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This is nonsense. Obviously you don't have much experience with factory work -- or you romanticize it. Industrial manufacturing work paid well because it was hard, tedious and often dangerous work when it was unionized. If it wasn't unionized -- and many industrial workers, especially in the South, were not -- it didn't even pay very well.
I think the OP is romanticizing factory type jobs based on the portrayal of such jobs in Michael Moore movies.
The number of high paying jobs, especially in the STEM fields are enormous. One can make 6 figure salaries right out of college or with a few years experience .. with a Comp Sci degree. Was this possible 50 years ago? No!
And the OP has to explain to us how working as a software engineer and making a 6 figure salary is "stressful" and "competitive". Heck, there are so many software related jobs that we have to import people from India to fill them ...
I don't know about your generation, but you personally are very spoiled. You've chosen not to go to college because you don't think you can make enough money to make it worth your while because you're not particularly ambitious. Poor baby. I suggest that you get used to slaving because that's your future -- and you've chosen it.
How old are you and isn't it about time you learned to not talk to people in such a condescending bullying way?
My father worked in a tannery. Do you have any idea what a tannery is like??? It's like the most noisome f$%#king place ever created!!! They used these nasty chemicals, carcinogens mostly, to remove the hair from the hides and to soften up the leather!!! My father was diagnosed with cancer 7 years after he retired and lingered for 2 years before he mercifully died. That tannery and its neighboring glue factory are closed now, but both are superfund sites. That's how toxic they are. Oh, yeah, and my dad's "cushy pension" was $95 a month. Watching our father slave in that tannery is the reason that my brothers and I all went to college and got non-factory jobs. We saw what it did to him.
I'm not saying everyone had great jobs and stuff back then but at least they didn't face the threat of no work and angry callous right wingers like yourself complaining that the jobless are just lazy and should magically find jobs that don't exist.
And BTW what decade was this? $95 50 years ago would be comparable to about $600 or so now, which is still paltry but considering the fact most non-tech things cost less back then it would be enough to live off of. Cushy no but hey my generation is lucky if we are even able to retire.
I think you guys are overromanticizing the present, to be honest. Not everyone in my generation is spoiled like you think - some of us still have to work through college. Many of us don't have parents that can afford to pay for it. I do, but I'm actually passing down the opportunity just because I can't find anything in college that is financially lucrative that I enjoy well enough to succeed at doing 40 hours a week (your choices are actually not that broad - tech and medicine are pretty much the only things worth going to college for).
Who made you the spokesperson for this generation?
My friends and I have all recently graduated (undergrad/ grad level) and almost all of us with some STEM education have had no trouble finding high paying jobs with great benefits (months after graduation).
The ones with Marketing/ Business type degrees have tougher time finding jobs, but it can be done if you are willing to go out of your comfort zone.
TECH and MEDICINE are two very broad categories with the most high paying jobs, and you very conveniently choose to ignore them. A lab-tech with a 2-year diploma could be working at hospital. Not everything requires a fancy 4 year college degree.
This is the year 2013, the Google era ... new age companies are making record profits and creating wealth and jobs for many. The internet revolution has changed the face of the job market. You have new IT companies sprouting up everywhere. Biotechnology companies everywhere.
Is there more competition? Sure. But I think you are highly mistaken if you think that those working multiple shifts in factories 50 years ago had it easier ...
What I see is something like the time when factories took over from farming as the dominant employer, and it left behind a large group of 'excess people' who might be your ancestors if they came, willingly or not, across the sea to the wilds of America.
What we're seeing is automation is wiping out many 'lower level' jobs. One place closed due to costs, but when they reopened it was with about twenty emplyees where there had been over a hundred. It was a warehouse and they put in robotic technology. Not only does the robot know where to go to retireve the order, but they always have an accurate inventory. The twenty people package the things the robot has retrieved.
And not all of us are made to work under stress and pressure. I worked as a programmer for a year and a half. I was laid off due to internal changes in the place, ie they 'thought' contract people were cheaper, but while it was devistating there was a huge layer of relief. I loved the work. But it had been fun and challenging before. But it took over my life and felt like I didn't have one. I didn't find another job like that, but I don't know if I would have lasted. I could do the work, but am not built to be pushed and pushed and pushed.
At one point the ex and I had a home business. I wish I could do that again. I've thought of even trying for night work at Walmart, stocking shelves and such for a bit of extra money. Oddly I think I'd be fine with that over something where someone is dictating to you all the time what to do.
I think we are leaving behind the people who work best in a back office with folders on their desk and nobody bothering them since today everything is becoming about how fast you can do it.
I did work at an assembly line job one day. Was let go. Was going to quit anyway. I can't do the speed game. I also lost one at macdees since I didn't snap to. But give me a problem and the tools and a deadline and leave me alone and I'll get it done.
My dad was an engineer on the Apollo project. He didn't go to college, just had raido and electronics experience in the military. They hired him and he got in on the beginning. Dad today would have to find a way to go to college and support his family and then hope there was a job out there for him.
Many people cannot afford to have kids as most good paying career jobs are in higher cost of living areas of the country that are extremely competitive. Also, with the exception of a few ultra conservative states many people are having far fewer children or none at all.
Welfare makes it easy for the least ambitious to have the most children. If you don't work, having babies is the easiest way to access the government handouts.
I got two good books recently by Charles Handy, a UK management guru (similar to Peter Drucker) about the future of work. The age of unreason and the age of paradox. They came out in 1990 and 1994.
He talks about "discontinuous" change. It's not continuous change anymore. Where you go from point a to point b in a straight line. He talks about the "shamrock organization", where companies basically learn to have a core middle staff (of highly paid people). Then they contract work out/temp work to the fringes. They have learned to do more with less. He said less than half of people will have full time jobs by the year, 2000. Hmmm.
-I think you have to redefine what it is to be an entrepreneur now. It use to be, before the internet (say before 1994), it would mean a small store or office, a few employees, overhead, products, etc. Not so now. Look how many options you have just on the internet. Who's to say that if you make $500 or $700 a month on amazon or ebay, you're not an "entrepreneur"?
-We're definitely in the "knowledge" economy. Regardless of what the government does or google or anyone.
Ugly truth. Change is hard for many people. Many people got left behind from the change from agriculture to more industrial work. I'm sure people out there know a grandfather type, raised on ag, never really embracing office work, or something more modern. I think its a similar thing now. If you're raised on factory work, its hard to do something different. I think we've had very radical change in the last 20 years. And not everyone knows how to take best advantage of it.
I'm not saying everyone had great jobs and stuff back then but at least they didn't face the threat of no work and angry callous right wingers like yourself complaining that the jobless are just lazy and should magically find jobs that don't exist.
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Whoaaaa,,,You throw out a topic and people respond. Then because some don't agree with your position you immediately attack and not debate. She made some great points. Be nice! Next time your threads may not be responded to.
Try the present. Ever since the economy went off the cliff, the only people who can get ahead or, in many cases, keep up, are those who have powerful connections, a lot of luck (looks, etc.), or who are willing to look a man in the eyes while sticking a knife in his back. We're already at that future, and it only gets worse from here without some major social changes.
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