more educated and skilled, requiring an investment to learn on top of an investment to move. People live longer, if we are going to be investing our time and money into skills and moving, we want to be able to live with those choices for a longer time than past generation would have expected. Each worker wants more time, money, and safety to face the future with and if skilled jobs aren't growing as fast as others, it's because they aren't competing to satisfy these needs compared with the more education related jobs. If you want people enthusiastic about taking a skilled job, enthuse them with the benefits package, 401k, and pay rate. This isn't even touching on the automation future which will replace human labor as robots and AI's don't care about paying off their homes.
The personality of companies are changing as the "lopsided" work force gets into upper management. This story repeats again and again. A company gets bought out and the old guard gets changed to "pushbutton managers", people who learned it in college and did not work their way up. They issue edicts from an "ivory tower" as if they had all the answers, then can't figure out why everything is turning into butt fudge with the company. "How hard can it be?" They just don't get it. Old timers being laid off because they make too much money, then getting called back because it turns out their experience is worth its weight in gold. Or company upper management meetings where they can't figure out why they are in the red - until one of them looks out the window and asks, "That guy there on the loading dock; how long has he been here?" The reply, "20 years." "Get him up here.," and this "lowly shipping dock worker" has fixits for all the problems. Mike Rowe hits it on the head....no shop classes...no hands on experience, no practical application - all pushbutton, computer keypad techs - that can't even use a metal file properly...."Is this a lug wrench?"....."Uh....maybe?" Now you have to go to trade school to learn those skills. We should listen to Mike Rowe. He is a smart guy and sees this problem how it really is.
I think education is a key factor. Let's look at public education in the past 100 years or so. It used to be that a person could do most any job with an eighth grade education, basic 3R's. As technology and our society got more complicated, we increased schooling to twelve years. Twelve year schooling is the norm for today, is it enough? Our workforce has gotten very specialized, I don't feel that a twelve year public program is sufficient in today's world. As in the past our government needs to upgrade it's public schooling from twelve years to fourteen with the last two years devoted to only one course of study, having a student graduate with the equivalent of an associate's degree in his or her chosen field including the skilled trades.
Sarah Pardue “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H. L. Mencken
I own a small plumbing company in Colorado. A year ago I took on two hires with absolutely no experience. Since I work in the field as well, I made sure to teach them something every day; I'd have them watch what I do as I explained to them not only how to do something but why. A year later, I can send them out on smaller jobs knowing they'll perform to my strict specifications. Because they are now skilled employees, their hourly wage rates have gone up 20% in six months, they now have a marketable skill and will continue to see wage increases as they continue to learn. On-the-job training is the key.
Humans learn best with repetition! We show, they do, they do, they do until the correct way is second nature!
This is also a lost idea. Companies do not train people at all anymore. Every one of them only want to hire experienced people. But they also want to pay the experienced the same pay as a non experienced one. Theres a reason why there is a shortage of skilled workers. Everyone has realized these jobs dont pay fairly. They expect you to do physical back breaking labor that ruins your health for a wage you can barely afford to feed yourself with
Get some education learn 3D modeling software, and become a pro! Then you can earn a decent wage starting around $25 an hour, and top designers $100 an hour! Get educated for the jobs that exist!AND NO MORE physical back breaking labor that ruins your health for a wage you can barely afford to feed yourself with
@@robertmclennan5310 $25 hr is almost what min wage should be. I make more than that installing windows. You proved my point. Prevailing wage for window installers is $32.50hr. Where i live.
If minimum wage was $25.00 an hour Rents would be $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment. Eating at McDonalds would set you back $75.00 for one meal not super sized. Gas would be $7.00 a gallon, and no one would be any better off! Minimum wage jobs are intended for high school kids with zero experience.
3:00 He has a point. You can engineer a bridge all you want, but you still need all the welders, steelworkers, construction workers, etc to actually build it.
The biggest lie high school taught me was the man who go to trade school is poor.
I finished trade school in 1987, I have 2 raised kids, a paid off house, decent savings, a pension and haven't made under 100k in 22 years. Not Bill Gates by any means but my trade (electrician) has served me well. And 0 college debt.
blade listen > building trades are temp work !!!!!!!
@Boondock Saint really? Did not know that. He has obviously done well for himself! LOL!
I graduated college with a business degree. Every college level job I could find did not pay well. My family was blue collar and trained in many trades. I took the trades route and did very well. An opportunity was available for a project manager. I landed the job because I was well rounded with trade experience and a business degree. I see so many college trained people in positions of management and leadership. These people are one dimensional and incapable of making sound decisions that affect the business and workers. Look around and you see examples of that everywhere, especially in our congressional leadership.
In the 60s,We had trades teachers in our high school ,electrical,electronics,metal,blue print reading,industrial math and wood shop ,I was on my 4th piece of property at 26, I’m glad I got into the trades
I've been a carpenter my whole life and I am 59.
Never been out of work, except for a few lean times.
Never had the respect of some. It's not a pretty trade, tho sentiment might think. I'd rather be a fireman. They get the girls lol.
Had to move around a bit, but not much.
Making reasonable moneys.
Family doing well, two homes.
Investments helped, but going the distance and finishing my apprenticeship got me good work.
2 children, nurse, and masters engineer.
Hope you don't get cynical.
