High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers

High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers

If America is going to get back to manufacturing, companies will need to get involved to make sure that there are trained people to hire.  There will need to be more of this.

PHILADELPHIA—Elijah Rios won’t graduate from high school until next year, but he already has a job offer—one that pays $68,000 a year.

Rios, 17 years old, is a junior taking welding classes at Father Judge, a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that works closely with companies looking for workers in the skilled trades. Employers are dealing with a shortage of such workers as baby boomers retire. They have increasingly begun courting high-school students like Rios—a hiring strategy they say is likely to become even more crucial in the coming years.

There are no jobs that Americans won’t do.  I have evidence.

Eight years ago, a crew came by to paint the high voltage power line towers on my property.

Every 50 years or so, power line towers get painted.  Fortunately, I was home when they came through.  I chatted with the foreman as 8 guys climbed the tower with buckets of paint.  They paint with mitts, don’t wear safety lines, and coordinate their movements so nobody needs to cross wet paint to descend.  The power lines are live and are in the 400,000 Volt range.  The painters chatted and joked around.  They seemed happy in their work.

They were not illegal immigrants or ex-cons.  I asked.  The foreman said they were in the Bridge Painters union.  Their total compensation package is $70 per hour.

When someone says, “There are jobs that Americans won’t do”, they are standing up for bad bosses, poor working conditions and low wages.  They are defending the exploitation of labor.

There are jobs that Americans won’t do unless the pay and working conditions are improved.

Three decades ago, the World Trade Organization was established to reduce restrictions on trade between countries.  The US lost any advantage it had for being the largest and wealthiest economy in the world.  America was undercut by countries without our environmental protections, occupational safety and worker rights.

President Trump is attempting to reverse the damage done to our manufacturing base and our economy.  He intends to rapidly reorganize world trade.  It will be disruptive.

As manufacturing returns to America, there will not be enough people available with the training and attitude to do the work.  Companies will need to get involved with education.  

For decades, our leaders in government, commerce and industry, have been coasting, riding the decline of our country.  That’s got to stop.  If industry is returning to America, and cheap labor won’t be brought in to do the work, we must do it ourselves.

Companies will need to get involved with urban and rural schools in low socioeconomic districts.  Many of those students will be harvesting crops, processing meat and cleaning rooms. Schools can’t promote  student resentment and entitlement, but prepare those students with basic skills, a sense of hope, a desire to be productive and the ability to be trained.

Those jobs won’t be fun, but they will need to have dignity, reasonable working conditions and decent pay.

The same is true of engineering, medical and technology companies.  Currently, nurses are treated poorly and short-staffed.  Engineers apply for ghost jobs that don’t really exist.  Companies rely on the H-1B visa program to provide them with workers who don’t expect much in pay or benefits.

Companies who require college-educated employees must require colleges to educate students.  Phony online courses and assignments completed by ChatGPT aren’t sufficient.  Companies must push back on grade inflation and DEI.  Colleges may be more prone to promote resentment and a sense of entitlement.

For fifty years, society has left it to bureaucrats in education to figure out what schools should be doing.  That worked for a while until schools started to drift.  Eventually, politicians figured they could mandate state testing, then get back to ignoring education.  That time is over.

Productive elements of society need to actively engage with schools to get young adults who are prepared to become productive elements of society.

It won’t be easy or comfortable, but it sure beats decades of Democrats and Republicans managing the decline of America.  With Trump in office, we notice that the rest of the Western world relies on the US to show how it’s done.  We either do the work, or we slip beneath the waves as China takes charge.