A Disturbing Change In US Culture

People who do skilled labor as dissed by today’s culture.

As a result, in an all-out Depression, employers are finding it difficult to find skilled labor. Here’s a guy who is somewhat of an expert on the subject.

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/2012/09/the-first-four-years-are-the-hardest/

This is his letter to Governor Romney. Normally I don’t quote the entire text but it needs closer scrutiny by the forum, as many just won’t follow a link.

Quote:
“Dear Governor Romney,
My name is Mike Rowe and I own a small company in California called mikeroweWORKS. Currently, mikeroweWORKS is trying to close the country’s skills gap by changing the way Americans feel about Work. (I know, right? Ambitious.) Anyway, this Labor Day is our 4th anniversary, and I’m commemorating the occasion with an open letter to you. If you read the whole thing, I’ll vote for you in November.

First things first. mikeroweWORKS grew out of a TV show called Dirty Jobs. If by some chance you are not glued to The Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 10pm, allow me to visually introduce myself. That’s me on the right, preparing to do something dirty.
When Dirty Jobs premiered back in 2003, critics called the show “a calamity of exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.” They weren’t exactly wrong. But mostly, Dirty Jobs was an unscripted celebration of hard work and skilled labor. It still is. Every week, we highlight regular people who do the kind of jobs most people go out of their way to avoid. My role on the show is that of a “perpetual apprentice.” In that capacity I have completed over three hundred different jobs, visited all fifty states, and worked in every major industry.
Though schizophrenic and void of any actual qualifications, my resume looks pretty impressive, and when our economy officially crapped the bed in 2008, I was perfectly positioned to weigh in on a variety of serious topics. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called to ask what I thought about the “counter-intuitive correlation between rising unemployment and the growing shortage of skilled labor.” CNBC wanted my take on outsourcing. Fox News wanted my opinions on manufacturing and infrastructure. And CNN wanted to chat about currency valuations, free trade, and just about every other work-related problem under the sun.
In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.
Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)
Which brings me to my purpose in writing. On Labor Day of 2008, the fans of Dirty Jobs helped me launch this website. mikeroweWORKS.com began as a Trade Resource Center designed to connect kids with careers in the skilled trades. It has since evolved into a non-profit foundation – a kind of PR Campaign for hard work and skilled labor. Thanks to a number of strategic partnerships, I have been able to promote a dialogue around these issues with a bit more credibility than my previous resume allowed. I’ve spoken to Congress (twice) about the need to confront the underlying stigmas and stereotypes that surround these kinds of jobs. Alabama and Georgia have both used mikeroweWORKS to launch their own statewide technical recruitment campaigns, and I’m proud to be the spokesman for both initiatives. I also work closely with Caterpillar, Ford, Kimberly-Clark, and Master Lock, as well as The Boy Scouts of America and The Future Farmers of America. To date, the mikeroweWORKS Foundation has raised over a million dollars for trade scholarships. It’s modest by many standards, but I think we’re making a difference.
Certainly, we need more jobs, and you were clear about that in Tampa. But the Skills Gap proves that we need something else too. We need people who see opportunity where opportunity exists. We need enthusiasm for careers that have been overlooked and underappreciated by society at large. We need to have a really big national conversation about what we value in the workforce, and if I can be of help to you in that regard, I am at your service – assuming of course, you find yourself in a new address early next year.
To be clear, mikeroweWORKS has no political agenda. I am not an apologist for Organized Labor or for Management. mikeroweWORKS is concerned only with encouraging a larger appreciation for skilled labor, and supporting those kids who are willing to learn a skill.
Good luck in November. And thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Mike Rowe
PS. In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I wrote a similar letter to President Obama. Of course, that was four years ago, and since I never heard back, I believe proper etiquette allows me to extend the same offer to you now. I figure if I post it here, the odds are better that someone you know might send it along to your attention.