Good luck.
Dave Haynes good on you. I respect people who work with their hands, its all elbow grease and the fact you were very successful makes it even more satisfying. Hope you can retire and enjoy the rest of what life has to offer
My husband, when I met him, was employed as a carpenter (and yes, he got THIS girl!) Unfortunately, his company downsized and stopped doing work in New England, and he (we) could not only not afford to move, our family situations would not allow. Thankfully he had other skills, and was hired by a previous employer (with whom he had done winter plowing.) He now works a job that requires his skills not only as a carpenter, but also as a heavy equipment operator, driver, loader, and engineer. All of that at less than half of the previous pay!
I started as machinist in training in 1972 @ $2.45 per hr.. After two years I was offered a tool & Die apprenticeship. I did my 4 years, apprenticeship and became a journeyman! My personal investment in tools needed approach $40,000 but my salary was $60,000 before overtime. A death at one company open the door as they needed a Tool & Die Designer to which I took 8 semesters in High school. So now I could design them as well as build them. Eventually I also took on Model Making and now I could Design the tool or Die, Build the product and make the sheet metal prototypes to exacting tolerances to fit the stages of the progressive dies. The more you know the more money you will earn! My best years in that field were in the low 6 figures. I perfected my model making skills and became a Designer/Master Model builder working for a small company named Motorola designing and building CB Radio's, Car Stereo Systems, and Automotive sensors. Bad recession hit Chicago in 1978 and I started searching out of state jobs. Come to Sunny California and build Wind Tunnel Models! Salary open, and Moving expenses paid! They flew to Chicago and interviewed, signed a contract. Starting Salary of $45.00 per hour and $10,000 in moving expenses. Learn to negotiate, be firm in your expectations, Ask about current salary and Top salaries. There are many websites that discuss the current salaries, so that is your starting points. There is no one that is going to pay top dollar to someone that has little to none experience!
@@robertmclennan5310 > tell your story to all the over trained over schooled out of work people !!!!
Hi Dave, I always wanted to be pilot, but left school and did a carpentry apprenticeship. Became apprentice of the year and used my trade to pay for pilot training. The disciplines, problem solving and can do attitude allowed me to finish up as a check airman on 747-8 and many other types, for a world leading airline. Never have I forgot my roots though, and Mike Rowe is an inspiration. And I’m 63!
My Dad completed a 5yr sheet metal apprenticeship program in 3 yrs by going to night class twice a week instead of once a week. Twelve yrs later he opened his own business.
This is what happens when you eliminate the middle class
coal some > eliminate middle class for 80 years and lie about it !!!!!
Really wish people like Mike Rowe were in Congress. Smart man and understands real problems..
The cost of living is not liveable.
Kathy Weaver especially here in NYC and places out west.
Kathy Weaver so you're saying that... the rent is too. Dawn. High?
Kathy Weaver so you're saying that... the rent is too. Dawn. High?
Lazy? Quality of life and life expectancy is meaningless? I've seen seniors who worked manual labor their entire lives: hint they are in constant pain.
I be one, and I'm not even a senior yet!
People in America need to embrace "Skilled Gap-Technology" and understand that it is noble to be in the "Trades." Listen to the Mike Rowe message and realize the "Trades" is all about "STEM" and see Industrial Education as a Great Curriculum.
Practical "skills is an ART" with a future. America has 6.2 Million Jobs...most pay over 35-40K.
T J (Tom) Vanderloop, Welding Teacher, Shop/CAD Instructor & Author
Two basic problems with the magical thinking in the discussion:
1. They said the jobs are there but the training is not. But the companies aren't stepping up to take care of the training, they're expecting individuals in workforce to guess what skills they need for some future position (often while working already) and pay for their own training, either through university or bottom-of the barrel entry-level jobs. Well, OF COURSE there's a deficit in skills, because the only place to get the skills is at a company or a school. Companies aren't able to/willing to train workers because they've been convinced by Wall Street that the only path to profitability is short-term thinking, and public education is an anathema to Republicans.
2. Also, it's BS to say "there are 6.2 million jobs available and 7 million unemployed, so those unemployed just need to take those jobs". The six million unemployed includes a lot of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who have irrelevant experience and/or can't take the entry-level or physical labor jobs that are available.
The _incentive_ isn't there. Even the dirt-poorest individual nowadays can show up at the local church for a free meal and a bag groceries to take back to his dumpster, where he can get on RUclips with his government-bought trac-fone, and talk about all the cool things going on in the world; and y'all wouldn't know him from Donald Trump!
BS Excuses! Do your Due Diligence and check these companies out! Look at their products and services. Is it something you want to do? Check on line to see what the average salary is. Find out what qualifications one needs to have? Take a part time job that offers relevant type of experience! Get off the pity train!
The one big thing they don't seem to cover are the meager wages offered to do the work. What is the incentive for your work force if employers are NOT WILLING to pay a livable wage. No adult should be expected to work full time and not be able to put some savings away. We have idiots fighting a $10 dollar minimum wage when $20 dollars an hour won't even begin to cover rent and expenses. People who work hard should not have to get by on near poverty wages !
China doesn't seem to have any trouble finding employees.
