There are a number of caveats to this. I appreciate that. But it is actually quite funny seeing this occur, across the "West", pretty much in most developed countries now, not just in the "Anglosphere"...
It's partially a consequence of 'Rona, and the government policies that various countries went for, in response to that. It's partially because of vaccine mandates. It's partly because, so we're told, a bunch of Boomers used 'Rona as the final push they needed, I guess, to retire, and get out. As a result of all that, though? Massive labour shortages, almost everywhere you look.
Media orgs and governments never admit this, but one of the only reasons that this situation can possibly exist is that young people are, increasingly, hugely overqualified, and are unwilling to take positions that they feel are somehow "beneath" them, or basically anything that they might consider "working class" or "unskilled"...
Previous to now, you also had employers not hiring people, because they were "overqualified" (amusingly, had that problem myself. Not anymore, lol), but now, most are seemingly so desperate that this excuse has gone out the window...
In essence though, in much of the world - the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, NZ, Germany, et al, society has spent the last 30-40 years telling young people that the only way to succeed is to: get a degree, probably get another degree, become a "professional" and fuck and/or backstab your way "to the top"...
No wonder young people have become so deluded as to think that manual labour, manufacturing, agriculture, whatever, is all beneath them. Especially when, in Australia at least, you still need to get qualifications, in order to do pretty much any of those jobs...
This was never sustainable. Nor were the ever-increasing levels of "student debt", across much of the West. Yet only now is it seemingly really coming home to roost, and still, it's pretty unlikely you will see anyone with power or influence admitting to any of this...
Personally, I can't wait until the day that this entire (economic, societal, political) house of cards comes crashing down.
One thing I've seen is that they're not "over qualified" they are "over credentialed".
The "qualifications" are so high that they are utterly unattainable by a normal human, and can only be met by someone with literally zero work experience.
I shit you not, one of these private schools had a job position open for a teacher who was:
That math don't fucking math. Someone who is a doctor and a lawyer has been in school for a long time, but has likely had decades of experience. But to go through 3 of those professions? It's insanity. To ask them for 2 years experience means they've never even held a professional position, and the wage certainly shows that.
It's just people packing credentials on credentials on credentials on credentials, all without work experience. That's a sign that these people are deep within the Social Justice Racket. No one ever actually did any work.
What's really sad is that even in the STEM field, people don't realize, Academic and Research positions in STEM? They're full. They've been full. Every time you saw a scientist say that we need more people in STEM? Yeah, either that was a lie or they didn't know. The US government has a strategic national objective to oversupply STEM in order to drive down the price of engineers, and also to push STEM into non-STEM fields. Most physics graduates don't work in physics... they work in finance. That's on purpose.
The college grad field is wildly oversupplied. But instead of admitting that colleges are flooding the labor market with the wrong labor, they just turned into over-priced diploma mills that produce bureaucrats and Social Justice Racketeers. The economic correction on this is gonna be real bad for all these people who have never really worked a day in their lives.
A lot of that is due to simple economic illiteracy among politicians and proles, which compound and enable whatever wealthy parasites setup. STEM degrees are pursued by millennials and zoomers since liberal arts bachelors no longer serve as general IQ tests for entry-level positions that pay more than unskilled labor. This started when morons thought restricting IQ tests, and other wishfully rationalized regulations necessitated the creation of HR departments in the first place, wouldn't result in a ballooning overhead and other poor tradeoffs.
Proles are always the most culpable for whatever dysfunction overtakes civilizations.
Not sure how it is for other people, but the stigma here (where I am) against people without degrees, below the age of say, 40, is enormous…
Like, unless you’re a seriously successful tradie (who, ironically, generally earn more than most of their degree-qualified peers), someone will openly look down on you, and may even say shit to your face, in my experience…
Even if, say, you own your own business or something…
Essentially, I think a lot of “the professional class” can’t even comprehend the idea that someone wouldn’t have at least a Bachelor’s… It’s just… Not even in the realm of their perception, lol…
Which is quite sad, but I suppose this is what you get when you teach arguably two successive generations that a degree is the only path to success, and basically make it “the new high school diploma”…
All of which, deliberately I suspect, increases pressure to raise immigration levels, in order to fill those “low skilled” jobs…
There’s no way that isn’t intentional. Much like how “native born” white people have stopped having children. Again, conspiratorial though it may be to suggest so, I really, really don’t think that is purely coincidental…
As Rev. Fulton Sheen said, university should be an intellectual privilege, not an economic necessity.
