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This is the point that I think Sigma, Dan and Tex are missing. Sigma, Dan and Tex seem to equate a college degree (and other professional training) with high wages, and assume that low-wage earners simply failed to get the education needed to earn higher wages. But that is a false assumption.



I understand that quite well, thank you. My wife has been either unemployed or severely underemployed (as in $7/hr) for almost a year now.

However, that's not entirely the fault of the economy or of our capitalistic society. She has a degree in History and experience (albeit little) in Public Relations and that's where she wants to work and it was her choice to get a degree that's not exactly in high demand. There simply isn't demand for her particular skillset right now and she can't find a decent job.

But that's not to say there isn't plenty of other well-paying jobs left unfilled, because there definitely is. With my skillsets I would likely only be without a job for a few days if I was laid off tomorrow. There are millions of other positions just like mine, that go unfulfilled for weeks or months.

My own company can't find enough field supervisors. These are no experience necessary, $60,000 to start, full-benefited positions and all you need is a 4-year degree. And few people apply. We can't even meet 25% of what we need to have. We'd hire from the glut of people with BCIS or Computer Science degrees if they wanted to do the work. But they don't want to do that work. They want to program. Is the government supposed to step-in and make sure there's plenty of programming jobs for all the Tech guys we've got sitting around, or are these people supposed to realize that their particular skills are no longer in demand and they need to adapt to the market?

Let's assume you don't have a degree -- we're hiring over 3,000 people this year, needed all over the nation, to start at $21.19/hr (and a $25,000/yr benefit package) to do various work. Requires nothing but a GED and the ability to pass a drug test (a whole lot harder to find than one would think). And most of our locations are in places where $21/hr goes an incredibly long way.

Guess what? We can't fill all the needed positions. The work is "too hard". It's railroad work, it ain't always easy. And requires working hard for an honest living. People would rather live off government assistance. You'd think if the way people were living was "so bad" they would actually be 'desperate' enough to take whatever work they could get -- particularly when it's paying $45,000/yr plus benefits with zero education needed. The solution is that we need to offer more pay -- but you end up with scenarios were the union guys are making more than their exempt supervisors, which makes it impossible to keep supervisors on board. Which means we have to pay everyone more -- and that's not exactly an easy task, although it is being done. Time will tell whether or not we can afford to raise wages enough to actually get people to work for their money anymore.

And this is far from an isolated case. Hundreds of employers are facing the exact same scenario. They have extremely well paying jobs to offer but either people just don't want them or they have a degree in something that either never was in demand, or was the particular fad at the time, only to now be unemployable and are unwilling or unable to get different training.

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