The Great American Do-It-Yourself Retirement Fraud, Brought to You By Big Finance & Co.

[ceonupe]

117. i would hope this president

and congress pass a jobs and education/training program that offers lowcost/nocost jobtraining to help those stuck in min wage gain the skills to get higher paying jobs.

the real probelm however is technology + offshoring is killing jobs that used to be those step up jobs. the factories are mostly robotic in the USA for the high value work (CNC/material printing/painting robots/computerized assembly/high tech logistics/shift from physical services to digital).

Car manufacturing in the south pays about 50% less adjusted for inflation than those jobs paid 30-40 years ago up north. yetthe cars are better and better built (thanks to technology and the fact that the engines/transmission often are made in mexico the electronics are made in asia and just partially assembled in north america).

But back to my point. We must create an industry to replace that manufacturing or else its going to be nothing but mcjobs. The biggest business have the technology and scale to dumb down the end job so much they dont have to pay more than the low wages they do pay. in many of these jobs the computers and machines do all the work the human is just there for human to human interaction and moving items from process to process.

take fast food french fries. Load up the big basket with a few bags of fries. it auto loads each fry basket, then it auto inserts the basket in to the grease for specified time and then it auto lifts the fires out. All the "cook" does now is dump in to the salting station and portion out orders. when ordering the clerk now presses buttons on a touch screen which build out the orders and route the various tasks to monitoring stations. It also updates realtime performance/product demand and inventory. The Worker only takes cash payment now less than 60% of the time. more and more purchases are being made by electronic payment. now i have been to some fastfood places that have a kiosk for ordering and i can say the process was much better and faster than the old approach of the cashier. I expect with in 10 years the role of the cashier/ordertaker to rapidly change with kiosk/smartphone ordering taking over. so where does that leave the fast food worker wanting to get paid $15 an hour?

Its sad when our own government classifies these very low end jobs as full employment for jobs numbers. these are not designed to be permanent careers but extra income or starting out jobs. Because the next level for many of these workers, manufacturing and low skill labor, does not exist any more these jobs become longterm jobs.