David Foster The cost of living is far lower in China than in the US. So menial work at low wages in China is better than what they had before, which is nothing. Within a generation, this will change, workers will become harder to find at those low wages and companies will move their factories elsewhere.
redjack56 raising the minimum wage would exacerbate this problem and widen the skills gap Lo0oOL
You can decree a $20 minimum wage, but then you'd just destroy the apprenticeships paying less than $20 an hour that lead to higher paying skilled labor jobs.
Ok, don't think you should work for $10/$11 an hour? How about $0 an hour as a volunteering position instead? That's what you get with a higher minimum wage.
Ronald Macmaster Huh? Your entire comment was senseless. How would a 20/hr minimum wage destroy jobs that pay less than 20/hr? Uhhhhh those jobs would get the new MW, too.
there are alot of 'trades' which are growing in demand..such as plumbers, electricians and if we face natural disasters, there's a huge need for restoration, cleanup from floods and fires..
You commented this 3 years ago, but you are definitely right-as evidenced by the frozen pipes fiasco in Texas recently (2021)
Many people believe that they are able to "slide into" a high paying job. I taught HS math for a couple of years and some of these kids lamented that there are no shop classes anymore. These kids are very passionate about trades such as carpenters, welders, hvac techs etc. AI is not a replacement for actual work just as power tools didn't replace workers.
Shop should be mandatory. Not everyone will go into trades, of course, but the skills are useful. I wish I had taken shop in high school. Then I wouldn't have had to teach myself how to fix all the things that break around the house.
Mobility and migration as it relates to securing a job have been fatally injured during the past ten years. As a well seasoned and experienced job seeker, I was forced to give it up and hunker down in place because of the debt incurred during overextended and fruitless job hunting. The "sedentary" nature of the American worker these days is a condition enforced upon the worker by the overall extraction economics of the neo-liberal age economy. There is your answer Mike Rowe, free market capitalism run amok.
coolmodelguy Why is it neo-liberalism...when both parties are complicit in letting wall street become a closed profit market for the rich. Especially the Republicans when it comes to protecting the Rich. And it's sad when you have so many HARD WORKING PEOPLE who make the money for the rich folk and they are getting paid pennies!
D W - Both parties are complicit as you wrote, and both are infested with the neo-liberal economic concept. From this point forward I will not willingly vote for any candidate for office that is beholden to the wealthy campaign donor class. This is the only way we as citizens have the power to change what our society has become.
As far as your question is concerned "Why is it neo-liberalism?", that is too complex for me to answer easily. What I can point to is the economic policy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, which was adopted gospel by Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, Clinton and Obama. Neo-liberal economics has hollowed out and devastated the working middle class of Americans over a 40 year period, my entire working lifetime.
Not so much fun finding out over the past year, that everything I was taught and believed regarding the economy and my place in it . . . was a con job to enrich the oligarchs and enslave workers with overwhelming debt.
coolmodelguy neoliberals/neoconservative... 2 sides same coin. Make no mistake. Both are equally complicit.
Mechelle Rene - Absolutely true!
coolmodelguy,How is the lack of good paying jobs in the trades a product of free market capitalism?
You need to decide which side of automation you want to be on. The side that gets displaced by machines or the side that fixes the machines. I chose to fix them long ago.
Me too and it has served me well!
Machines will one day fix themselves..
Mike Rowe's point about the loss of worker mobility might be related to the rise of the dual wage earner family. Both spouses need to want to move to where the work is but if one has a great, or even merely good, job the move carries important risk.
Then the one with the current great\good job stays behind! Give the out of state job a chance and see if a full move would workout!
its all MANAGEMENTS FAULT !!!
Michael Segalla> ROW IS FULL OF CRAP !!
After leaving the military (cavalry scout), I found a job with a valve manufacturing plant. I rose rapidly thru the ranks, supervising the guys whom trained me. I put in my notice because of my mom's deterioating health and I was moving west to be closer to my mom.
The president of my company decided that my position should be a college graduate position. After my boss had interviewed many college graduates for my position, he told me these college graduates were total idiots and he no longer expected me to stay and train my "smarter" replacement...
Cost too much to move? wah wah wah, grow a pair & stop making excuses.
People don't move anymore because moving costs money. We used to be able to sell a house and move, but now no one can come up with a deposit to pay a new landlord in a new city. Of course labor can't move. It's not that people are too lazy to move, they just don't have the resources to make it possible, even if there were a job somewhere that paid almost as much a the minimum wage should be.
Paul Peterson - Exactly! Your assessment is right on target.
Paul Peterson, Relying on a minimum wage is the problem. Yes, moving is difficult. But, it can be done. I did it.
58% of the american workforce is paid minimum wage, so you are absolutely right
orgone conclusion - It stops being "maybe you planned your life stupidly", when the same phenomenon happens to millions of people across all social and economic spectums. Once again, you are guarding the system, doing a con job on behalf of the oligarchs for free.
coolmodelguy exactly. It's so pathetic. Nothing lower than middle and lower class people who spout about "job creators" and who defend the 1%. I imagine all those people have very low self esteem and are extremely uneducated, thinking they'll stroke it rich one day.
I live in Alberta, Canada where the oilsands is being developed by fly in, fly out labour from across Canada, the skilled tradesman is being flown to the job spreading the wages across Canada. Workers including executives don't have to move to get to the job, they are taken to the job and flown home after a 14 to 21 day shift.
