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Rodentraiser makes some valid points, its just there are two types here on CD. Thems what haves, and thems whats struggles to live.
Never the twain shall meet.
No one has mentioned, among these things, regardless what side you are on.
And that is WAGE REGRESSION. what do i mean?
Well my state, for the bulk of the state, minimum wage is $10.40. Dec. 31 it goes to $11.10.
A person making $11 now, is almost a dollar over minimum. But chances are they will only go to $11.50 if they are lucky, or just $0.40 over minimum instead. Their wages regressed.
Also, for those currently making $15, are almost $5 over minimum, but they might not get an automatic raise to coincide with the minimum increase, so their wages regressed to just $4 over minimum.
Lets not get into inflation either. That takes a bigger bite out of their income due to the rise in minimum wage.
Also many, like mathjak ( thanks btw for explaining your work history) lived and worked in different times. Id Like to see how it would be for him to now take on the comparatively high debt to get that hvac basic education now and see just what little that job might comparatively pay today. Hes retired, and yeah has skills to work only 1 day a week, but if he was back in the trenches trying to earn a living and pay off that debt, he might be singing a different tune.
What do i mean? It cost one of my best friends about $30k to get his juris doctorate (lawyer). Between working as a proctor, a student teacher position and a few other then-lucrative jobs, not to mention cheaper college in the early 70s. he came out of law school debt free. He now makes $6k a week as an experienced attorney. And now to finish law school, it takes about $300k, and you cannot work that off going through school like he did. He himself has said there is no way he could come out of law school debt free nowadays.
Another example: in 1981, i took a job as third shift cashier in a restaurant attached to a travel plaza. I was paid minimum PLUS a $0.25 shift differential, something that has disappeared anong lower paying jobs. Second shift got a $0.10 differential. When i got hired over in the store section for day shift, i not only got a raise, but got to keep the differential as well. By 1989 i was in retail still, making MORE THAN 3 times above minimum wage. Then 1990 came. The economy tanked. I had to leave the state i had moved to to move "back home" to only find minimum wage jobs.
Now minimum wage service jobs are the basis for the local economy here.
I do draw SSDI now, and while i can work part time, im making less than i was in 1989. I DO keep low as just like with regular SS ( until or unless certain conditions are met), one is only allowed to make so much before one gets dinged.
It isn't easy to compare todays living to the 70s, 60s, or even the 50s. No matter what charts, graphs, or "comparisons " are used.
Things were different. My OH, for example, punched a time clock, got schedule off a posted paper one until recently, for example. Now my OH is FORCED into having and maintaining a smart phone for punching in and out, and to get schedules. Cant compare the apples to apples like that! ( and people wonder why low income people just have to have a smart phone)
College required cheap tablets, pens and pencils and some books, nowadays its computer systems required abd expensive program purchase. No book, except maybe ( and its a stretch) a complete set of law books or a set of medical books will ever match the cost the $2500 of a required computer systems and a few programs cost now. No cheapy chrome book laptop will do now. When i did go to college in 1981 $100 for a book was so expensive!!!
Then There are also the people featured on 60 minutes or another news program not so long ago who had their handy dandy expensive college degree with "skills" who worked for Google, but who lived in their cars IN Google 's parking lot because THEY COULD NOT afford a place to live!
Id love to see what mathjak would say if he was in THAT situation. Ill bet in the 70s he didnt have such problems,
cause living wages were easy to come by . Even i had that in the 80s, and i didnt finish college!
( btw mathjak, you want to come replace my furnace with a new one with central air????)
that school was almost 2500 back then in the 1970's .. my first job in that field paid 165 a week or 10k or so with overtime , that is about 60k today in 2018 dollars .. what i paid for apex in todays dollars is 15k . today apex is actually about 19k , the median hvac tech job here is about 50-60k . my kids went to a city college for 5k-6k a year . today cuny cost
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Undergraduate Tuition
CUNY Queens College tuition is $6,330 per year for in-state residents.
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so what you are trying to imply really is not true as a general statement .
as for lawyers , my son is an attorney here with a large national law firm with 900 attorneys .
he paid off all his loans in 5 years . hofstra law ran him 126k in total .. it was a local school . not only did he pay off school but paid off being a general partner at a cost of 225k and now he just became a full equity partner at another cost of almost 300k , 1/2 of which is paid immediately with a bank loan and the rest over 5 years from distributions . .
so you are trying to generalize way to much . what you earn is individual and location dependent . many kids needlessly go away and spend ridiculous sums of money on colleges when they don't have to . many of his law school buddies took jobs as public defenders for low pay or others at his firm spent a fortune at out of state law schools and are struggling to pay off loans and partnerships .
