You’ll forgive me for thinking you’re a right wing fellow with an axe to grind too (unless you have some evidence that you are not). 
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Left and right wing are in the eye of the beholder, they’ve basically become insults to different sides of waring cults. I have defended socialist ideas and have been called a communist for it and I have defended conservative ideas and have been called a fascist for it (the only swear word some people seem to know) because I care about the idea and the evidence rather than which side I’m supposed to be on to be ideologically pure.
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Education is a process. But “upper secondary education” sounds like it refers instead to an institution. It might be better to not conflate the two, if we are interested more in what people know, rather than who they are affiliated with. This risks creating a society and workforce which prioritizes reputation more than evidence.
In my experience it’s the same in the Bavarian countryside, many of the restaurants are run by people from Ex-Yugoslavia or Hungary. Maybe in East and North Germany things are different, but in the areas I visit regularly, there is a perceptible shift.
Whenever I go into a restaurant anywhere in the touristy areas Chiemsee / Statnbergersee I now expect to be served by an Easter European waiter. Admittedly, I spend a disproportionate time in restaurants because neutral ground to manage various complicated family situations. Guessing the nationality of your waiter is a really interesting distraction when spending time with our family 
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In relative terms there has certainly been a shift, but in the parts of Germany where I have spent almost all my life it is still nowhere close to what you are describing.
Personally, I think the only reason skilled labor isn’t widely acknowledged as educated knowledge is because we as such a stratified class society fail to acknowledge the social value of skilled labor. I would say the monetary value as well, but many a mechanic out-earns me. Yet society still doesn’t respect his education the same way it does mine.
And yes, I know that we doesn’t include all of us all of the time. But, like racism and sexism, classism is so baked into our culture that when we stop actively thinking about not perpetuating it, we often unwittingly help it along, which is why I don’t have a problem with using we as a society.
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I hear you. My daddy was a ship welder and, briefly, a brick layer before an injury put him out of work. His dad was a teamster shop steward and a mechanic for decades.
My dad specifically directed me to go to college and get a white collar job. No trade for me. My electrician stepfather basically pushed me the same way.
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I suspect this is a hold-over from when college was seen as the place to learn how to learn, as opposed to learning a specific skill set. There’s a quote from the poet Phaedrus I think sums up the old (and largely obsolete) ethic of higher ed, A learned man always has wealth within himself. The quote remains true, but it no longer applies to higher ed where even well-connected idiots can graduate from Ivys. Also, I think there was a long, slow and massive panic in the late 20th Cen over tradecraft being outmoded by automation.
The thing is that I know enough about the practical applications of automotive maintenance that I know that won’t really happen. I like bicycles, motorcycles, and (increasingly) old cars because I can repair most of what fails on them. But modern autos are a different animal altogether and will only get more so as companies like Tesla and Google drive the tech to new levels of sophistication. The upshot is that there’s no real reason to think that skilled tradecrafts are going anywhere. Even the idea that it’s a different sort of knowledge is overly simplistic. There’s a false divide in physics (my field) between theorists and experimentalists, an anachronism that’s slowly but surely being abandoned. The reality is a multidimensional continuum between knowledge workers and applied sciences.
If our vaunted university system is to remain relevant into the 21st Century, it must abandon the one-size-fits-all educational model and adapt to the new reality that students and society don’t benefit from everyone aspiring to that four-year rubber stamp that more often than not has little on-the-job relevance. The problem is that, even though many an academic and administrator will enthusiastically nod along when you tell them that, the whole system is built on bilking maximum profits from middle-class Americans pushing their children to climb the class ladder, or lower-middle-class kids incurring debt they’ll spend a third of their life or more getting out from under, so they change nothing because change is not in the best interest of their own job security.
sigh
Sorry, I know I’m getting on my soapbox again. The intransigence of institutional stupidity just frustrates the hell out of me.
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Oh, you’re one of those people.
Adorable. Do you do parties?
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Yeah mine as well. I come from a family of dockworkers, which requires more skill than is generally thought - load a ship wrong and it rolls for example. But he’d be damned if he was going to allow me to do that, let alone force me like his dad did him. He’d seen to many people crushed, limbs severed, a guy who “drowned” in a grain silo, etc. Let’s face it, it’s not just about class. Manual labor is in many cases more dangerous, certainly more dangerous than sitting at a desk and typing.
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Yep. You should be as well. 19th century dogma is as obsolete as religion is, yet people still seem to think that a term invented based on where people sat during the french revolution still has meaning. But they don’t, it’s just my tribe your tribe.
Yes, but they always end in tears.
Seriously though, I just took the lazy “accident of birth” argument to its logical conclusion, a reductio ad absurdum.
I didn’t say “unwanted”, I said they are coming (a high proportion of immigrants) to join part of the labour force already under pressure with high unemployment and bad prospects. They are very much wanted by employers (as you could see from their ubiquity), because they drive wages lower by adding to the supply side in what is already a buyers market.