I have also noticed that employers want trained workers, they should be providing more on the job training. Let the education system what it is supposed to do, provide people who can read, write, do math, and problem solve.
My sentiments exactly
It would be great to move to find a good job. But in my case I just don't have the money to just up and move. No company is going have a place for me to stay. So what do I just sleep in my truck till I find a job.
Kyle Beck I had to travel for my trade and I slept in my truck to pocket the per diem $$$ lol I loved it... even woke up a couple mornings with my sleeping bag frozen to the floor of my rig... I loved the hard work from an early age and over did it and now at 40 and disabled trying to get by on 1/4 of what i made while working... single dad with 2 teenage daughters. The car insurance pretty much clears my acct every month lol
Moved from Chicago to los Angeles in 1979, and slept in my van! Family stayed in Chicago until I could locate housing. Nothing worth having comes easy!
Yes Kyle that is exactly what you do or whatever it takes.
the unspoken problem here is Low Wages. I won't take a job if it grossly under-pays.
Lane Sterenberg nailed it. Other than that, I feel where he's coming from. If wages were keeping up with inflation we wouldn't even be having this conversation
Have to start some where! New employee with no training and you expect a CEO's salary? Companies are starting to offer on the job training but you need to sign a contract! It is written in favor of the employer to guarantee 100% participation of the employee to live up to his part of the contract!
1) CEOs aren't paid a piddly 15 bucks an hour from which a huge slice is grafted by shifty insurance plans.
2) Real job training that ensures an escape from abject poverty is as rare as hen's teeth these days.
Quit your Bitchen and starve. We all need to start at a low wage! So just because you are arrogant you will not take a low paying job?
Caterpillar machinery has openings for technicians that carry a salary of $120k after a few years of experience
Need a better incentive for labor jobs... the disability part of it sucks and will be discouraging for the younger generation watching the older generation suffer... we build this world then get tossed to the curb once we get broken. There is no such thing as the golden years for construction workers
Make sure you secure the job first i.e. interview, job acceptance then you make the move to the city.
I do not see Mike taking a dirty job and do it 40 hrs a week for years. He only has to do a dirty job for a couple of days then he moves on. He does not practice what he preaches.
If you want people to do dirty jobs pay people money and security instead of, low wages and uncertainty. Unless you are working a skilled job for a heavily subsidized defense contractor you are not going to afford a suburban home with a couple of kids and a stay at home wife. If you wind up working for a smaller manufacturer you will get low pay, expect to live in a rental or a house trailer worth no kids and a working wife, and have your job move to a right to work for low pay state.
Before the new management decided to destroy GE they moved all their manufacturing to Mexico or non-union Texas. That temporarily improved their stock price and destroyed a thousand skilled jobs and economic security. Dirty Jobs indeed.
I’m always amazed when I see guys with absolutely no mechanical skills at all. WTF?
6mil jobs, but how many of those meet a living wage? Why would I pack up and move for a job that still leaves me unable to pay the bills? I can not pay the bills at home and I don't have any moving expenses that way. We've effectively 6 million jobs no one wants because as the cost of living has increased, wages stagnated. Make another 6 million jobs that leave people broke and youll have 12 million I filled jobs, why work to be broke if you can not work to be broke?
What is a living wage?
Kevin Preston MIT has provided a living wage calculator. It shows a given amount needed to sustain for the cost of living by city, metro area or state.
livingwage.mit.edu
Kevin Preston well, if you're curious, just look at the last payraise congress gave themselves. They did it, they claim, cuz they needed what they called a 'living wage' I guarantee you it's so much more than most of us make. They gave themselves a badass salary, a badass raise. Meanwhile, trump halts all payraises in the government. That's a good way to lose skilled people. But what do I know? I'm just some guy.
Adrian Le Gras interesting.
VP Perf: You have a computer so do some research! Search for jobs in nearby states. Compare cost of living to wages that will be paid. It is called "Due Diligence!" The jobs are out there if you have the knowledge, and experience!
We have 18 and 19 year olds that consider a shovel ready job, is above their pay grade. Like if they could land a 100k job right out of high school? Then there is lazy people. Not saying there isn't anything wrong with lazy people, they will always find a easy way to do certain jobs that actually gets the job done, quickly and more efficiently, I'm talking about the people that are lazy with no ambition in life.
The difference between automation now is that it is taking care of needs. When all needs are taken care of, its completely different ballgame
Apprenticeship Programs, Apprenticeship Programs, Apprenticeship Programs, That pay. Young people want these jobs, but they don't pay anything when you show up to the job site untrained. It used to be these trade skills paid good money, maybe not on the first day, but you didn't have to wait for the boss to die to get a pay raise. Now no one wants to pay. Why work yourself to death if you don't get paid any more than you would working an easy job. It doesn't effect me, because I'm older, but young people in blue collar potions aren't being offered any wages.
Maybe self respect? maybe a job well done? Get a job flipping burgers!
My52PickUp
Because, for many of us, two years as an apprentice getting paid beats four years off college racking up debt.
i'm 66 trying to retire. my job is not hard to learn, but the young man hired to replace me nearly a year ago is still unprepared to take over. he is 1/3 my age, feels entitled so doesnt work very hard, has a huge disconnect with WORK AND LEARN the job first. wants it handed to him but unwilling to work for it. i tried to tell them a month into hiring him that he wouldnt work out... now they are seeing it. too bad.
