And all those jobs existed in a different form. Style columnists from the old days were influencers. Is professional game player any different from your normal professional athlete (except being in worse shape.) And Uber driver is old cabbie, just more exploited.
This is important. In normal times, reasons offered for not being in the labor force include:
- Discouraged (i.e. thinks no work is available, couldn’t find work so stopped looking, lacks training/education, discrimination)
- Family responsibilities
- In school or training
- Ill health or disability
Coaching, per Nebraska, might help with the first bullet. Not so much the others, but they likely already aren’t receiving unemployment benefits.
That’s false, of course; especially in terms of building and maintaining housing, those industries are extremely short of workers. Those are skilled trades and there isn’t nearly enough labor to meet demand.
I work with a lot of companies. Not a single one is bullshit; they all make something society needs. (Personally, I don’t think ANY job someone is paid for is bullshit, but I am being conservative in my definitions here to align with you.) These are companies that make things critical to the supply chain, medical devices, parts for power plants so you have electricity, and construction for homes and critical businesses. Every single business I work with is desperate for workers, and none of them pay crap minimum wage, they all have solid pay scales and benefits.
Or wants. I don’t need this fancy pocket encyclopedia that I’m typing to you on but it sure is nice. There’s a whole lot to quality of life beyond the essentials.
But even if the company or industry is producing something society needs/wants, the jobs may still be bullshit. Someone wrote a book on this, which I have yet to read:
This might(?) tie back to the OP:
He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth.
Sounds like we should be making training for those sorts of jobs more widely available. Probably a better idea than allowing any 18 year old who thinks it’s a good idea to borrow $250,000 to pursue their philosophy degree.
I’m finding your increasingly strident demands for me to argue with you to be distracting and counterproductive.
It’s not lack of training either. Plenty of companies are willing to train, and still can’t find employees.
I’ve told this story before, but I did work for an aviation manufacturer that was frantically trying to digitize its manufacturing for the simple reason that its work force was in their 50’s on average, and they couldn’t hire young people to replace them and were about to lose a whole lot of institutional knowledge wrapped up in the heada of those workers. They wanted to digitize and formalize their processes to capture that information before it was lost.
The jobs available started at mid $20 wages with full benefits and pension. This was ten years ago… You didn’t even need a high school diploma. All training done on the job. The work was good, and the current employees were very satisfied with their jobs.
They kept getting candidates for the jobs, and they would interview, give a tour of the factory, offer a job, and get ghosted by the candidate. It happened again and again. Young people just didn’t want to work in a factory, even a clean one making aviation hardware.
I think the attitude towards work has changed. I don’t know if it’s increased wealth, or what kids have been taught in school, or what. But they seem to see gainful employment as an adversarial thing, something only to be done to get money for what you need. Earlier generations saw work as uplifting, as providing meaning to life, and something that everyone was simply expected to do. If you weren’t working and there were jobs available, people would wonder what was wrong with you.
Of course there were slackers then and people who deeoly care about work now - I’m talking about general attitudes, not individuals. But I remember when I got my first job - it was one of those ‘garbage jobs’ that pays minimum wage, but it felt great to be employed and have my own income. I felt lucky to have a job, not exploited. Then after a while I looked for a better one.
For young people, lousy minimum wage jobs have a great benefit: They motivate you to make something better of yourself. You realize that a life of low paying scutwork would really suck. I think of the many friends I had who worked, then went back to school to learn to do more fulfilling or higher paying work. If a UBI had been available then, I think it would have turned some of those people into dependents of the state. They just wouldn’t have had enough motivation to do the hard things required to make it in the world. It would have been easier to live on UBI and then blame others for their predicament.
I’m not sure there’s any way to quickly train or policy our way out of that. The highest-ever “core-age” (25-54) civilian labor force participation rate was 84.6% back in 1999. It was 81.8 in November. If we were at 84.6 now, that’s only an extra ~3.5M people when we have 11M openings. Although we had 7M openings pre-pandemic, so maybe I’m wrong and that adds up perfectly.
[All number seasonally adjusted]
[ETA math error]
This remains a major problem. I know places offering $25 an hour to start to high school graduates, but if it’s a factory job, no one shows up, or they quit after a day or two.
Of course, the young folk who stick with these jobs can end up sleeping on piles of hundred dollars bills. I’d advise any high school grad right now to skip college. Become an electrician’s apprentice. In four years you’ll be making major bux with no student debt.
It’s not that kids mind gainful employment at all. I know teenagers right now, and they bust their asses.
It’s that for DECADES they have been taught that if you work with your hands as a career, you’re a loser. There’s classism at work. I personally know young adults who worked very, very hard to get degrees in fields where there are no jobs, like history or communications, while technical fields are desperately lacking in employees.
