Since President-Elect Donald Trump announced a deal with Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana instead of Monterrey, Mexico, President Obama’s criticism of then-candidate Trump’s plan is going viral in an “I told you so” manner. During a PBS town hall in June, President Obama addressed a question on jobs leaving Indianapolis to a Steelworker’s Union representative.
“And so what we have to do is to make sure that folks are trained for the jobs that are coming in now because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back,” Obama said to PBS host Gwen Ifill.
The President continued by hitting Trump without mentioning his name, saying, “When somebody says, like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for, that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s — there’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how — what — how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.”
Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a vocal Never-Trumper during the election season, tweeted an entire thread expressing a similar sentiment on “jobs of the past.”
We should be honest that there will be more, not less, job change in the future.
We should be encouraging prep for disruption & retraining. https://t.co/36kOczakAn
— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) December 1, 2016
It’s undeniable that as global forces change, companies are looking for faster and cheaper labor. So, as a result, plants either move abroad or automate labor to have machines do the work. One huge flaw in this pattern of thinking is that it takes the human element out. It’s easy to produce an enormous economic report from Harvard stating all this. But tell that to the 45-to-55-year-old with a mortgage and family who has known nothing but the assembly line or manufacturing plant his whole career, who now is out of a job.
There’s a saying as old as time, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” When it comes to retraining a man that’s built A/C units to now work in some technology firm, will companies invest time and effort in the old dog or the young person that’s been fully integrated with technology growing up?
Similarly, millennials are enormously affected by the question: Is a college degree and the uncertainty of the modern job market worth it?
According to a Forbes study published in August, 37 percent of millennials regret their decision to attend college. Meanwhile, 63 percent said they were relying on either an inheritance or winning the lottery to ease the load student debt has provided. Donald Trump, calling school choice the “civil rights issue of our time,” not only pledged a $20 billion dollar grant for charter schools but also made vocational training part of his school choice proposals.
Even NPR has produced stories on young people going into trades. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education secretary, has long been an advocate for school choice. There are already ideas being circulated as to how a Trump administration can begin a transition back to educational diversity. This would mean that college simply isn’t for everyone, but everyone should be able to find success their way. Even Vice President Joe Biden has said America could be the manufacturing giant it once was.
Bottom line: simply saying certain jobs are going away or promising retraining programs isn’t solving problems. Modernizing these old industries and raising a new generation of blue-collar workers is a start. Some may not feel Trump is realistic about jobs, but at least he’s jumping in with both feet and trying to create solutions.