Atlease you can get actual skills, then you take those skills get better pay somewhere else.
If we put our hearts back into infrastructure the apprentiships with manifest as the jobs become available. We must have both. High and low tech. People cannot move... it's too expensive. Affordably house them, move them and they will come. Corporate greed is killing our society, not the individual.
Mechelle Rene yes.
Apprenticeship are expensive for employers! Are you willing to sign a 10-year contract agreeing to give 100% every day? If you fall short are you willing to pay a hefty fine for breach of contract? Are you willing to invest your earnings into high-end tools and instruments needed?
Your Lazy! No Balls to find something that you Love to do! No Balls to take a chance on investing in your own time in bettering yourselves. I guess it's time to move into Mommy's basement! Best case scenario is start your own company!
WHAT A POINT YOU MAKE MIKE...STAY ON POINT SIR..YOU ARE SO RIGHT..COLLEGE IS NOT THE ANSWER.. YOU STAY REAL..YOUNG MAN...OUR COUNTRY NEEDS PEOPLE LIKE YOU..
People don't migrate to lower paying jobs because.... they cannot afford to move. duuuuhhh
when he said radio would replace newspaper.. you're right radio didnt have "enough" to replace the newspaper.. but now newspaper is DYING. It's all about online now. Online websites, youtube, etc... Newspaper is becoming obsolete. This is shown through how each company in terms of paper vs other media outlets have outperformed it and continues to outperform every year.
radio, newspapers are just the "paperbags" in which we, the consumers, get what we really want --- the content. these paperbags are irrelevant, its the info that is important, the stories, the gossip, the data that we need to stay up to date in this world. that is what will always be needed. the way that we receive it will change. today it might be thru social media, but in the future that may also become obsolete, but what will always stay the same is the craving for the stories, the news, to be kept in the know of what is happening because deep down inside we are all just busybodies wanted to be all up in everyone's business
I've migrated often (I have a e-commerce and digital marketing management background) and have definitely prospered. The digital economy has been good to my family.
I know of Americans working overseas and are getting $84,000 a year tax-free, and they do not really do anything! Contract workers for the Military-Industrial complex, No kidding. Perks galore.......
Robert Smith
They are helping make this world a worse place. The military industrial congressional complex is no place for decent work.
Do you even know what the Military Industrial Complex means/is about??? I'll give you a hint - it's not a good thing, as much as you think/believe or were told.
Of course, some of them come home in a pine box.
But the good news is, the company will screw your family out of your wages!
Then apply for those $84,000 a year tax free jobs! Don't forget your body armor, and AR!
Don't forget to dodge those bullets!
It's simple, pay more money for work.
The more you know, the more experience you have, the more MONEY you will be paid! Simple!!
As soon as I graduated from college in '91, I moved out of my dying industrial home town to San Francisco where I knew that I would ultimately have been job prospects. SF was expensive and it was not easy but I eventually was able to work my way into the IT industry. Any success I've had can be traced back to that decision to leave. So I agree that people need to go where the jobs are. Our ancestors knew this so I don't know why this is such a controversial strategy. It worked for me. I could have stuck it out in my home town and suffered and complained but that wouldn't have been benefited anybody.
Here in Michigan hilo technician are a huge need. Great money and home every night. 2yr degree and your off making no less than 85/90 per yr with little overtime. With overtime 115/150. All depends on how much you wanna pay Uncle Sam at the end of the yr.
Mike I just watched your testimony to Congress?? Well it doesn't matter who you where testifying to it was obvious to me that you were the smartest person in the room, and funny too, I'm a retired trucker always watched your show (when I wasn't at work) big fan, thank you for speaking up and common sense!
Corporations don’t value their employees particularly the blue collar employee. There is an insistence that a guy or gal who wears work boots shouldn’t make a six figure salary even if they work overtime.
I owe my current situation to a combination of streamlined living and good fortune. My mom was a public school teacher and my dad inherited a family home improvement business that never became truly profitable. They worked their keisters off so that my sister and I could go to Catholic school almost entirely K-12 and then college. I got a degree in English, worked an armored car job for six years. Moved to a new city (same state) and bought my sister's old place when she moved into a house. Now I work at a printing press --- combination of physical labor and some computer work. Good job, training, benefits --- best I've ever had. I'm an uncle now, but single myself with no kids. I don't know what the future holds. I have a stock portfolio too, so I really can't complain.
He's right on again...!! Go Mike! HUGS2U
The country is poised for building many more privatized prisons, returning to the practice of incarcerating people for debt in addition to addiction and other 'sin' crimes, anything imaginable to remove large numbers of people from the general population, warehouse them with their basic survival needs and nothing more, and make tons of money off it.
Audrey Muzingo - Exactly correct. This is a disgrace when for a fraction of the cost these incarcerated people could have been issued with a UBI (Universal Basic Income), which would have most likely eliminated the possibility of having a negative encounter with law enforcement. But social justice over the "justice system"? Never in America! (We have to change attitudes in this country.)
True
Darlene Freeman unions.
Decadence is fraught with temptation.