That’s something often said which I’ve never seen a single shred of evidence for. I mean I know some welfare scoungers, but they don’t want to do any job, others will and do take any job if they need to out of necessity.
There is no “1%” in Europe, the concept barely makes sense in the US. It’s propaganda language.
Pay wouldn’t rise. Besides, all countries in western europe with the exclusion of Germany struggle with rising unemployment, and even in Germany unemployment is still at 6%. We’re a long way from needing immigration to fill jobs, except for very targeted recruitment for certain sectors of the economy.
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Not in America. It turns out illegal immigrants (I’ll leave aside the legal ones) do the jobs that no American is willing to do anymore. These are largely agricultural, construction, and service related.
Alabama found this out the hard way.
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[quote]With 468 billionaires, Europe claims 28% of the world’s ten-figure
fortunes adding up to an aggregate net worth of $1.95 trillion. Russia
leads the count with 111 billionaires – the same number as the state of
California – while Germany has the second-highest, boasting 85 ten-digit
fortune.
The United Kingdom is home to 47 billionaires, slightly more than its
neighbor across the Channel, France, which claims 43
billionaires. Georgia, Guernsey, Lithuania and Romania each have just
one billionaire.[/quote]
Tell us again how there is no 1% in Europe.
We’ll wait.
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Hold on
Edit
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The (mostly illegal / semi-legal) immigrants you described as ‘unwanted’ are not joining the labour force that you and I are part of and they are not driving wages lower. Neoliberal employment legislations are driving wages and working conditions lower. You can see the gradients in various EU countries: UK: work till you drop to German: laissez faire to French: the Worker is King but huge unemployment. Very different conditions combined with very different enforcement of illegal employment in different EU countries.
You are so utterly wrong on this. My daughter worked as an apprentice in the Hotel Industry in Berlin (5 Star Hotels). Every single co-worker she worked with (the people who did the dirty work like her) was an immigrant in various stages of legality. One of the main reasons she quit as an apprentice is, because she sussed early on, that if she stays in the Hospitality Industry and rises up the ranks (as is likely for a nice German Girl) her job will be to help her corporate masters exploit people in desperate life situations.
Why don’t you, next time you go to a Hotel or Restaurant, ask to speak to the cleaner who makes your bed, washes your linen, or the guy in the kitchen washing your dishes or bringing the rubbish out at 2am in the morning. I will bet you, that they won’t be native German speakers (most likely they also won’t tell you their real story, out of fear of repercussions). Then ask your German friends or any unemployed German you encounter for how long they would be prepared to work in irregular 12 hour shifts (variously starting at 5am / 10pm / 12 pm or whenever it best suits their employer) weekends and holidays always included for under €1000 / month for the next ten years.
The sooner you realise that these (in your words) ‘unwanted’ immigrants living of desperation are securing your living standard the better.[quote=“Forkboy, post:53, topic:69940”]
There is no “1%” in Europe, the concept barely makes sense in the US. It’s propaganda language.
[/quote]
Really no idea what planet you are living on. Switzerland, in the middle of Europe is pretty much an enclave of the 1% with a few well cared for workers thrown in for good measure. Have you ever been to London / Monaco / anywhere on the Cote d’Azur / Klosters / Davos or the Costa Smeralda … I sure know there is a 1% as I happen to live next to them in London, and my friends are not the ones buying flats for £17 Million. Don’t worry they are also doing well Germany. It’s just that ostentatious wealth is not a German thing. But someone sure is buying all those luxury goods.
The sooner we get used to the idea that not all jobs are created equal and that our life styles are propped up by awful working conditions abroad and at home the sooner we might actually be able to do something about it (presuming that is the aim) and the immigrants are not the problem.
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There’s a top 1% everywhere, but Europe is among the most equal income distribution in the world according to the gini-coefficient.
The wealth of the top 1% is way less here than in the US. The top 1% hold 13% of wealth in Belgium as compared to 34% in the US.
So yes, I hold that the term isn’t directly transferable to the European situation.
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I’d like to see some proof of that. Rethoric about “neoliberal” conspiracies won’t do.
My point wasn’t that a lot of those jobs aren’t done by immigrants, they clearly are because they are cheaper (especially the illegal ones) but to deny that non-immigrants don’t want to do those same jobs. In fact you proved my point as your daughter had no trouble doing the same job.
I’ve plenty of people in my immediate circle and family that do that kind of work. Maybe your privileged situation doesn’t allow you to see it.
There are rich people everywhere, and there always will be. The point is that we do not have the relatively large inequality that the US has, see my post above.
[quote=“Forkboy, post:26, topic:69940”]
Many kids are starving and out on the streets. Why don’t you let them live in your house?
[/quote] Sounds really stupid, how about I pay what’s left after bills and rent to educated people who fix a home for them? That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? I call dibs on the idea, I will call it “taxes”.
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