there are always those who find a way no matter what the obstacles , the rest just find excuses which are cheap ,easy and require no extra work . you just float like a cork in water and hope you land something better . but hope without a plan for doing so is only a wish .
i got dumped out of apex in to the worst economic conditions since the great depression . we had very high unemployment , vietnam and an oil shortage and the draft . that was the only lottery i ever one , number 80 , 100% chance of being called up , which i was . . it was very very hard to find jobs and stay alive in that era so your portrayal of it is way off . as well as dollars then to go to apex vs dollars today and the pay really is not much different in these parts ...
for those who can't find success for whatever reason it always looks easier in a different time or place to them .
i can cite so many hard luck stories of people i knew back then which were the same gripes as today but the bottom line is life is always going to be individual and location dependent no matter where you are or the time frame you want to talk about.
i begged my project friends to join me when i went to apex , but nope they were content doing what they were doing and did not want to take the extra step .
we all started our adult lives off in the same shape , yet i am retired and today they are raising their own family's still in the same projects . to them they see it as they just had no breaks in life or opportunity . i can tell you first hand that is not the case .
they did not take control and make things happen , instead they waited for things to happen and to drift in to better opportunity . well they waited so long for that ship to come in the pier collapsed so to speak .
Last edited by mathjak107; 10-18-2018 at 04:19 AM..
I don't really see the impact at my work or at my wife's work. Both of us have recently been involved in hiring and there are PLENTY of overqualified applicants seeking work.
From my conversations with businesspeople, if your job is very high skill, especially for certain IT type jobs, it's hard to find people. If your job opening is low skill, especially in service, you can find workers but they have no loyalty. There are so many of those jobs available they'll quit for any reason whatsoever, they can get a new job the next day.
For medium-skilled middle class people, the competition for what I call "homeowner jobs" - the kind that will enable you to buy a median 3/2 house in any given area - is just as competitive as ever. ESPECIALLY if you live in a place that people want to live, which I do, although I don't get why people covet this place so much. My wife's new position is entry level, going to start at under 40k per year. She's getting apps from out of state with 10+ years experience, in addition to recent graduates from good colleges, etc... The people with experience can make 60k in another city... I don't get it. If they economy was so good she should not be seeing that.
The places people don't want to live have no good jobs but plenty of cheap property.
Rodentraiser makes some valid points, its just there are two types here on CD. Thems what haves, and thems whats struggles to live.
Nope. Have-vs-have not is too simplistic, a straw man from the get-go.
At a minimum, there are Haves, Have-Nots... and the vast class of Have-Some-Want-More.
No, that's not trivial word gaming. If you don't including the notion of intermediate economic tiers and desire for more - not from nothing, but from some level of Have - you've reduced the argument to a meaningless black and white.
All I ever wanted to do was go to college and study something I could use to make a decent living at. When I finally got the back pay for my disability, I really thought I could do that. But I had to be realistic. The amount of money I got was a lot to me, but probably wouldn't pay for one year's tuition at a university. I was 60 and would be older than that when I finished a degree. I didn't want to be 64 and $100,000 in debt. I was tired, depressed, and fed up. I knew I didn't want to hop from job to job to get the best pay, I didn't want to move someplace that I hated to take a job, and I knew I didn't want to work 60 to 80 hour weeks, even if I could. I just...gave up.
I remember living in my truck and working full time while going to college. I remember working full time while supporting myself and taking a year's worth of high school in one semester to graduate. I had a lot of energy and hope in those days. But living was like fighting a battle every day just to survive. I wish I could have stepped back just once and seen the whole picture, instead of just what was in front of me that day.
Well, it's too late for me now, but what's scary is there are so many more kids out there who are also struggling. Nobody is telling them about the things they need to be asking about. No one is asking them what they want in life. We still throw people into the deep end of the water and expect them to swim. We take pride in those who swim without help and ignore the ones who drown. We say if they were going to amount to anything, they wouldn't have drowned in the first place. We complain about not having enough money for Social Security because there aren't enough young people paying into it, but we ignore the fact that the people who could be paying into it are drowning because we don't want to teach them, or pay them a better wage, or give them encouragement, or even think they're worthy of teaching.
These are the kids who should be the adults whose taxes could be fixing our roads and bridges, creating businesses and jobs in the community, paying for community services, circulating the money in our economy, and funding retirement. Instead of helping those kids be those people, we're ignoring them and telling them to do it all on their own. We're throwing them in the deep end and telling them to sink or swim and that we don't care if they sink. And that's going to come back and bite us in the ass in a huge way.
to earn a decent living you don't need a college education . you just need to do the things people can't or won't do for themselves. my idol is the fellow who owned a fleet of sceptic service trucks when we had our house in the poconos. a grade school education and a multi million dollar business .
my friends went in to the silk screening business and developed a tee shirt empire just by taking a few marketing classes.
it is about creativity and drive to succeed . look at sriracha hot sauce , an immigrant pepper farmer.
i have no college degree either . i have high school and a trade school . today i am retired and teach motor controls and variable frequency drives to electrical engineers one day a week at my old firm , been doing this for more than 3 years now . i was a sales engineer at the company for 23 years .
all self taught and on the job training over the years . it was never taught to me . i made them teach it to me . i made them send me to factory schools when i found them listed .
