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.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.
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.
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.
