Service industry.
>>Service industry.
That tired old cliche? I don’t know if you realize this, but most everything we buy is disposable because repair costs more than new and last year’s model doesn’t have the features that this year’s model has. When we do want to repair it, we balk at the cost of hourly labor and the markup on parts, so we go the internet to buy the part and then install it ourselves.
If a person in a service industry, such as utility company, makes good money and benefits, the “free marketeers” here call them thugs and accuse them of wrecking the economy.
Finally, we as a society look down on service workers because they “failed” to move up into something that we decide is meaningful. Our “lawn guy”, “pool guy”, barber, “nail lady”, etc are expendable if they make one mistake or someone else comes along and undercuts their price by a couple dollars. We demand that they be “competitive” by lowering their price with no regard to how good their service has been over the years.
The service industry can absorb a certain percentage of the underclass, but many of them will feel poor and under-appreciated and will join the non-working poor in their demands for government “fairness”.
20% of working age Americans and their dependents are already beneficiaries of one or more government poverty programs. With the continuing loss of blue collar (manufacturing) jobs, such government dependence will only continue to increase.
And these so-called free trade agreements that mostly increase the access of US transnationals to the world's cheapest labor, and provide almost tariff free access back to the US market, assure that working class jobs and wages will continue to decrease and government dependency will increase on and on.
As has already been said, this is a formula for more and more socialism voted in by those who can no longer find jobs that provide a middle class standard of living.