Last edited by mathjak107; 10-19-2018 at 04:09 AM..
For medium-skilled middle class people, the competition for what I call "homeowner jobs"
- the kind that will enable you to buy a median 3/2 house in any given area -
is just as competitive as ever.
Well stated.
Quote:
ESPECIALLY if you live in a place that people want to live...
I'll go farther: Monumentally high competition in those (frequently cited) places.
Quote:
The people with experience can make 60k in another city... I don't get it.
They'll accept less RIGHT NOW in order to justify the move to where they want to live.
Then they'll HOPE that in a year or two they'll be back up to $60K or more.
Some achieve that goal. The rest seem to gravitate to living in RV's on side streets.
Quote:
The places people don't want to live have no good jobs but plenty of cheap property.
Too broad. Almost invective.
The places SO MANY people ASSERT that they don't want to live ("flyover country")...
have FEWER jobs generally, fewer good jobs and even fewer for those coming from somewhere else...
but have plenty of decent property available that can be bought on local incomes.
to earn a decent living you don't need a college education . you just need to do the things people can't or won't do for themselves. my idol is the fellow who owned a fleet of sceptic service trucks when we had our house in the poconos. a grade school education and a multi million dollar business .
my friends went in to the silk screening business and developed a tee shirt empire just by taking a few marketing classes.
it is about creativity and drive to succeed . look at sriracha hot sauce , an immigrant pepper farmer.
i have no college degree either . i have high school and a trade school . today i am retired and teach motor controls and variable frequency drives to electrical engineers one day a week at my old firm , been doing this for more than 3 years now . i was a sales engineer at the company for 23 years .
all self taught and on the job training over the years . it was never taught to me . i made them teach it to me . i made them send me to factory schools when i found them listed .
"Driving that change are shifting trends in the workforce, as well as "up-credentialing," or when a job that previously was open for high school grads now requires a college degree. That's partly what is happening to secretarial work, with one study finding that almost seven of 10 job ads for executive secretaries called for college grads."
College degrees? For secretaries? Computer skills, yes. But college degrees?
I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Let's try to remember what it was like for women then. HVAC jobs were not done by women, even if I had burned with the desire.
And just so you're aware, there is very, very little on-the-job training done today. Most employers don't and won't train. You need to be able to walk in and do the job from the minute your feet hit the floor. Even police forces don't train anymore. You're expected to pay your way through a police academy before you get hired. And trade schools cost money. A lot of it. Where, exactly, do you think you'd be if you hadn't had that on-the-job training?
in my industry which is motor controls ,drives and factory automation control , on the job training goes on all the time at every single factory and distributor .
in fact i teach for one distributor one day a week in retirement but if i wanted to go around from distributor to distributor i could build a business and do it full time .
i have not done hvac in 25 years . i took the basic skills i had about controls and just kept morphing in to different fields which had "controls " as a theme .
i have been a motor control specialist /sales engineer for the last 23 years sliding more and more in to factory automation control and custom pumping panels for the water pumping and sewage treatment plants .
all learned on the job
i don't talk in terms of straw people or people who have no idea how to develop a career and use that to justify, why one did poorly which you see over and over . i talk only in terms of what i see and what i experience . YMV
as i say those who really want to succeed will find a away . the others will find an excuse or some article .
Last edited by mathjak107; 10-19-2018 at 03:37 PM..
as i say those who really want to succeed will find a away . the others will find an excuse or some article .
Yep, only lazy, stupid and unmotivated people can't get a job.
Along with those who were unlucky enough to have their industry take a little zig to one side on them at just the wrong moment. You wouldn't know about that.
Yep, only lazy, stupid and unmotivated people can't get a job.
Along with those who were unlucky enough to have their industry take a little zig to one side on them at just the wrong moment. You wouldn't know about that.
i never said any such thing . but many will not get good jobs in any climate or industry for a whole host of reasons while their peers will
wrong again , you assume to much all the time ----the reason i went in to hvac is my profession was facing being obsoleted back in the 1970's so i know about losing your livelihood . i was a pro drummer and dee jays were putting live music out to pasture . drumming was all i knew and work was getting in shorter and shorter supply as venues were converted to disco's , SO YEAH I DO KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT ..
Last edited by mathjak107; 10-19-2018 at 04:01 PM..
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