A "War On Debt" could easily replace the war on drugs, and would be far more lucrative. Debt affects far more people, and the supply-demand-penalization-via-incarceration triangle would be entirely American corporate, unlike drugs. I could be such a persuasive villain if I didn't have this pesky thing called a soul. Others don't though, and it's just a matter of time before they try to get this ball rolling. It's up to us not to let them.
What we need are more on the job mentor programs willing to help new worker learn the skills to do the jobs instead of telling them to "go to college" and accrue debt plus squander 4-5 years to get the skills.
...but if you cannot afford to move? I am willing to move but I need to know I am going to make enough money to pay rent, health insurance, food, car insurance, and medicine!
Do your research!
People buy into a lie, easily and it gets easier to believe you need more. There is what you want and what you need. And when you break down what you need, you actually need far less. People, unknowingly maybe, lie to themselves about what makes them happy.
Great segment
Eny one who thinks that the one two punch of advance A.I and automation won't have a major impact on the labor market is delusional. You can stick your head in the sand 6 feet deep if you want but you can not stop change
By refusing to acknowledge it.
This time it really will be different.
In spite of Elon Musk's starry-eyed daydreams, AI robots would be a cinch to take out in the rebellion their overbearing presence would surely instigate.
There is also much more bureaucracy involved today to relocate for jobs. I hold 5 professional licenses in 3 states, but if a job becomes available in a state i am not licensed in, it is difficult, and in some cases impossible to relocate to a given state.
I love this man! If only he would run for president
This is an interesting discussion, well worth having, but I think it misses an essential point about the nation today. When I was a kid, 60 some years ago, my father supported our family, bought a home, etc., on his sole income. Today, real income has fallen hugely by comparison. We became stalled decades ago. Now, even two average incomes cannot cut it. The reason is that the top 1% hijacked the system and have half of all the nation's wealth and the gap is growing wider. Meanwhile, the nation's infrastructure is collapsing and Trump's privatization scheme will only make it worse. The people have to take their nation back.
Love You Mike..Can I Have a Vacation..🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻Please
Gezz people you have a phone, you have a computer, you have the internet! Do your Due Diligence prior to traveling to a new town and find out what positions are available! Send your resume', ask about a telephone interview! There are good jobs out here for QUALIFIED people! Your not Qualified, then get Qualified!
I have always encountered a pressing obstacle when job hunting: experience. The job providers don't have the money to train an individual into experience. That should never happen. Our education system is severely inadequate in preparing our citizenry for the continuance of our economy. Our education system needs to keep everything about acquiring literacy and critical thinking skills but the students need to be work-ready when they graduate because employment upon experience is not working.
I completely agree with Mike that STEM should become STEMS, to bridge the skills gap. I also agree that people don't want to travel for the jobs they desire, or can't-I have trouble getting out of Michigan myself, and I've worked at one of the jobs featured on Dirty Jobs. Americans are willing to work for jobs they fear are going to be phased out by technology, which is a viable fear. A lot of the simple jobs-like cashier-have already been phased out in places nationwide, replaced by kiosks in Canada.
I agree mostly with Mr. Rowe, but the last administration talked a LOT about training/retraining the work force of the future. When HRC talked about replacing coal and retraining the miners to work in the new energy field and people lost their freaking minds.
Loved your shows mike
It's the old saying "IT'S A DIRTY JOB BUT SOMEONES GOT TO DO IT".........LOL
and yet there are still more people than jobs, even if all jobs were filled tomorrow. -_-. this is why it's so hard to find one, especially at the entry level.
Mike should run for president
hes a baseball player or something. i like him but why is he being asked this question? People are already losing their jobs to automation. Uber is betting on 10 years.
There is a real easy market solution to the economy being "lopsided".
Compensate people better.
I have a grandson who would like to work, but doesn't know which to sign up for. Please send advice.
Just moving to a "new" location before having a job is problematic. Housing you can afford on what type of job? Drag a family to new location with no job or one job for two job household? Drag your family away from family period? All costly questions . Been there done that. Much harder than theory....
Mike Rowe for President
Automation is going to effect white collar jobs FAR sooner than all of blue collar. Only because the cost of implementation for blue collar is cost prohibitive due to the requirements they physically need to meet.
No jobs locally? How is plumbing, heating and A/C, electrical, auto repair not available in any city? I went anywhere I wanted to and always had work. I comfortably retired at 62.
Robots are going to decimate jobs. There won't be a pilot in every plane or a driver in every truck. They're going to be like drone pilots, one driver for a multiple of vehicles, on standby in case of emergencies, connected via the net...
Eden's Aquaponics But you just know that one day some greedy corporation will find a way to cut costs even more by removing some of that human redundancy if they can get away with it. As for your point about delivery parcels, the robots will take care of that with barcodes and scanners, the internet of things, etc.
Its cost prohibitive to move 1,000 miles for a job
Everyone talks about losing their jobs and not getting paid enough but no one has addressed the more pressing problem. The biggest issue is the cost of living ;buying a house . Living where the jobs are at is too expensive. Because of this getting paid ever and ever so much more money the cost of living rises but the wage actually has been stagnant versus the cost of living. We need to address affordable housing and affordable public first.
In JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, the people who found good jobs and better lives were the ones who left Kentucky (en masse) for Ohio. The ones who stayed, stagnated and suffered.
