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Wages aren't enough to get people to do working class jobs. People will rather make less working as a journalist than work as a plumber. Being a social media strategist or HR will be more attractive than changing diapers and driving trucks. Unless they want to pay wages that are well out of the realm of possibility for content writers it isn't going to work.
The most effective method to get more nurses would be to fire communications majors from government jobs. A sizeable portion of the upper working class and the fallouts of the actual middle class no longer do working class jobs. Instead they get degrees in less demanding subjects from lower tier colleges. The meme of them becoming baristas isn't accurate. Most of them do get office work. However, they would be far more productive welding, building and caring.
It's fundamentally a recruiting that could be addressed the way the federal government addresses other recruiting shortfalls: cash bonuses, educational loan forgiveness, or even just direct educational subsidy. There's no reason you couldn't have a nursing equivalent of Teach for America or even ROTC.
Have these been great successes? Because from where I sit we also have a shortage of quality teachers and military officers. Do elite schools even have ROTC anymore? Sometimes, after a late night out I would see them on campus in their uniforms. I pitied the poor bastards.
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There are 58,500 “news analysts, reporters and journalists” vs. 520,700 plumbers and pipe fitters. It sure doesn’t seem like plumbing is that unpopular, to say nothing about the millions of other blue-collar jobs.
If you fire all 826,200 “media and communications workers,” you might be getting somewhere. How many of them do you think are working for the government?
Source
Tough to find data at my fingertips, but I've heard that the non-profit sector, which is largely unproductive, has grown from approximately 0% to 10% of the workforce in the last 50 years.
The noisy bit of the non-profit sector is unproductive. But the big numbers in non-profit employment are in service provision in fee-charging or government-contracted non-profits - the most visible examples are church and university-owned hospitals; private, parochial and charter schools; and private universities.
Government-contracted non-profits have essentially the same problems as government-contracted for-profits. Fee-charging non-profits like university-owned hospitals are notoriously run in exactly the same way as for-profits, including the "sometimes making huge profits" bit. In general, I would say that service-providing non-profits are only unproductive in a Sturgeon's law kind of way which also applies to the for-profit and government sectors.
I guess we'll have to see the numbers. I agree that those institutions are productive, or at least no worse than private or government alternatives.
I do wonder how many people are in the activism and awareness space. I seem to come across a lot of them in my personal life. I try not to wince when they tell me what they do.
Top 10 registered UK charities based on paid employee headcount - not sure how I would find the equivalent for the US. Registration is optional for universities which is why they don't dominate the list.
So I would say across these 10 names 20% of the activity is annoying nonprofit stuff and 80% is providing services on a commercial or government-contract basis. My guess is that the US figures would be even more skewed because of the large number of nonprofit-owned hospitals in the US.
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There is a lot more creativity in job titles when it comes to various low productivity office jobs. Tradesmen tend to have short and to the point titles. The people who should be in the trades tend to have vague titles.
Umm, have you run this thesis by actual tradesmen?
From my vantage point most bs office jobs are going to people who would have been housewives or secretaries in an era when the trades were fully staffed, and the trade shortage is as much about having to compete with IT and relatively earlier retirements making the fertility crunch apparent earlier, and that while there’s a minority of men who should be working trades jobs in offices, they mostly have actual jobs that either would have existed in 1960 or exist now because of an actual function. Most young men who should go into a trade seem like they’re playing video games and smoking weed instead, funded by some combination of parents/neetbux/McDonald’s. Likewise trades job titles are increasingly unwieldy; everyone is a ‘technician’ these days.
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I don’t believe titles came into this.
How many communications majors do you think are in government jobs?
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