Is there a reason you also omit any responsibility of the employer to observe health and safety regulations and place the burden elsewhere?
Because the reason I believe Mr. Rowe does so is because he is a certain flavor of libertarian that seeks to place the most risk and responsibility on those with limited power, and absolve those with the most power of as much of the risk and responsibility as possible.
That pledge doesn’t sound like he has an axe to grind against some imaginary strawman at all. Not even the tiniest bit. On another note as a tradesman myself, the greatest barrier to good tradespeople entering the marketplace is not necessarily educational or financial, it’s that many trades are over-saturated with incompetent boobs whose business practices are shady AF. Oftentimes I feel like I’m an honest little piggy at a trough of giant greedy pigs devouring all the slop and leaving nothing for me. I know, I know, Shame on me for engaging in the blame game and offending master tradesman Mike Rowe. But yeah, get rid of all the thieves through (gasp) stricter government regulation of the marketplace, and watch as good, honest tradespeople take their rightful place in the market. Everyone would be better off for it.
Get this shit off of my BoingBoing.
That’s one of the reasons I think this approach isn’t working well and won’t work well in the future.
It’s very hard to blame the limp wristed college degree holders. When those college educated people are marching in the streets because they’re struggling. And it’s pretty dumb to tell that to blue collar workers when their own children, who they struggled to put through college, are the very people being described.
This whole thing was definitely initially an attempt to respond to the problems of millennials entering the job market around 2008, joblessness, and wage stagnation. But it’s basically just telling people they were wrong to try to better themselves and their children. That social mobility is bad.
That’s not a very attractive proposition these days.
Have a higher mean income or wealth level than the general population. And a significantly higher mean income or wealth level than Hillary/DNC voters.
The outsized focus on a very small group of blue collar workers, and exclusively the white ones, is a big problem with how we talk about Trump.
And the working class in general. The contractor I know with 2 brand new, tricked out, luxary pickups who owns his own home, a vacation home and a 6 figure income Is “working class” and blue collar. By my friends struggling to keep it together on sub $50k salaries, who own nothing, are not. Because their job is in an office.
I don’t. As mentioned in my previous comment, workplace safety is enforced by OSHA. That falls under the responsibility of the employer.
It’s also a violation of labor law, unless you are exempt.
Dear god, please un-do the harm you did by posting this by also posting the Citations Needed episode in which Mike Rowe’s grift is fully exposed.
I’ve lived my entire adult life in the university environment and owe a comfortable life to the work that offered to me and my wife. Our parents made considerable sacrifices to put us through college. (As did, in my case, the State of New York, which gave me scholarships and fellowships a half-century ago.) But I also recognize that a good and satisfying life can be had outside the white-collar world, and that not everybody needs a full-on academic education to have one.
On the other hand, the skills that my father acquired in high school in the 1930s are not necessarily what contemporary high-schoolers get. (And I see plenty of those over my wife’s shoulder.) So I’m torn. Effective citizenship requires skills that are now delivered in college (if you’re lucky), but many of the long-term-rewarding jobs are in areas that go off at an angle from the university. And again, seeing the university (as distinct from the post-secondary system in general) as a job-generator distorts that institution’s function. The world that produced me and my wife (both academic Ph.D.s) also produced smart, socially sophisticated skilled-trades workers–I’ve had good coversations with many of them. I wonder whether our educational system can still turn out that same range of citizen-workers.
See, I feel that workplace safety is 100% the responsibility of the worker.
It is also 100% the responsibility of the employer.
If they both give 100% so employee safety is 200% covered - maybe, just maybe no one will go home in a body bag…
(To exmplain further: it is the responsibility of the employer to provide a safe working environment, to provide PPG, to allow and require employees to take the extra time required to work safe, to provide the information required regarding the materials, safety issues, knowledge and training of safe work practices, and everything else that the employee needs to be safe on the job. It is the responsibility of the employee to use all of these tools to be safe, and to work in a safe manner. It is the responsibility of the employer to accept when an employee says “I cannot do this safely” to find a way to make it more safe, or to find someone who can do it safely, without negatively impacting the employee.)
Exactly! Thank you for explaining it succinctly.
Hey, sounds like his pile of free money isn’t for you. No need to hate, just move along.
Haters gonna hate… Guy just wants people to work and succeed, Your union strong, government model is working well in Venezuela, and the rest of the 3rd world. More I read the comments, the more I hope for a reset in our country. #whoisjohngalt
If that’s the case, why isn’t his pledge “I pledge to work and do my best to succeed”?
Well, no. The union-strong model is what led to trade jobs being worthwhile in the U.S. for the period in which they were, in fact, worthwhile. Companies didn’t provide pensions, healthcare, and living wages to blue-collar workers (edit: and as @Ryuthrowsstuff points out below, a whole mess of other things that we think of as necessities rather than benefits) out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because, when workers unionized, it became either impossible or politically uncomfortable for companies to keep mistreating workers.
Oh, and welcome to Boingboing.
And, right on cue, the 50-cent party arrive.
Please do go on. What would a “reset” look like in your preferred outcome?
(also, I’m not 100% certain that hashtags work like you think, but maybe in the Randian future they will)
Which, of course, works both ways, right?
Ha ha, Libertarians. Hilarious.
I liked Mike Rowe when he was a harmless TV host. I even liked his podcast, until he started shilling for the Koch Foundation, and I read his Worldview Pledge. Fuck that guy, and his pile of money. Not the one he amassed for himself by being a shill, but the relatively tiny pile of money he’s offering to willing future slaves.
Or weekends, 8 hour working days, a minimum wage, safe working conditions, vacation, sick time, holidays off, overtime, payment in currency rather than company store vouchers, job security, access to fucking bathrooms, the “right” not to be physical beaten or murdered by Pinkertons; and so, so much more.
But you know ever since those libtards took over the neighborhood kids can’t find a job climbing inside industrial machinery anymore. So fuck unions.
It just dawned on me. This guy thinks he is actually John Galt. Remember in Atlas Shrugged, there’s a cheesy creed all the Galties have to recite to show how independent they are? And then they go to work as plumbers and short-order cooks just to stick it to the Man?
That.
There is a list a mile long of problems with Rowe and his backers. I understand that.
I also understand that what I have heard from the left about getting people into good paying trades jobs is damn near inaudible. “Free college” has pretty much drowned that out.
Leave that whole arena to Trump and the Kochs, and they’ll be more than happy to fill the seats and the stage.
I am sure you meant well by this comment. But it pegged my condescension meter. May have bent the needle.
I go out of my way to look at potential hires who do not have college degrees, and have bucked corporate HR quite a few times to get them into jobs.
