Teacher shortage, construction worker shortage....
Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers.
This article acts like it's a giant mystery as to why this is the case.
Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers.
This article acts like it's a giant mystery as to why this is the case.
The article tosses unemployment stats. However (like every article that does that), it doesn't mention that BLS's official unemployment figure is ~20 percentage points lower than the actual number of unemployed[1]. This means there are many more millions who could benefit from those jobs but have no realistic access to them.
> Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers.
The folks flocking to well-paying jobs are typically folks who have have paid-for college - and enough cash on hand to get established where the job is. Without both of those things, the odds of high-paying tech/finance/medical employment is fairly low.
[1] If you take the total number of 16-64 working ft & pt and subtract it from the total number of 16-64, you are left with a 20% difference. Officially, this 20% is neither employed nor unemployed.
note: BLS counts people who are self-employed and people who work w/o wages (eg: cargiving) as employed. ref: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
A significant portion of the remainder 20% are stay at home mom/dad with no desire for a full time job.
We could make some fairly simple formula like "The minimum annual pay must be at least 10% of the median house price" - the percentage can be whatever but then it automatically changes each year based on the housing market, and would help ensure that people can live near there job, which also has a side benefit of saving a bunch of time/energy on commuting
Not to say classism is solely or even largely responsible, but it must surely play a part.
If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class and if you get paid through your investments alone such as owning stock or a company then you are a member of the capital owning class.
Retirement funds and investment funds are there so workers feel like there's less of a distinction between themselves and the class they are beholden to even though that truly isn't the case
A PM for a tech company, most FAANG ICs, a doctor who doesn't have an ownership stake in the practice they work for, an enterprise salesman, a wall street trader all work for someone else and NONE of them are working class for the purposes of this discussion.
There are huge social and cultural gulfs between the top, middle and bottom and they each have their own distinct cultures and there is natural conflict that stems from that (I would go so far as to say "most" does). Obviously some people manage to straddle the lines but the gulfs are very much there.