Taxcutter says:
If you are too good to be a high-voltage lineman or coal miner or auto mechanic or oil driller maybe that’s the reason you can’t find work. Maybe a society that respected such people would be more prosperous.

Apparently Romney read the letter.

https://twitter.com/dgjackson/status/243872112580907008

https://twitter.com/mikeroweworks/status/244494476989575169

Why is it that counterproductive bureaucrats make twice as much as auto mechanics or oil drillers? Is that not a great deal of the problem?

 

This:

Hits the nail on the head. It's a problem that predates the Obama admin, but one that seems to be getting worse.

The emphasis, IMO, needs to be on:

1) Improvement to the quality of education received in primary and high schools.

2) More emphasis on vocational education through partnering with business and via two-year community colleges.

3) Revisit public school funding. Impoverished neighborhoods don't have the economic base to properly support their schools, which just perpetuates a cycle of underserved students and poverty. Privatization of the school system does nothing to address this issue.

Skilled labor still requires workers who are educated. It should not be regarded as a dumping ground for "losers".

Moreover, when people can't advance without a piece of paper from a four year college regardless of their acquired knowledge and skills, something is very, very wrong.

 

Blue collar work has been stigmatized for decades by the left and Academia as "work for stupid people". To them, it's far better to major in some worthless liberal arts field like "Gender Studies" and "Women's History". How ironic is it that these same highly educated liberal elites are now graduating with tens of thousands in school debt, are unable to find jobs, and have to move back in with their parents? The only ones who are pretty much guaranteed to find a job nowadays are highly skilled workers.

 

If anyone has a job in: Savannah GA, Montana, Wyoming, or Arizona, I'll take it. And I'm appealing to the posters on this board.

I will clean (*)(*)(*)(*), do data entry, or even pick berries.

As long as I got to live in one of the places I've always dreamed of.

'no excuses', right?

 

Hopefully Obama work kill the coal mines in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. You can get a job there.

 

Mike Rowe is a great fella, but nobody in this country respects work anyway. The only things that gets respect is sit-back-and-watch CAPITAL gain.

 

you left out truck drivers
http://www.king5.com/news/business/...-cylinders-in-Washington-state-168992146.html

 

Indeed trucking is doing well. Every trailer I see advertises for CDL holders.

Railroads are doing well, to. They are screaming for people to drive that train.

 

Mike Rowe is awesome, and I believe that he has hit the nail on the head.

And to the person above who tried to make this a "Liberal mindset" problem. ITs a problem that infects all of society. Not just one segment.


I am an avid watcher of Dirty Jobs. And although I am a white collar worker myself in the financial industry, I watch these shows, and see how hard these people work, and often think to myself "It may seem a simple job, but I bet those people are far more often satisfied in a hard days work than I am"

 

Good for you, man. The door is open for you.

 

Liberals don't respect work. That's why they don't have a job.

 

Yes it is...so long as you know somebody who knows somebody that knows an accountant, or a CEO.

 

I hear that. My brother in law is a journeyman electrician and he is a lot happier doing what he does than I am.

 

Conservatives don't respect work either. That's why their corporate heroes pay the actual workers so poorly. No respect. Just profit, and lots of it.

 

That's because they usually pay peanuts (<35 cents/mile) and run the drivers ragged! Drivers for many of those big outfits would be better off flipping burgers.

 

Absolutely correct. I know people who are truck drivers. The pay ain't so great these days. With the price of diesel, and the whole corporate climate of cut, cut, cut and take, take, take, I'm surprised anybody wants to drive a truck any more. Seems no method of work today warrants any decent pay though, not just truck drivers. The CEO's do very well though. Their message to all of us seems to be "it's all theirs, they EARNED it, be happy I don't lay you off and be happy you have a job that pays anything at all....now get back to work and make me more profit". Our country is so completely screwed up I doubt it will last another year without major collapses and/or massive civil unrest. The haves and the have nots are sooooo far apart in their ideologies and I can't see them coming together. We are a nation divided for sure....and divided nations fall, as we will soon.

