Quote:
Originally Posted by madison999
Wisconsin is not the Bible Belt.
Nafta most certainly affected my life negatively. You retired when I was getting started. I’m glad you got the good years but to turn around and take your position towards younger people is asinine.
Enjoy your pension. Must be a nice thing.
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I wasn't referring to Wisconsin in that statement. I was referring to NAFTA effects first hitting Canadian workers with little choice but to go along with Washingtons's demand for an agreement or no favoured trader status for Canada.
Before you accuse me of taking a position towards younger workers in general please do your research.
Read something other than Trump sound bites. The rise in technology and the relative education of various countries is what you're fighting; not these deals with your immediate neighbors.
Do you know that India graduates more mechanical engineers each year than American universities TOTAL graduations? Can you imagine a country that puts it's technology training at the top of it's priority list and does not force it's students to go into massive debt to attend it's Universities?......That's what you young people are now competing with.
Visit your own silicon valley and observe the numbers of foreign workers. Why are they so prevalent? Because they're being churned out by the thousands in other countries valuing an education above all else and making it cheap to attain.
I and my older brother were virtually indoctrinated by a WWII, 4 year overseas veteran who demanded we prepare for a world requiring innovative thinking ...his mantra was "skilled trades" and "pension savings". He literally beat that into us at every sit down mealtime. We listened ...and both of us thank him with every breath we take now.
As a life-long tradesman holding certificates in three trades; general machinist, heavy/marine diesel mechanic and 4th class stationary engineer. I was never unemployed and all three availed me the opportunity to hold two jobs at alternating shifts for decades of my work-life. That was occasioned by me realizing that skills in more than one discipline would add to my personal marketability. I made sure when employed that 4-6% of every pay cheque went into a registered defined benefit pension plan.
Those days are gone now as when I was able to work all day as a machinist in a factory, then at end of shift, report to the power house of the same factory to stand boiler and compressor watches all night on a rotating basis …...automatic systems and outside contracting to maintain them have all but done away with old style boiler rooms providing heat, refridgeration and compressed air needing people hands on.
You are up against CNC machines that can do in seconds what it took me days to perform on a variety of machine tools with multiple set-ups. Now a machine gets a fixture installed to locate one or more pieces, pre-set tooling installed in a delivery device and the operator selects one of a bunch of programs stored in a database that might be miles away from the machine itself, et-voila. He then walks to the next machine while that one goes about it's business without him.
In 1967 I attended a course of Numerical Control at Ryerson Polytech in Toronto, Canada to learn how to program such equipment. I could see the writing on the wall even then....As part of the course we were flown to the IBM complex in Endicott NY where we got to watch in an overhead amphitheatre as a technician dialed up a computer on King St, in Toronto, Canada put the hand set in a receiver base, listened to a fax tone and watch a four axis milling machine start up and machine a part being told what to do by a dang computer in Toronto a few hundred miles away.
Griping at the progress made is akin to pizzing into the wind. Demanding jobs come back to a labour pool costing any manufacture more to produce anything you can name is the stuff of forcing that maker out of business by the death of a thousand cuts. He will not compete and your own citizens will knot the noose by buying a quality built product that costs less but is made in Indonesia by a guy making half the money but getting all his other things paid for, such as healthcare and advanced secondary schooling for his kids.
Screaming and political rhetoric by a pandering, vote-seeking politician that flies in the face of logic and reason might make you feel better in the short term but does nothing for your childrens future in the long term.
I'm sorry, but that's the reality of the day and your country led the whole parade. Adapt or fail; your choice.
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