I can tell you why people don't want to move to another job. It all comes to the push for home ownership started in the early/mid 20th century. Selling a home and buying a new one can be a huge ordeal and expensive. And we have massively encouraged people to create deep roots and settle in. This is changing some with the younger generation, I just don't know if it is significant yet.
The real estate market is so high, nobody can afford to move, or afford to live where there are jobs.
The US is about the only country in the world that allows foreign companies or foreign investors to buy real estate here. But you can't even buy a hot dog stand in Mexico unless you are a Mexican citizen.
The most prolific writer of the New Testament, Paul supported his ministry as a Tentmaker even though his family was wealthy( his father was a Roman Tribune). A trade skill was required by tradition for your own benefit. There are many formally wealth on skid row.
It's... hard for a lot of poorer Americans to just get up and "move where the work is" when the act of moving is not tied to the absolute certainty of work. Especially with family and kids to support, roots laid down, a spouse that is working, etc...
Transportation has been destroyed by over policing and draconian driving laws. Self driving cars are gonna bankrupt driving jobs of all kinds. Elimination of the driver saves on policing also.
People are not often able to move to the job they desire (need).
the only way houston should be rebuilt is if they hire venetian architects, and maybe a few dutch folks in the bargain
The problem with Mike Rowe's view on these things, which are insightful, those who seem to agree with him most are the ones seeking to strip money from public education, and to keep these "low skill" jobs low pay jobs. One of the tragedies of capitalism is that as you grow as a capitalist society, we need all in it to spend. This is why, truly why, welfare exists, and as we increase in population in our capitalist utopia, which it truly is, all of us will need to have more money to put into our wants based economy to keep ourselves moving forward, and that will mean more need for social safety nets, more need for higher wages, more need for low interest, more need for more wants.
You want to get these jobs back, which in the end they never really left, you need to raise the wages at these jobs. They say they can't afford it, but can they afford to not have a work force? If you could make $50,000+ a year starting as a tradesman, working for an employer, then these skills based programs would be flooded. Till we put our money we
Zachary Sivers
> GOUGERS
Rowe is missing one HUGE issue - the availability of American workers who are not high on drugs or drunk. There is an epidemic of substance abuse in the working class that has to be addressed before anything starts moving forward.
Having recently retired, should I move back to the States and learn a new skill? I'm still youngish......
I love Mike Rowe
we are sedentary because we are trapped in our houses, and it is impossible to move because moving costs too much.
how many of that 6.2 million are fair wage full time jobs worth up rooting your self or family for ? thinking many are part time no benefits jobs at large chains
We can all make excuses of why not to take a chance! All the 6.2 million jobs are real and if you are qualified pay very well! People with small brains .....think small!
I don't know where your from but the jobs that you need as trade pays really well Bath iron works in Maine is looking for workers and will train them and the pay is 20 to50 dollars an hour they are union. If you work for s electrical companies its pays very well manufacturing jobs pay well with good benefits. Do some research and find out what jobs are available
Where are these jobs? What type of jobs? I'd like to know. Also I have found many jobs are not secure. Had a friend that moved to a new city for a job and within a few months was laid off because the company was downsizing. Now he is a city where he doesn't want to be.
Due diligence!
> GOT FOOLED AGAIN - BUDDY !!!!!
Some of us having AAS degrees and experience and are willing to move to a new area for a job. Maybe businesses need to take a chance on people. They might surprise them.
The robots took already many jobs stupid, just compare a car factory in 1950 and now.
Bert Nijhof
Get a 2 yr degree in Robotic technology. Robots are like humans and wear out so they get replaced or repaired.
Lissa, you are completely right, I only worked 44 years in automation and the last 10 years in automating air traffic management, including fully automated landings of aircraft. Of course even you don't believe that the maintenance of those robots will take as many persons as the number of workers replaced on those production lines by those robots since the fifties. Robots are not like humans, they never complain, work 24/7, don't make errors and only need some limited time for preventive maintenance once in a while.
From experience, they most definitely don't work 24/7. In the auto body shop at the assembly plant I work at, we can only run them for 6 days and then we have to shut the whole shop down for 12 hours of maintenance work. And they do make mistakes. You have to watch them closely, because if they do make a mistake they'll make the same mistake 1000 times a shift. Unlike humans, they don't learn from them. They just repeat the same actions no matter what.
:ToggleSwitch. We are not yet there, but the signs are clear. We will have partly to decouple income from work (basic income), pay for work that is now done by volunteers or house wives/men and reduce the number of working hours per day for most people. That automation will not only replace blue-collar jobs, it is already replacing white collar jobs (bank clerks) and service jobs (Wallmart and Starbucks). The BNP of the USA is still growing like in the past, so the USA will have money enough to solve the problem, but you will have to change the rules for 'paying' people. The alternative is that you create an even larger angry under-class without any future and hope, that at a certain moment will vote for fascists and/or will start using force. A rerun of France 1789 and they will hang all oligarchs and elitists from the lantern posts. You have the choice "the end of capitalism in the big ugly Kladderadatsch as predicted by Karl Marx" or a huge reform of capitalism, larger then the one done by FDR in the thirties.
@@bertnijhof5413 > YES !YES - NOW START THE REVOLUTION !!!!!