 

Saw a interesting story related to this telling new unemployed college grads to log off facebook, and go learn some practical skills, explaining this is what people did with their time before TV. learned new skills like reading a measuring tape, turning a wrench, using tools to specification, ect.

 

Yeah your hostility to this is consistent. It is calling for government to play a role improving training and skills. As we know conservatives don't approve of government intervening in the economy like this.

You need to make your mind up about one thing though. Are we all welfare bums or running effete liberal corporate America?

This is a very sensible thread which you attempt to make into flamebait by your obsession with liberals. Tell me, do "ideas" interest you at all?

 

Is this where the invisible hand swats and misses?

Back in the 1970s in parts of Australia there was a huge change in the education system where high schools ceased to educate people who would leave school and become tradespeople. Schools which had educated people for university or teachers college or for further vocational education (I think in the US you used to call it VoEd - you had some excellent centres of research and learning in Vocational Education, I have used their materials in my own education) but I don't know if they still exist. We - Australia - sort of looked down on vocational education. Biiiiiiiiiig mistake!

Even today we have a shortage of qualified tradespeople in various occupations (and too many in others) which means that wages can - if it were not for the industrial relations system here - force up wages and therefore produce inflationary pressures. But given that we grew our colleges of technical and further education (in the US they would be seen as community colleges) things could have been worse.

The problem with allowing the market to dictate needed occupations is that there is a lag. Some of our more advanced technical colleges experimented with competency-based education and turned out competent tradespeople without being wedded to the usual apprenticeship time-line. Unfortunately I don't think that was followed up widely, which is a shame.

Maybe workforce planning is something that government could do as a service to the community. Businesses are too busy trying to compete to think about things such as workforce planning across a whole society.

 

I am a liberal. I have a job. ( and in fact have not been WITHOUT a job for the last.... 23 years now.

Based on this fact above, I feel safe in saying this. Your not being honest here.

 

trucking doesn't have a hiring problem, it has a retention problem. no one tells these new guys that they're going to need rubber boots to wade thru the BS they'll encounter daily.

 

I was just talking to someone today about how hard it is to find skill workers. The pay is good and most jobs have benefits. It is the welfare queens that don't want to work. Obama is offering 24 months on the take now and it will get worse. Get off your butt and learn to do something besides complain, most of us don't want to hear it.

 

Government workforce planning was a feature of the old USSR.

Great reason to reject government "workforce planning."

 

Historically all societies start as an agrarian society then move to industry and finally reach their summit by turning into a corporate/services type of economy. In short, you are either developed, developing, or under-developed. The United States is a developed nation and we live in a truly global economy, your Nikes are made in China, your undies are made in Guatemala and your towels are made in Bangladesh. It is human nature to purchase goods that are cost effective, I am sure there are stores that sell American made underwear but is the average American really going to buy underwear that is 5 dollars more expensive than the cheaper brand?

Now what implications does this have? If you are an American do you want to spend the rest of your life in America? Im guessing you do whether you are a republican or a democrat; I doubt you want to pursue your dream of becoming a shoe factory owner unless you are willing to relocate to China, that is if China really wants a free-thinking shoe factory owner, which i doubt. Therefore, what do we do? We get on with life, go to college and enroll in majors that allow us to obtain jobs in THIS country.

Now the letter is impressive but someone should point out to this guy that if you want jobs in other sectors they haven't disappeared, they have just been out-sourced. Sure you can get that job as a blacksmith or a textile engineer but are you willing to relocate to China or India? Ask yourself that question. If the answer is NO then don't complain about the current state of American culture and call it "disturbing." There is nothing disturbing about buying cheap underwear that comes from other nations, it is inherently human, waste not.. The blue collar jobs are always going to be around, but are you willing to relocate to countries that have these jobs is the question?

 

The left has been selling the myth of the 'Free Lunch' as a right for decades. As they control the media, that idea has been served for decades...Idiots believe it today and reality is horrifying to too many folk.