Saturday, January 20, 2018

Blue Collar Boom

Steven Hayward posts on Power Line a quote from The Wall Street Journal (behind their paywall) concerning the ongoing economic boom.
Americans with only a high-school diploma are seeing faster earnings growth than their highly educated counterparts, as employers in low-wage industries hungrily search for workers to fill job openings.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, median weekly earnings for workers 25 years and older with only a high-school diploma rose 2.3% from the same period a year earlier, new Labor Department data show. Meanwhile, pay for Americans carrying a bachelor’s degree edged up just 0.8% from the fourth quarter of 2016.

The trend has been ongoing, with year-over-year wage growth for high-school graduates outpacing wage growth for college graduates in each quarter of 2017.
Would you call this Trump delivering for the people who elected him? I emphatically would. Who would have guessed the GOP would become “the workingman’s friend?” Not I.

Many of the most decent, squared-away people I’ve met in recent years have been in the building trades. The U.S. totally needs a healthy, prosperous blue collar workforce and community. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs is looking absolutely prescient.