By Mark Rhoads –
Since the election on Nov. 8, liberal Democrats and their allies in elite media and colleges have talked about their failure and Donald Trump's success in reaching out to "working families." Their definition of a working person is apparently limited only to someone who has a job in a factory.
But what we used to call "white collar" workers with some college or technical school education also work hard to provide for their families. Working hard to earn an education with advanced skills is very demanding and is no less difficult because it is brain work instead of muscle work.
The challenge of keeping jobs in the United States is not only competition with cheaper labor in other countries, but it is also a challenge of modernizing plants and constant vocational training for new jobs that did not exist in the past.
Many jobs of the 1970s and 1980s will never come back because the world economy has moved on. Really honest labor leaders understand that but continue to hold on to the rhetoric of the past as they look for villains to blame everywhere but in the union headquarters offices.
Americans who hold fast to a work ethic for their families can still make new products, but they are different kinds of products than in the past and workers who make them need new skills.
No, it’s actually not, Mark. As somebody who has observed white collars and blue collars, I can attest that it’s a lot easier to be lazy in white collar, a heck of a lot easier even, than it is in blue collar. Laziness sticks right out in blue collar, but in white collar I’ve seen men get Ph.Ds on company time. Blue collars didn’t create cyber Monday, web surfing white collars created it. Yeah, web surfing on company time. Try that on the line; you could lose your arm. Also, according to the exit polls people with two-year technical degrees, the “some college” category, were among the strongest Trump voters. Also, blue collars are a lot more likely to be fired than white collars, even lazy white collars, because of field saturation.
Also, white collars get a degree of job protection because they and their fellows consider themselves a kind of elite group, and a certain amount of “cover me, and I’ll cover you” mentality exists.
When one actually does get fired, he gets a favorable (or at least a luke-warm) recommendation to pass on to his next employer. I see this as an illustration of the elite insider attitude.
I didn’t even want to demean white collars in my comment. No doubt, there are some very hard working AND talented white collars. But this “holier than thou” that we’ve repeatedly heard for the last year and a half is pure nonsense and this “blue collars aren’t white collars because they didn’t work hard enough” is a lie.
I’m white collar and I’ll guarantee you I work harder than every single one of these useless blue collar city employees. Want to stand out as a city employee? Do something. Anything. You’d be the only one. And probably get fired for it.
Very true. But state teachers are white collar and a whole bunch of them have “post-grad” degrees. The bureaucracy is full of comparable examples in administration, regulation, law, and, yes, NASA.
What good is “vocational training” for American workers and American kids, when the NWO Republicans, like Rhoads and Cong. Peter Roskam are calling for more and more (176,000 this year) H-1B visas whereby foreign 3rd world workers are allowed into our country – to fill those jobs – at a fraction of American sustainable salaries.
And often – the displaced American workers are forced to train their foreign immigrant displacements.
That is why the mainstream GOP is now a joke.
But fortunately – we have Donald Trump.
Ted Cruz did have one of the other great lines in debate last year: if illegal aliens were state teachers, professors, lawyers, corporates, entertainers or lobbyists the “immigration” debate would be very, very different in this country. Limits would all of a sudden become particularly popular and very socially “acceptable.” There wouldn’t be a debate, really.