Originally posted by phil conrad
At this time I am very glad that I have a trade. I work as a locksmith. It seems like it will hard to get this done from afar. Seriously I think this country has lost sight of the importance of people who work as trades people. We may not be the smartest but we seem to work every day for a lot more than minimum wage.
Amen brother. And I'm speaking as somebody who DOESN'T have a trade, so to speak. When I went off to college more than ten years ago, my father wanted to give me some capital to start up my own residential painting business here in Northern NJ. Alwyas had a talent for it, and genuininely enjoyed doing it (used to do it through summers, etc). But I said "BAH, I shall go to college, graduate with a degree in English and spend my days sitting atop a tree stump writing poetry and what not".
Boy, looking back, I think the painting would have been a good bet. Nobody (at least in my general vicinity) does any of their own work on their houses anymore. Two income families with kids - they just don't have the time (or perhaps the interest) in getting their hands dirty, and contractors are cleaning up. I envy people who are involved in trades - plumbers, electricians, you name it - they are laughing all the way to the bank. In fact, most of the largest homes in my neighborhood are owned not by CEO's and CFO's, but by landscapers and contractors.
That's not to say that my wife and I haven't done very well for ourselves and we certainly wouldn't trade our college educations for all the money in the world - I've been in telecom for 8 years on the sales side, and it's paid very well and I definitely use elements of my degree every day. But the one thing that I really don't have and may never have is job security. Hell, I was laid off TWICE by large companies by the time I was 25.
Needless to say, after investigating many career changes in the past two years, it looks like I may be starting that painting business anyway (at least on a part-time basis). And when my kid grows up, I will definitely instill in him/her the value of learning a trade.
And I think this country is going to find itself in a pickle in years to come - we have no manufacturing anymore, and now we're outsourcing tech jobs to India. That will come back to bite us in the *ss, because while I see "potential" cost savings and higher profits for some companies (again, the outsourcing argument is really not black and white), the wealth generated by this outsourcing will LINE THE POCKETS OF BOARD MEMBERS and will not trickle down to consumers in the form of lower prices, etc. And at the end of the day, we lose jobs and create no new ones.
People say that my generation is living better than my parents did, but I think that's a load of crap. I may have more "stuff", but I don't have the quality of life that my parents enjoyed growing up.
Sorry for the rant.
Rich
- granted, at least YOU would be going along with it, and eventually you and it would come back to the USA!
