Posted on 11/24/2025 8:33:12 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Last week a radio host in Salt Lake City asked me a question I didn’t expect. We’d been talking about my “jobs Americans won’t do” article, which kind of kicked the anthill, and everything stayed within the usual lanes: illegal immigration, wages, hiring incentives, hollowed-out towns. Then, at the very end, he asked the only question that really matters:
“So how do we fix it?”
Not describe it or rant about it. Fix it.
My answer, essentially, was, "It's complicated." There isn’t a bumper-sticker answer. And there certainly isn’t a partisan one. The problem goes much deeper than illegal immigration, though illegal immigration made it far worse. The truth is brutal: We didn’t just lose workers. We lost a generation of training.
Kids stopped working. Old pros retired with no apprentices. And the entire ladder of skill transfer, the thing that turns kids into competent working adults, collapsed. Even if every illegal worker disappeared tomorrow, the skills wouldn’t magically reappear. You can’t fill a gap with people who were never trained to climb into it.
This is where the conversation really begins.
To understand why “Americans won’t do these jobs,” you have to start with the fact that millions of Americans never learned how to work in the first place. Not because they’re lazy, but because the culture that used to teach work simply vanished.
For decades, teens worked bagging groceries, bussing tables, mowing lawns, babysitting, or stocking shelves at the IGA. They gained skills and moved up into more responsible positions, all before college, and they saved money to go to college instead of taking out horrifyingly expensive college loans.
These weren’t demeaning jobs; they were developmental ones. They taught punctuality, resilience, communication, and responsibility.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
FROM THE AUTHOR:
While teens were drifting out of the workforce, older workers, the masters of their trades, were losing their apprentices. Construction, agriculture, landscaping, roofing, plumbing, electrical, hospitality, you name it — one industry after another abandoned training in favor of illegal labor that was cheaper, easier, and instantly available. And when a trained worker retires with no apprentice behind him, the skill dies with him.
You cannot grow a skilled workforce without a ladder.
Our educational class had deliberately sabotaged the labor force through socialism and socialist programs.
Another excuse to bring in Indians to work for lower wages.
Teenagers used to staff McDonalds.
Here in California, it’s now mostly middle aged Mexicans.
For them it’s a career.
I remember the Hall of Fame baseball announcer Ernie Harwell saying all the sports people on radio and TV used to say “And (the player) works in construction during the off season” or whatever job they had. One of the players was a grave digger, I remember.
But then they started making so much money by the 1980s that very few needed another job.
Another trend:
Teenage boys used to come up to neighbors and offer to mow the lawns (or shovel snow) for money.
I remember my late mother in law asked every young kid in the surrounding blocks if they would do these for her and every one refused since they didn’t need the money and it was too much work.
Those professional companies with pickup trucks and trailers and several (usually immigrant) workers using rider mowers,. weed whackers and leaf blowers signed up under contracts for that work since those days.
Into this mess, the elite class, particularly reporters and politicians, offered the most tone-deaf slogan of the digital age:
“Learn to code.”
It was the 21st-century version of “let them eat cake.”
The idea that millions of displaced workers — welders, truckers, carpenters, machinists — could simply become software engineers was always ridiculous. Many weren’t capable of the job — not stupid, just with minds that work a different way.
The whole push for a college education is also partially responsible for it.
Instead of encouraging kids to go into trades, they all had to have college educations to get anywhere in life.
TPTB did a great job of killing our pool of homegrown skilled workers, giving the left the perfect excuse to import foreigners, particularly illegals, who are far easier to cheat of good wages.
And we swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
For anyone out there interested in a good, steady (six figure as I understand it) income, the trades are still looking for skilled, dependable workers with a good work ethic.
And illegals.
It’s also that kids are not taught how to run a home
No one’s home. When the kids get home at 6PM they have to do homework and eat. That’s it
They don’t come home at 3. Help mom. Ge with the kids in the neighborhood. See other moms running their homes
We knew what was going on in the homes around us we talked. The mothers were out gardening or in the kitchen or smoking a cigareetreading the paper They had us helping out
I knew how to polish silver, cerium drapery, bake and frost a cake, plant tulip bulbs, wash windows with vinegar, sew, taper, hem, clean a fridge with baking soda, how to shop, cook,
The boys knew how to - how to fortify a house helped do, put up a fence, any yard work, take out stumps, till a garden, get a fire going. Get rid of vermin, basic plumbing
Now kids play videos. They’re given a calculator in grade school- none till college! They don’t learn to speak to others face to face
Homes are abandoned. Kids are abandoned.
Skills are learned first in the home.
Our system has taken off the entire week for T’giving. Same
for Veterans Day.
When do they even teach? If at all?
You cannot grow a skilled workforce without a ladder.
***************************
True.
Which is why many corporations are going be hitting economic icebergs as we proceed through decade.
They had a model that worked for years and are welded to that model.
Smart leadership would spot the problems over the horizon, but many of these people aren’t very smart.
Practically, not EVERYONE can code. The job market would be beyond saturated.
If everyone coded, then where would anything else be? It takes more than one career field to keep this country running.
“For anyone out there interested in a good, steady (six figure as I understand it) income, the trades are still looking for skilled, dependable workers with a good work ethic.”
Hmmmmmm.... six figures eh.... believe I could un-retire for 5-10 years then retire again to enjoy my later years. Mighty tempting it is.
I wouldn’t just blame what the author describes, people in specific areas and then expanding more and more wanted cheaper labor. Adults chose to not teach their kids and any kids in their daily lives the value of having high school jobs.
The govt in Regan years pushed war on drugs and it started making kids more aware of drugs and i think in Clinton years it became more rebellious like any forbidden thing, and I think the Clinton years also pushed college education “NEEDED” for better jobs, income. After 9-11, there was more fear in people in ways and it morphed into life is short, party. Creating even more teens etc not entering early into workforce.
Kind of a status symbol of adults wanting to provide first car for kids instead of kids working to earn. Just like multiple decades of kids having their own room growing up and sometimes big rooms. Late part of last century focus on trying to achieve an appearance of status, big house,more vacations etc. Now some of those who bought big are passing, and kids don’t want it, but foreigners are scarfing up all they can be it work or houses.
PARTICIPATION TROPHIES:
TAUGHT KIDS THAT THEY JUST HAD TO “SHOW UP” TO GET A REWARD.
WORKING OR GAINING ANY SKILLS WAS LEFT OUT OF THE EQUATION
DUh!
Who needs "Reading", "Writing", and "Arithmetic"...
There has been no room in K-!2 and College for wasted skills like those within the government's efficient indoctrination system over the past 60 years...
The peasantry population must be maintained and reproduced...
Those trades only became professions when we were building out an entire modern country after the invention of electricity and the automobile. Once it was built, they didn't need all those tradesmen. Many were laid off and their replacements never hired.
They weren't renovating Section 8 housing in failed Democrat cities, they were building new modern buildings and houses. Now, it's mostly underfunded renovations done on a seasonal basis.
Your grandfather earned a nice living as an electrician, wiring up entire communities. Your father started with some new construction but finished his career doing renovations part time. Your electrical work is part time for renovation jobs with some new construction mixed in here and there.
It's the same with plumbers, carpenters, masons, etc.
Most fast food jobs didn't exist until the 1970s. The kids were filling in for a new industry. It was only a matter of time before such jobs would be taken over.
In many places, there simply aren't enough teenagers to fill those jobs.
In addition, the banker, the landlord, and the tax man want their cut.
ICE is publicly advertising jobs. That’s a start.
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