Big blue collar money, if you're willing to put up with it, is plumbing. No middle-class suburbanite wants to deal with sewer lines or waste water.
Frankly, all of the trades are perfectly fine.
If you can find an in demand manufacturing job, that can also pay good money. I am currently in talks (had the interview, trying to get a follow-up) with a local corporation to work in their machine shop building transmission cases. I may not necessarily know how to run those machines, but I did show I can do the math needed as well as work through logic problems that come with the work. Just the starting wage would be about $40k, and that is assuming no overtime (spoiler: there will be lots of overtime).
Of course, I realize that many areas may not have those sort of jobs since many local governments are hostile to them.
That's a good job. The career path around machining is actually quite lucrative. Especially if you tell people "yes I'm willing to travel and repair machines in other places" which is apparently a thing that no one wants to do anymore. Not sure why people hate traveling so much.
They don’t necessarily hate travelling. They hate “hard” (as in physical) work, lol…
Hence us becoming a society of blobs. We have every luxury imaginable (in general), and we’re not willing to work for any of it…
Sure, this doesn’t apply to some “professions” (medical, engineering), but a lot of people are just happy to take any highly-credentialed pen-pusher PMC job, these days…
“Management”. “HR”. “Public relations”. “Admin”. “Bureaucrat”. “Marketing”. “Compliance Officers”. “Oversight Committees”. “Board Members”. In fact, almost anything with “officer” in the job title, that is not military… Those are our overlords, and many of them don’t physically DO anything…
Yet those are the highly paid jobs. Not those roles which actually require physical effort, or indeed danger. This is the trouble…
Hence, a society of overpaid blobs, lol…
I don't entirely think we are a society of overpaid blobs. I think we just have a swath of overpaid bureaucratic parasites from the Social Justice Racket, weighing down the economy.
The reason we have to pay trade skills as much as they get is because of the shortage on tradesmen, and the oversupply of bureaucrats. However, those jobs, indeed: those industries, do exist.
Take our oil industry as a comparison. Nobody who works on an oil rig is just lazily or happily doing nothing all day, even the management. Part of how Trump got us to being energy independent is because we expanded the amount of offshore oil drilling we had very dramatically. While I'm sure the oil companies would love for Petroleum Engineers to be paid less that $150,000 /year starting salary, they do have people that can do it. At that wage, they can get the people they need.
Most of the time, that's really what most of these major companies mean by "labor shortage", they really mean "labor shortage at this wage". Most of the truly massive corporations would rather import 30 million people a year in the hope that some random number of those will end up working in their industry, rather than raising wages by $5 /hr, and the government agrees with them.
We wouldn't have to worry about cheap labor in America if Globalists hadn't decided that Communist Slave Labor systems should be the manufacturing source for all world commodities.
In this case there would be no travel because they do all of their machining in-house. However, they were struggling to get second shift workers, so I told them during the interview I would be open to that as a shift. Not exactly what I want, but it could be far worse for hours (4pm-2:30am specifically).
Yeah, that doesn’t sound too bad! That’s like, the same as some hospo hours. As long as you have reliable transport (which I assume you do), and the car park is secure and the like, I would be happy, in that situation, personally…
Oh yeah, I agree its not bad hours. I would have to slightly modify my normal life schedule, but not to an outrageous degree. And there is something to be said about the fact that I would be off work when most other people are at their jobs, so I can avoid busy hours.
EDIT: Actually, good news. As I was just finishing typing this, I saw that they sent me an email that they were going to hire me. And even on the day shift I was wanting as well.
Nice
I'm genuinely happy for you.
Tell me about it. I fix almost everything around my house not because I want to, but because the prices that damn near every tradesman charges are outrageous.
Patch a piece of already exposed, easily accessible copper 1/2" water supply line? $1500. One day's worth of patching up some old mortar on a chimney? $2000. Run a trencher to lay down a new water main? $4000.
It's nuts. And it's because everybody out here has more money than sense.