Sigh. Yes discrimination exists, and the whole War on Drugs was target mainly at minorities.
At least when their generation sold out they got decent compensation packages. Nowadays selling one’s soul to corporate America doesn’t even guarantee decent health benefits, let alone the kind of salary that would allow a young adult to buy a home or raise a family on one income.
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Head over to Shawnee Mission KIA and take this baby for a test drive!
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Yes, that would be one solution, but many of them won’t move to where the jobs are. You can’t help some people.
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Fixed That For You
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LOL. You must be a local too.
Well, not really. I am not the only person with a gas powered car. There over 250 million + cars in the US. I have one.
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That alone is the best hope that things might be different this time.
Sure puts a new spin on the expression “seize the means of production”, huh?
Hell, I work for a company that sells station control and POS software to gas stations, which is about as Kevin Bacon’d from the actual oil industry as you can get, and I still have some moral conflicts about my current employment. Of course, long-term, I think the only saving grace for service providers like us is if hydrogen fuel cells ever get more than a 3-station install base in southern California.
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Call Congress for that one – corn is used because it’s cheap due to subsidies. It got subsidized in the FDR administration, and never stopped once the dustbowl ended because of Big Ag and the fact that Iowa tells the country who the presidential candidates will be.
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Sun strikes a pose. Sun taps potential. Sun pumps life. This ain’t your daddy’s solar panel!
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This other ad put out by the API runs constantly on MSNBC.
How do they think “Oil: The Chronicles of Riddick” would sell. On MSNBC.
I still can’t believe they call themselves the American Petroleum Institute either.
Every publicist they hire undoubtedly tells them that they should be changing their
organization’s name to something faceless and/or deceptive.
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Not universally true. One word … robots.
Even raising a robot family will only save you so much. A lot has changed since the days of the “middle-class family living comfortably on a single income” depicted in Small Wonder.
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But usually not of lung cancer at 60…
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We can’t afford to live anyway
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Doesn’t mean you should die unable to breathe years before your time. It’s a horrible way to go, trust me.
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I’m not trying to argue the point, you’re undeniably right.
None of the articles were nearly as precise about what job descriptions specifically they were having trouble with as I would have liked; but I’d be inclined to suspect that their biggest problems may be in specific areas that require either considerable talent or willingness to specialize, or both.
So long as you pay better than average and aren’t grossly less safe; convincing people to work in drilling rather than construction is unlikely to be a serious problem. Convincing the math wonk to specialize in geological modeling for you, rather than doing ‘big data’ something for the cool kids in tech, or weaponizing exotic financial instruments for the finance guys, though… Also, one of the trade mags mentioned the decline of the perception of job stability: probably harder to convince people that picking up, say, the esoteric high end welding techniques required for certain particularly demanding piping applications is a good idea if they think that you’ll right-size them with the next commodity price fluctuations, or that your future as an industry isn’t what it might be.
People with lousy options are both likely to endure greater costs in standing up for principles, and have a lower ability to absorb those costs, so I suspect that “quit whining and try raises” will work just fine; but there are aspects of petroleum and petrochemistry that you can’t really run without people who have other options, some that may have even became much more competitive and lucrative of late.
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Fixed that for you.
Under the current way of things, maybe not. It will take considerable changes in the way business is done to get the people disenfranchised by shifting industries into new job training. It may also take subsidies or loans to assist them in moving to areas where any other industries even exist. It will be complicated and expensive, but we can help some people. And the rewards in the resulting tax income and greater participation in the economy are worth helping “some people.” It’s gonna take bigger and better brains than I have to work out the details of how.
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