Wonderful blog, David. Yeah, the nobility of work. My Stepdad always amazed me - he was a pipe fitter and welder, strong Union man. He was a champ on laying beads on a 60" steel pipeline - they used to time each other for the hell of it. But when the aerospace industry got underway, the engineers had no idea how to build the stuff on their drawing boards. The tradesmen had to figure it out, and the solutions were creative and sophisticated. Inductive brazing? Invented by welders at Cape Kennedy. Amazing process, feeding thin spooled wires of different metal alloys into a high strength gas weld that would hold against a Titan missile blast.

Today the real question is class and poverty, not race.

Great post, David. This line in particular has me thinking very deeply this morning.

Thanks for this post.

Great blog, David.

The heart of the matter is that America's once proud working class, both white and black, is being transformed, has been transformed...

I would argue one of the reasons for this is the disappearance of vocational/technical tracks in high schools along with wood and metal shop in middle schools.

Recently I went to a local jeweler whose family business has been around for years. He and I got to talking and discovered we attended the same middle school. He lamented our school no longer offers metal shop which was where he found his calling.

College prep has completely supplanted vocational/technical training in the secondary schools where I reside. Education reform has to revitalize those programs.

It's a disservice to kids to force those who have no intention or interest in a college degree through a one-size-fits all high school curriculum that leads to a dead end, if and when they graduate. No wonder they drop out!

Those kids would be better served if curricula were in place to give them marketable hands-on skills. This would provide a huge incentive for them to graduate. It would require high schools to offer two different kinds of diplomas, one for the college-bound and one for the vocationally trained.

I don't fault Obama for encouraging kids to aim high. But once they've come back to earth they need options within the public education system to develop the skills and acquire knowledge in areas where they have the greatest talent and aptitude. This would give the country the work force it needs to meet the myriad challenges it faces.

Good points, all.

Being fair to Obama, imagine him trying to argue the value of aspiring to a manufacturing job, given their vanishing act. That would require not just advising young people, but changing the economics of manufacturing, mainly through restorative tariff protection. Not an easy sell, since it always can be portrayed as leading to higher consumer costs.

But it may be too late for returning to blue-collar work. As robotics improves it gets cheaper, while the worker gets more expensive.

excellent, thought provoking post - thanks!

it seems to me that in a nation as wealthy as the usa there is absolutely no good reason why any citizen should lack adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, an excellent education and the opportunity for fairly compensated, honest work.

currently the us government and its allied institutions choose the winners and losers in the economy and its never been more plainly obvious than it is now.

would that we could all be as important as the crooks on wall street whose reward for destroying a great nation's economy is bigger profits, bigger salaries, bigger bonuses and a free insurance policy for same courtesy of "the little people."

A thought-provoking post indeed, in my view, reminiscent of:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

"I immediately thought on reading Obama's words, "what's wrong with aspiring to having a union card and working in a factory at union rates and getting married on that pay, buying a house and raising a family, seeing some of your kids go to college and then retiring on a decent pension and going fishing with your grandchildren?""

The problem is that since reduction in transportation costs has meant that foreign low skill workers can compete with their domestic "brothers in the class struggle", manufacturing employment is coming closer to international parity in wages. Unions are not able to bargain effectively, because they can be replaced by imports.

This is a good thing; it makes everything we buy cheaper and disproportionately benefits the poor. There were never nearly as many "good paying jobs" as many people imagine.

There are still decent paying jobs out there that don't require a four year college degree. But they require skills. Unskilled labor is cheap, and expecting it to get expensive again is like investing in buggy whips.

(But what about the metaphor?)

One can hardly fault a transient who, finding the back door of a five star restaurant to be unlocked, sets to eating and drinking until nauseous and even unconscious. Nor should one be surprised if the transient forgets to mutter his litany of discontents that normally accompany his daily search for food and instead sing the praises of god and the saints and the joy of being alive. And one must expect that the rightful owner of the restaurant will likely have to resort to force of violence to eject the interloper.

The industrial revolution was a happy accident for homo sapiens in that it provided a moment of largess beyond the capacity of ordinary nature to provide. Of course this “revolution” consumes everything – community, resources and people themselves- and does so in a way that is so hopelessly unsustainable that the metaphor of the unlocked restaurant has its merit – a once in a lifetime experience for a wandering man that will never again be repeated except in myth and dreams. And as we can not fault the transient for his excess we should not be too hard on ourselves if we are intoxicated by our easy good fortune. But wait. I think I hear the footsteps of the restaurant owner. Shall I prepare to fight or flee?

Here is something very important to read:

An Anthropologist on What's Wrong with Wall Street
What do you mean when you say the American worker has become liquid?
I mean that there's constant job insecurity, constant downsizing, constant restructuring, a constant need to retrain to have an adaptable skill set and be flexible. In a sense, job security and stability have been liquidated. What I found in my research was that in many ways investment bankers and how they approach work became a model for how work should be conducted. Wall Street shapes not just the stock market but also the very nature of employment and what kinds of workers are valued.(...)How does that translate to the rest of corporate America?
The kind of worker they imagine is a worker like themselves. A worker who is constantly retraining, a worker who is constantly networked, a worker whose skill set is very interchangeable, a worker who thinks of downsizing as a challenge — a worker who thrives on this. This becomes the prototype, but in many ways that's quite removed from the daily lives of most American workers. Before this crazy crash of 2008, bankers always landed on their feet, almost always. Job insecurity isn't the same thing for the average American worker. They often experience downward mobility or don't land on their feet.

Certainly in a system like America's any disadvantage will be magnified and race is just one more. The main thing is social class. As to:

“According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents."

Family background has as strong an influence on socio-economic opportunity in the classless United States as it does in the supposedly hidebound class-ridden UK. In terms of giving children a good start in life and having a fair labour market, both countries probably have much to learn from those at the top of the league table - Finland, Norway and Canada, among others.

whereas to begin with there are 1,696 basketball players in the NFL...

He wrote NFL when he meant NBA.

Working 60 hours week in two jobs is what GWBush would refer to as being uniquely American. Yes, not many countries where a person can swirl in the bowl for ten year before they are flushed away in our disposable society.

The unions have completely abandoned their original efforts. It was workers of the world, unite. Well, even in the US, the unions have abandoned each other, much less bringing their foreign counterparts an organizational structure. So they foreign workers are paid such abyssmal wages, even though there are thousands of miles to transport the good they create, they can still arrive for less then they could if they were made here. Workers of the world, you are on you own. Oh, and PAYCO, you were too, in case you didn't notice. The pilots flew, the flight attendants attendend, the baggage handlers handled, and the system ran like nothing happened. The world changed then. Organized labor divided and was conquered. It was no more complicated then that.