Better be thinking about learning an extra trade or getting another college degree because according to employment trends, the job market for working Americans in the future seems pretty dire.
Late last year, Forbes published an opinion piece by former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich titled, “Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back” where he writes about the declining jobs in the manufacturing sector and how these jobs are, well, not coming back.
Blue collar workers and their families have been the worse affected by these disappearing jobs at car assembly and part plants, in the garment and apparel industry, etc. A total of 22 million jobs were gone between 1995 and 2002 and the jobs losses continue to rise.According to Reich, even manufacturing jobs are disappearing in China. The reason? Higher productivity, more robots taking jobs away from real humans, and an explosion in the high tech industry.
At the turn of the 20th century, the assembly line opened the door to a mass of job opportunities to men and women alike. The two World Wars produced a boom in the manufacturing industry — many Americans reached the middle class and others became quite wealthy due to this. It was a prosperous time in America which led to many of our modern achievements, but that America is now gone.
The impact on seniors
Poverty among the elderly has been rising over the past decade, according to a Census Bureau report released onMarch 2. About 13 percent of the population is made out of people over 65 and, get this: 9.7 percent of them live in poverty. That means that only 3.3 percent of seniors are well-off.Remember these were seniors that lived through the time period when manufacturing jobs exploded. Sure, many of them didn’t necessarily hold manufacturing jobs, but a good portion of them did. So, if seniors today are not making ends meet even though they lived their younger years during a time of many opportunities, what do you think is going to happen to people today who have lost their jobs and have no savings in let’s say, 30 more years? Will these also be seniors who will be living in poverty? Most likely.
The impact on you
With the rapid decline of manufacturing jobs in states like Ohio, Michigan, California, New York, etc., the job market becomes more saturated — the pool of blue collar workers needing to work becomes gigantic and their opportunities for employment shrink by the day. Most of those are out of work will never be able to work in manufacturing again.
