The First Four Years Are The Hardest…
Dear Governor Romney,
My name is Mike Rowe and I own a small company in California called mikeroweWORKS. Currently, mikeroweWORKS is trying to close the country’s skills gap by changing the way Americans feel about Work. (I know, right? Ambitious.) Anyway, this Labor Day is our 4th anniversary, and I’m commemorating the occasion with an open letter to you. If you read the whole thing, I’ll vote for you in November.
First things first. mikeroweWORKS grew out of a TV show called Dirty Jobs. If by some chance you are not glued to The Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 10pm, allow me to visually introduce myself. That’s me on the right, preparing to do something dirty.
When Dirty Jobs premiered back in 2003, critics called the show “a calamity of exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.” They weren’t exactly wrong. But mostly, Dirty Jobs was an unscripted celebration of hard work and skilled labor. It still is. Every week, we highlight regular people who do the kind of jobs most people go out of their way to avoid. My role on the show is that of a “perpetual apprentice.” In that capacity I have completed over three hundred different jobs, visited all fifty states, and worked in every major industry.
Though schizophrenic and void of any actual qualifications, my resume looks pretty impressive, and when our economy officially crapped the bed in 2008, I was perfectly positioned to weigh in on a variety of serious topics. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called to ask what I thought about the “counter-intuitive correlation between rising unemployment and the growing shortage of skilled labor.” CNBC wanted my take on outsourcing. Fox News wanted my opinions on manufacturing and infrastructure. And CNN wanted to chat about currency valuations, free trade, and just about every other work-related problem under the sun.
In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.
Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)
We have now raised several generations of Americans who think manual labor is the name of the guy who mows the lawn. That’s why we simultaneously have problems with high unemployment and illegal immigration.
Maybe we should make Ditch Digging 101 a prerequisite to a college degree.
The Crawdad Hole 
My uncle used to say “Variety is the spice of life but monotony brings home the groceries.”
there is a trade school Williamson school that is like a 4 year college. They train the people who do the jobs that some college kids think are beneath them. The graduates of the Williamson school are well educated and make a good living.
I wish we had more schools like this all over the country
here is a history of the school
http://www.williamson.edu/about/history.htm
I wanted my son to go there but being a teenager, he thought mom did not know what she was talking about. He regrets that
the other dream was for him to go to college in the winter and work a freighter around the world in the summer. He would get to know the good bad and ugly of the world an be better for it.
just a mom dream
I suppose I should point out the inherent racism in snooty white elitists who think physical labor is beneath them.
Oh my God don’t even get me started. I have one kid who is perfectly intelligent but not academically oriented and, I am 100% certain, will be MISERABLE in college and would be even more miserable if he got an office cubicle job. When I suggested to his snooty elitist LA West Side father that he should be presented with, shall we say, a variety of options, guess who got the white trash treatment?
That was beautiful! I love Dirty Jobs!
He’s nailed it. Over the years Americans have come to value college degrees and assorted credentials more then they value hands on experience and hard work. You can really see this with kids…and the President. Everybody wants the job title, but nobody wants to do the actual work. You see this with people who start businesses, some of them are more interested in being able to brag, “I own a business.” and are shocked to realize it’s going to involve actual work.
Were I live we have a fencing company that is 100’s of thousands of dollars in debt and has never actually installed a real fence. This is one reason why so many businesses fail, not the economy, not incompetent people, but unrealistic attitudes. There is a perception in this country that business owners don’t work, they just haul in cash. You didn’t build that, etc. If you start a business with this attitude, you’re going to fail.
A former boss of mine said “Lots of people come in wanting a job. Less than half of them want to work.“
years ago a couple won the Irish sweepstakes and bought the bar where my husband worked. The new owner thought his job was to sit at the bar and converse with the customers never did figure out that there is a lot more work than that to owning a bar. They eventually sold it back to the original owner at a loss.
I have worked security at several bars and nightclubs. The ones that fail are the ones where the owner thinks he’s hosting a party.
Yep. You are running a business, not hosting a party, however good it makes you “feel”.
Obama has the same problem. He thinks he’s hosting a party for cronies and Dem pols, not running an economy.
What I would not do for a well educated tradesman school? As a former prof, I can say without hesitation that college was a waste of time for too many who should never have been there to begin with. They were ready to work not read a book.