I love Mike Rowe and what he is about. But the reason we are teaching kids to go to college is because we want them to achieve their fullest potential. I'm in college right now and this summer I'm working maintenance at a golf course and all of my coworkers are middle to late aged blue collar workers who raise families. All of these guys are struggling to finance all of there kids through their childhood and are hoping to send their kids to higher education so they could work the careers that they wish to do and have a comfortable enough living to live without financial burdens. Mcdonalds and the 9800 jobs he was talking about are always hiring so why teach a kid to strive to work for a job at 50 years old, when he was capable of working that job at 16 with minimal training. Not to mention that more skilled jobs that require hard work and dedication are more full-filling to work than a job that you know a lot of other people are capable of doing an
Big problem is folks don't want to travel for work as a tradesman. I'm a welder who has not worked close to home in 15 yrs because the place I chose to call home doesn't have the pay I need to live. Now having said that I've recently changed to a job close to home so I can spend more time with my family and took a huge cut in pay. So I live a bit more frugal then before. Its all about looking forward, that's why I worked on the road for so long, so I could stash my retirement back early and get it growing on its own . now I work 40 hrs a week instead of 70 to 80 a week.
People move all of the time. That's why it costs so damned much to live places that have jobs like Austin, Texas. So yeah, you move to where there is work and you pay a shitload to live there, and in the end, you've barely gotten ahead if you've gotten ahead at all.
We need to talk about what pertains to most people, not the very small number that may, for example, be able to move to some region of North Dakota to make money with natural gas extraction and find it financially lucrative.
Mexican trade schools, trained in Mexico to apply for US citizenship as skilled labor to the front of the line.
Lets see... shorter career (cant be a field tech as you get older), pays less, harder physically (and takes a toll), plus get looked down upon.
And people wonder why?
Pays less than what?
Robots are already taking jobs. Warehouse jobs are utilizing robots currently.
What he says about sedentary lifestyles interests me. Do most American's identify more with their state, or their country?
Mike Rowe was Trump voter..
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H. L. Mencken
Good GOD. People own homes and often have people they love and must care for in a general locale, also a spouse's job can be a factor. How freaking condescending can these 2 be?
Tammie Bachman - Chuck 'Softball Q&A' Todd we expected little from...and Rowe's a GOPer, from way back.
Just 'par for their course', really.
Been a huge fan of Rowe but that has changed. The sheer disdain here for people being unable to "migrate" is elitist b s. You can just snap your fingers and sell a home? You can uproot children or elderly parents? Till when? The next corporation screws you over? The more I listen to the tone of this the more I think it should be exhibit one a lecture entitled "The Arrogance of the Republican Mind."
He's a Koch Brothers puppet. Google: mike rowe koch brothers
Paul Blair
Oh, that's too bad. But it helps to make sense of their attitude- blaming workers for being unskilled or in useless bachelor degree student loan debt. Where are the good technical schools? Places like Germany plan training.
In the "good old days" around the USA's founding, most jobs were agriculture related and had to be done locally due to the lack of shelf lives and easy transportation. These days, services and products are highly specialized with the products of a plant being able to cross the globe out of a few dense factories. Jobs are also more educated and skilled, requiring an investment to learn on top of an investment to move. People live longer, if we are going to be investing our time and money into skills and moving, we want to be able to live with those choices for a longer time than past generation would have expected. Each worker wants more time, money, and safety to face the future with and if skilled jobs aren't growing as fast as others, it's because they aren't competing to satisfy these needs compared with the more education related jobs. If you want people enthusiastic about taking a skilled job, enthuse them with the benefits package, 401k, and pay rate. This isn't even touching on the automation future which will replace human labor as robots and AI's don't care about paying off their homes.
The personality of companies are changing as the "lopsided" work force gets into upper management. This story repeats again and again. A company gets bought out and the old guard gets changed to "pushbutton managers", people who learned it in college and did not work their way up. They issue edicts from an "ivory tower" as if they had all the answers, then can't figure out why everything is turning into butt fudge with the company. "How hard can it be?" They just don't get it. Old timers being laid off because they make too much money, then getting called back because it turns out their experience is worth its weight in gold. Or company upper management meetings where they can't figure out why they are in the red - until one of them looks out the window and asks, "That guy there on the loading dock; how long has he been here?" The reply, "20 years." "Get him up here.," and this "lowly shipping dock worker" has fixits for all the problems. Mike Rowe hits it on the head....no shop classes...no hands on experience, no practical application - all pushbutton, computer keypad techs - that can't even use a metal file properly...."Is this a lug wrench?"....."Uh....maybe?" Now you have to go to trade school to learn those skills. We should listen to Mike Rowe. He is a smart guy and sees this problem how it really is.
I think education is a key factor. Let's look at public education in the past 100 years or so. It used to be that a person could do most any job with an eighth grade education, basic 3R's. As technology and our society got more complicated, we increased schooling to twelve years. Twelve year schooling is the norm for today, is it enough? Our workforce has gotten very specialized, I don't feel that a twelve year public program is sufficient in today's world. As in the past our government needs to upgrade it's public schooling from twelve years to fourteen with the last two years devoted to only one course of study, having a student graduate with the equivalent of an associate's degree in his or her chosen field including the skilled trades.
What about elevators, will they always have a human operator as well...?
I don't understand why this TV show host is being treated like an expert...
Sarah Pardue
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H. L. Mencken