These types of jobs eventually burn out your body.
You used to be able to buy a house and grow a family on these wages, and eventually retire. With that no longer being the case, why would anyone with choice choose this option?
You used to be able to buy a house and grow a family on these wages, and eventually retire. With that no longer being the case, why would anyone with choice choose this option?
So.
Generally speaking, the old pension plans are only for those grandfathered in, new pay scales are lower, and hours to get better service time and benefits are higher.
Also, watch what companies do in terms of carving off subsidiaries with more of their retirees for intentional bankruptcy (see Patriot Coal). Those benefits will be cut in chapter 11 and then offloaded to the PBGC to be paid by the public.
He's lost his hearing, but that's genetic; nothing to do with his labor.
No company in your industry has ever offered you anything like his union pension, because no companies in any industry (excepting maybe railroads?) offer anything like his union pension. They all stopped doing it some time between him and you.
The young people of today can't go back in time to when your dad was the same age. They have to take the jobs that are offered now. And the companies of now have worked very hard to bust the union influence of the past, so that they can offer crap pay and crap benefits, and shovel most of the risks of working the job onto the worker.
Young people are taking one look at that, and deciding to not even take one step down that career path. All this tells me is that young people are not as stupid as companies assumed them to be. The companies offering jobs that don't balance remuneration with worker risk then have to rely on workers with lower expectations, which is to say immigrants from countries with lower quality-of-life norms. They don't look at the work by judging the job in relation to other jobs in the US, but by comparing it to a similar job in their country of origin, and finding that it is X% better. Then the political scene changes, those workers start to dry up, and the companies are screwed--or, more accurately, hoist on their own petards.