One of the BIG differences in Europe, for those who are always so enamored of how Europe does things, is that they are sensible about this. They train their manufacturers, car mechanics, etc, and those professions have some dignity in the culture.
I do this with people who want to blah blah on and on about how much better the European system is for this or that.
“So, you want good schools like Sweden? Because they have a full voucher system. You want to educate everyone like France? Fine – you CANNOT get into an academic career in France unless you are damn good, and damn smart. If you fail, too feckin bad. The rest are channeled into more appropriate career choices.”
Then I laugh while they sputter.
Germany is the same way. High school seniors take a test. Only those who score high get to go to college.
Rich kids can always go to private schools or come here as exchange students.
when I went to school you had different classes. you had the college prep groups and then the business groups they both had different studies. Don’t they do that anymore?
Tracking is racist, so everybody goes to college prep. But don’t worry, you can get all the loans you want!
Even if you want a Masters in Underwater BB Stacking.
And you know what, WMCB? You’re absolutely right. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing (at least as regards France, bc that’s the only place I know). Whose interests are really served by creating 10 seats in each Ph.D. program when there will only be one living-wage job available by the time those students graduate?
“Everyone can be a doctor and lawyer and professor” is sort of a dumb way to approach education. There are flaws to the French system, and I’m sure some smart people get shut out, but overall it works. Nothing is perfect. You aim for the most sensible.
Good gawd, who left the doors open at the asylum?
It’s like they have now become a caricature of all the pinko commie shit that they were (wrongly) accused of for years.
It’s gobsmacking.
myiq thanks for the timely post.
This week my grandson started kindergarten. At the first day Boo Hoo breakfast for parents of kindergardeners the school counselors started off by giving us an uplifting lecture about school bulling that left me feeling like salt peter needs to put in the cafeteria food to make boys docile, diversity valuing creatures who won’t be boys rough housing at recess and ruining their kindergarden careers.
Seems like any teasing and taunting is now deemed to be bullying. I kept my yap shut but I wanted to ask if they could clarify what the legal/criminal definition of bullying is. No wonder there are so many thin-skinned, micromanaged cry babies. Boys need to toughen up and put on their big boy pants. Girls need to quit whining. Life’s a beach and isn’t going to be fair.
Then they told us about how starting in kindergarden, kids are told about the need to prepare to go to college. No mention was made about valuing tradesmen like plumbers, electricians and carpenters. The liberal elite metro sexual types here in DC don’t mow their own grass, clean their own houses, repair their own cars. Without their electronic gadgets they are helpless. They think they are so smart but I find so many people here to be myopic circle jerk bores.
OT Allen West uses the God vote in a an ad
If I had to do it all over again, I would have become a plumber. Einstein said that, but I can really relate. I wish we had more trade schools, more apprenticeships, but mostly I wish that this country would change it’s attitude towards these kinds of skilled labor. White collar jobs can be outsourced, but they will never send your plumber to India.
I’m right with you, although shallow me would have become a hairdresser, cosmetologist, or aesthetician. And started my own salon/spa. Do what you love, right?
I don’t know about making “Ditch Digging 101” a college prerequisite, but I will say that (at age 57) one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t take “shop” in high school. It ought to be required for high school graduation. That thought would have horrified me as a teenager, but teenagers are idiots.
When I started college at age 30 I had a whole different attitude and perspective on life than I did when I was 18.
30 is when I went to college (nursing school). I worked my ass off.
(cough) I went at 14 (part-time, full-time at 16). Child prodigy gone bad ;-). I probably would’ve gotten a lot more out of it if I’d waited.
I did something similar, propertius. Started at 15 but it still took six years to finish up thanks to being poor. I definitely appreciated my education more AFTER dropping out for a while, that’s for sure. Because I was not a very good secretary and not a very good waitress. Both jobs required people skills that I just never really developed.
That’s why I went to law school.
My father, who spent his career as a teacher, first in high school and then as a college professor, said this, oh what must be thirty years ago: Bring back trade schools, bring back apprenticeships.
My son is an auto tech and you’d think he was a doctor because I couldn’t be prouder. The kid is good, real good, he can diagnose and fix problems no one else can figure out. OTOH, so many of the kids I see coming out of college with their “Communications” degree don’t seem to have any skill sets, practical or advanced.
We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it. -endquote.
yep.