[thackney]

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[GeronL]

There are 95 million unemployed in this country, there is no shortage.

[Artie]

“Dow is investing billions on a massive new ethylene cracker”

As an aging white male, I could possibly construe the preceding as a racist statement. Help me Al Sharpton!

[Gen.Blather]

I’m 60 with two college degrees, one in engineering and one in business. I have a good resume and interview well. A head hunter told me I’d need to take a competency test before he could send me to a particular client. It included fractions and logic problems as well as reading comprehension. Most of it was grammar school level with only a handful of problems that were high school level. When I spoke to the head hunter about it he told me that virtually all of the candidates from the local “historically black” college had failed the test. Many others with college degrees had also failed, but in lesser amounts. The test had dramatically reduced the client’s turnover. As an aside he told me that he believed that if the test went to court it would be ruled racially discriminatory.

The entire idea behind public education was to prepare illiterate farm hands to work in the industrial revolution. Even as society has become more complex the education system has dumbed down its product to the point they are not capable of working. All they are capable of doing is filling out welfare forms and voting Democrat.

[WayneS]

I’m tired of being a civil engineer. Where do I sign up?

[Moonman62]

Most likely these aren’t real apprenticeships, but a devious plan to pay even less to new hires.

[Sequoyah101]

these are good, usually long lasting, steady jobs. The “refinery and chemical” zones where these plants are are full of nice homes with man-cave barns and boats and campers and people with vacation time to use them and what appear to be prosperous retirees.

[JoeFromSidney]

In the summer after my freshman year in college I took a job in a steel mill. I ended up working with the brick-layer gang in the open hearth part of the mill. The workers rebuilt the furnaces after each heat of steel, and lined the big ladles with firebricks when they were eroded away. The mill had an apprentice program for brick-layers. There were a lot of young guys in the apprentice program, and they had a career track ahead of them as bricklayers in the mill. Unfortunately for them, brickwork in a steel mill is different from brickwork in construction, so they couldn't get jobs as bricklayers outside the steel industry. However, once they finished their apprenticeships, the pay was good and they'd have jobs as long as the plant existed.

The apprentices were mostly high school graduates, with a smattering of college graduates. I was one of the few literate men among the bricklayers, so they made me timekeeper. It was really a "nothing" job, just keeping records and pushing paper, but it was something I could do easily. However, there was no future in it. Had I stayed with it, I could never have become a supervisor because I lacked bricklaying skill. The apprentices, even though many of them could have handled the job, wouldn't have wanted the job. They wanted the career track as a bricklayer, eventually leading to supervisory position.

I returned to college at the end of the summer. However, I consider that job to have been an important part of my "out of school" education.