[Bret L]

Revaluing Work: Class Division Exacerbated By Immigration Hits A Wall
(Finally)

By Brenda Walker

"The rapid changes in society caused by technology and bad public policy have had some negative side effects, to say the least. When computers began to come on like gangbusters, the big influential brains foresaw a brilliant future for America based on information technology. That vision might have been more accurate if not for outsourcing and cheap H-1b labor, but a Jetsons meme took hold, and the educational system retooled and re-imagined accordingly. No more icky manufacturing spewing dirt into the air: America's future would be white-collar, educated and take place in a clean comfy office.

And as the knowledge economy looked increasingly like the hip New
Wave, the blue-collar people producing things in factories became seen
as old-fashioned and expendable.

A contributing factor was the rush to outsourcing that ripped the
heart out of America's manufacturing base. Business discovered cheap
and exploitable labor offshore, and millions of middle-class blue-
collar citizens were kicked aside. There was great suffering, but
elites didn't care because the affected people hadn't graduated from
college and therefore didn't matter much. Anyway, that sparkly new
future beckoned.

For those jobs that couldn't be sent abroad to be done by exploitable
non-Americans, the gates were unofficially opened to millions of legal
and illegal foreigners, who came with a "Kick Me/ Pay Me Less" sign.

The dismantling of American manufacturing was well documented in the
popular 1992 book, America: What Went Wrong?. By Donald L. Barlett and
James Steele. The book started out as a newspaper series in the
Philadelphia Inquirer and generated the paper's largest ever reader
response: 20,000 letters, calls and requests for reprints back in the
days before email.

(The authors later authored the much-noticed 2004 Time Magazine
cover story on the porous border—and were subsequently let go in one
of those coincidental media downsizings, another example of how bad
things seem to happen to professional journalists who write critically
about immigration).

Along with the changes in the way America made a living came a change
in attitude. The class division between blue and white collar
enlarged. It didn't help that the blue-collar middle class was
shredded by the twin evils of immoderate immigration and outsourcing.

The immigration part of the equation further downgraded the status of
workers. Jobs that were once performed by Americans were increasingly
occupied by foreigners receiving lower wages and laboring in
workplaces that had become more dangerous. A generation of young
Americans in many locales has grown up thinking that foreigners build
houses and work in meatpacking plants. However, just a couple of
decades earlier, those same occupations provided middle-class lives
for previous generations.

Good sense is a rare commodity in public life these days, but there is
a definite wave of resistance forming up against the rejection of
honest work. The failure of the knowledge economy to bring a
prosperity paradise has propelled growing doubt about how the work
world has been redesigned, and people wonder what has been lost. Plus
the new world of sterile cubicles has turned out to be unsatisfying to
the human spirit.

A significant indicator has been the attention stirred up by Matthew
B. Crawford's recent book Shop Class as Soulcraft, coming from sources
as dissimilar as the Washington Post and Popular Mechanics.

It helps that the author has quantifiable intellectual cred—a PhD in
political philosophy—so he has been taken seriously by the book
reviewer set. A tough job market for professors set him on a path
toward repairing motorcycles and reflecting on the value of manual
labor. The May 24 New York Times Magazine carried his essay titled,
The Case for Working with Your Hands.

"The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a
simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is
also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a
motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work
on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some
“vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I
have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with
the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go
into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of
Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral
fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The
academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional
panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of
a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down
an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and
the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm.
"

As someone who has lived in both worlds, Crawford has the academic
vocabulary and the experience to comment on the ingenuity required in
automotive repair. (If you have listened to Car Talk, NPR's humorous
radio program of vehicle diagnosis presented by MIT graduates Tom and
Ray Magliozzi, you already know that smarts are necessary to interpret
mechanical symptoms.)

Crawford tells a cubicle horror story about an early academic job that
consisted of writing abstracts about journal articles on topics that
were often completely mysterious to him. Yet his superiors cared only
that the numerical quota was met, not about the accuracy of his
descriptions. The deceit nagged his conscience and compared negatively
with his experience of motorcycle mechanics as honest and personally
fulfilling work.

"Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power,
several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t
feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day.
Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the
edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a
while. "

The Crawford article struck a chord with many readers.

PatriziaNorth of Whitehorse Yukon:
Boy, was this ever an article that needed to be written! As a former
teacher of college English, over and over again I saw teenage boys who
were far too restless/unmotivated to be in a classroom. Yet that was
where their parents wanted them to be, based on our society's message
that only "intellectual" jobs have prestige and value. [...] The other
vital point that the writer makes is the moral value, the "soul
shaping," of work that is concrete. One of the many ways in which
we're adrift, at least in the Western world, is our loss of connection
between our senses and the natural world.

Francoise of Chicago:
You have no idea how much this article means to me. I suspect--hope--
it represents the beginning of a shift in thinking. [...] When we were
young, living in tidy blue-collar towns, working in a trade and
building things was still a respected way to a good life. How funny to
remember my work at the huge consulting firm in the 90s, hearing
people talk about the tech industry and knowledge economy replacing
the 'old industrial model', and then watching so many of those tech/
knowledge jobs quitely blip overseas.

Michelle of Mansfield Ohio:
This is such a great and timely piece. As a college instructor I see
many kids pushed into classes, and then a degree that they do not find
interesting and which will most likely not serve them well on the job
market. My father ran a small construction business for most of his
life, and when it came to quantitative analysis or mechanical or
spatial problem-solving, he was utterly brilliant. He had a high-
school diploma; the rest of his education was outdoors, on the job.
Our society needs to get over its white-collar snobbery, and high
school guidance counselors need to rediscover vocational education as
an equally valid career path.