A lot of my clients are having luck hiring young people here from India, from the Philippines, from Jamaica, from South Africa. In some cases they pay to sponsor them to immigrate. These folks don’t see “machinist” as being a second class job, they see it as being a job that pays solid cash, is very stable, and which leads to big opportunities. They’re the ones who will own these sorts of businesses in 20, 30 years, but we don’t have nearly enough of them. As it is, the great majority of businesses who hire me are either owned by immigrants or were founded by the immigrant parents of the current owners. It’s not that Canadians don’t work hard though; it’s that Canadian education is not producing people with the mix of skills required and an interest in these jobs, but Egypt, Vietnam, and Romania are, so there is a natural tendency for people from those places to fill in the gaps in our labor force.
Not to be that poster, but it’s interesting how a couple of middle-aged guys here are scratching their heads over why young people tend to reject factory work, and musing over the potential impact of classist prejudice, while completely ignoring the issue of how sexist prejudice in factory environments may be disincentivizing a good half of the potential workforce.
@Rickjay I totally agree with all that.
When you poll young people and ask them what they want to do with their lives, the #1 answer is ‘Youtuber’. Also high up on the list: Blogger, journalist, actor, musican, digital content creator…
Or stop requiring college degrees when you don’t actually need them. Training and tuition reimbursement are tricky if employers feel that investment is going to help a competitor. Whether that’s a realistic concern, I don’t know. I’ve seen policies where if you leave within a certain amount of time, you have to pay back X percent.
I don’t have articles on-hand but I’ve heard of companies or industry groups sponsoring community college programs, which I expect to be more cost-effective and relevant.
But yes to the harassment (etc.) thing. Also an issue in other male-dominated fields.
Fair points. And it’s not just female workers who find the sexist “corporate culture” of many manufacturing workplaces unappealing. A lot of younger guys are also not that thrilled about the prospect of spending their workdays in a middle-aged blue-collar “boys’ club” where it’s expected that they’ll join in harassing their female coworkers or else get called homophobic epithets. (And heaven help any such younger male workers who actually are gay in such an environment, of course.)
Well, if you asked me that question I’d have a similarly ambitious goal or I’d just say “retired with lottery jackpot.” We all wanna be famous rich entertainers; the question is whether people have the education and skills to do something that’s useful and they they like enough to stick with.
I don’t think work ethic is the issue. People want to work at something; very few people legitimately lack the willingness to exert effort.
You must be talking about different factories. The ones I’ve been in (and that is a lot of them) do not resemble your anecdotes, and they were also full of women. Not 50/50, but enough so that they were always visible. Female supervisors were also common.
I can believe dirty little factories run by small companies may sometimes be toxic to women, but if you are undertaking a multi-million dollar automation project you are likely a large firm with HR and legal exposure to harassment charges. The kind of stuff you are talking about just isn’t tolerated. Certainly not at any kind of large scale.
Anyway, sexism wasn’t the issue. They couldn’t find men or women. And the factory was full of middle aged and older women.
I’m making no claims about any specific factories or relying on any anecdotes from personal experience. I’m just quoting the findings of large-scale industry studies that report significant problems with sexism and sexual harassment in manufacturing as an industry.
And the large number of sexual harassment complaints submitted to the EEOC from the manufacturing industry seems to bear out those findings.
So I don’t really find it plausible, as you suggest, that this issue is confined to “dirty little factories run by small companies” and there’s no sexual-harassment problem in manufacturing “at any kind of large scale”.
That doesn’t mean I’m calling you a liar about your anecdotes about your own experiences, of course: if you say that the factories you were personally involved with didn’t have a sexist culture, I believe you. But note that problems with the industry as a whole can by association tarnish the appeal of individual firms in the industry, even if those individual firms happen to be wholly free from those problems.
I’m saying my experience is biased by the fact that the kind of factories I worked in were very large, very professionally run. Think Proctor and Gamble, GE, Volkswagen, etc. These have cultures little different than their head offices, and they come down hard on discrimination and sexism.
These do not make up the majority of factories. I have no problem believing that there are many factories out there with toxic cultures. Small and medium sized businesses are where you find the majority of worker exploitation in the first place. They are often under-capitalized, can be poorly run and don’t have anywhere near the same level of scrutiny and oversight that something like a GM plant might have.
Nonetheless, even these well run factories with lots of happy women in them are having a problem finding young workers of any gender.
How do you know that these women were “happy” workers?
They have a job, don’t they?
They’re working to enrich their corporate masters, aren’t they?
Isn’t that enough? /s