You can listen to a June 12 interview with Crawford on San Francisco's
KQED, where he discusses the appeal of the trades, that jobs like
mechanic resist easy dumbing down and are more intellectually
engaging. The concrete results—the bike runs or it does not—provide
tangible rewards that dealing in abstractions cannot. He believes that
the widespread dismantling of school shop classes in the 1990s was a
serious mistake. The Educational Establishment believed that everyone
would be sitting in front of computer and therefore skills acquired
about woodworking and auto mechanics would no longer be valuable. They
were wrong, but their students paid the price.

Noting that a Mercedes no longer has a dipstick, Crawford thinks that
the removal of tools and the awareness of how things work has also
engendered a kind of passivity and dependence in the modern
personality. He sees a larger effect in society—the knowledge worker
may be narcissistic and disconnected from reality, while the washing
machine repairman must be engaged and empirical because his
effectiveness is directly measured.

Another promising sign: the promotion of blue-collar education by
Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader of the California Senate.
(Not many good ideas come from that quarter, so this item is welcome.)
Perhaps the realization is dawning in Sacramento that the new dropout
culture spawned by diverse immigration requires a more practical
approach to workforce training.

If only Sacramento Democrats were as realistic about spending...

Bulldozing money toward California public schools (projected at
$11,626 per student in 2008-09) has not helped graduation rates and
literacy. The required high school exit exam to test basic proficiency
in math and reading has proved tough in particular for English learner
kids, only 72.8 percent of whom graduated in 2008. Similarly,
graduation rates are declining in Los Angeles USD, with one study
finding that only 48 percent of students there graduate on time.

So Vocational Ed looks more appealing on a pragmatic basis. Of course,
many smart kids don't want a joyless cubicle existence and would
rather work constructively with their hands as well as their minds.

Charles Murray dissected sacred cows of the bachelors degree in a 2008
article, Are Too Many People Going to College? , subsequently expanded
into ED BOOK. He believes the foundations of a traditional liberal
arts education should be taught in high school, thereby making a four-
year college education less necessary for training responsible
citizens.

"We now go from one extreme to the other, from the ideal of liberal
education to the utilitarian process of acquiring the knowledge that
most students go to college to acquire—practical and vocational. The
question here is not whether the traditional four-year residential
college is fun or valuable as a place to grow up, but when it makes
sense as a place to learn how to make a living. The answer is: in a
sensible world, hardly ever. "

The university establishment must not like the opinion becoming more
widespread that their product is no longer a sine qua non. The ivory
tower remains one of the most protected elite bastions in America.

Thus California's once-exemplary K-college school system has been
rocked at the student level because of the state's fiscal meltdown.
Classes and enrollment have been slashed while student fees are going
up $662 this fall on UC campuses. Yet amidst this crisis, salaries at
the top have rocketed into the stratosphere. A recent offender was the
hiring of a new chancellor at UC Davis for a salary of $400,000 (a 27
percent increase over the predecessor) plus free university housing,
an $8,900 yearly car allowance, a $100,000 relocation subsidy and
other expensive perks.

Of course, nothing enhances respect for work like the lack of it—and
the cratering economy is also stimulating critical thoughts about life
and labor. The excesses and corruption of our own age's robber barons
certainly make the traditional values of the individual craftsman
shine anew.

Such a revaluing of work is all to the good. A return to more
traditional respect for honest labor, particularly the skilled sort,
would do a lot to erase unnecessary class divisions that have arisen
under the new order.

It has always been a lie for the Open Borders crowd to say there are
jobs Americans won't do (wages go curiously unmentioned). But it would
be more difficult to foist that fabrication on a less class-conscious
society.

Immigrants can pack up and go home because more Americans are coming
to understand they were never needed in the first place."

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes
two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Her
favorite memory of shop class is when a ne'er-do-well friend in high
school made a professional quality banjo in wood shop when the other
boys were building shelves and birdhouses. It made everyone in the
school pay attention to him in a new way and certainly made shop class
look more interesting.

http://www.vdare.com/walker/090723_revaluing_work.htm

[Trevor Wilson]

"Bret L" wrote in message
...
In other words, AGW is horse****.

**Well, no. Feel free to submit your evidence. Make certain it comes from a
reputable scientific source. Those whacko religious/right wing political
sources don't count. In your evidence, please explain how the glaciers in
Greenland are moving towards the sea at a rate which is much faster than a
few decades ago. Here's some cites that you need to refute:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0527121055.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet

http://images.google.com.au/images?h...title&resnum=4

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=3606

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/0...sea-level.html

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science...ing/index.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...glaciers-melti

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...aciers-melting

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...el-predicts-gr

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ise-sea-levels


OTOH, we may be in for an ice age,

**********. Complete ********, in fact. There is zero evidence of such a
thing. The TREND in world temepatures is clearly up. Year to year variations
are to be expected, but the TREND is up.

no matter what we do. In fact, doing nothing may be far better than
the wrong thing.

**More ********. Here's some stuff that we know (beyond any doubt):

* Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, CO2 levels have risen by more
than 30%.
* CO2 is a known greehouse gas (GHG).
* Ice core data tells us that the rise in temperatures is faster than at any
time in the last 600,000 years.
* Ice core data tells us that the rise in CO2 levels is faster than at any
time in the last 600,000 years.
* Ice core data tells us that CO2 levels and temperatures are closely
linked. Sometimes CO2 leads temperature rise and sometimes it lags.

The real concern is that we *may* be approaching a 'tipping point', beyond
which there is nothing humans can do to stave off disaster. Most scientists
feel that this level is around 500ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. A handful of
scientists believe it is already too late. Either way, we need to address
the issue right now. There is deep concern that the release of methane from
permafrost areas will cause global warming to become unmanageable. Methane
is a more powerful GHG than CO2.



--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au