Some people do seem to genuinely look down on 'blue collar' work.

Last week, my sisters friends went for a meal out to celebrate her birthday. Her boyfriend drives freight trains, and seems to get some strange attitude from her friends. They are mostly working for free while trying to break into film, or journalism. A few are teachers, which the others seem to see as 'giving up'. Yes, they are hipsters.

I loved this conversation:

Sophie - 'so taking this as an axiom... sorry, have you heard that word before'

Sisters Boyfriend - 'Well, a long time ago my masters was in philosophy ...'

Sophie (double takes) - '... but... why are you driving trains? Surely you could find something better?'

Sisters Boyfriend - 'Well, why are you working as a receptionist for free?'

I both farm and write software professionally. I find the differences in reactions that I get, depending on which career I claim to have, to be quite amazing.

That sounds like a great setup. Care to give more details?

This was a real conversation? Wow.

edit: Plus, driving trains doesn't seem like a bad job to me. I had a friend who drove freights in the 90's, and he really enjoyed it. Also, your sister's friend is a clueless hipster: driving freight trains was one of the dream jobs of those original hipsters, the beatniks.

That's hilarious. I wish I could've seen her reaction.

I don't see him as touting anything right-wing, IMO - he is touting the 'Don't demonize the opposition' idea, a worthy one at that. He also advocates market solutions, which in many cases solve problems with a whole lot less effort and in a 'cleaner' (read less complex) way - for example, the CAFE standards versus just raising the taxes on gas, both would accomplish the same goals of increasing fuel economy for cars sold. One does it with a bunch of complex regulation, the other does it thru a market mechanism.

Sometimes market mechanisms are really hard to apply, things like roads, healthcare, public safety, and so on. But when you can use a market based mechanism in a market economy its almost always the least complex and most efficient way to solve problems.

Yeah, I'm with you. I just wish it wasn't portrayed as such a partisan, negative thing. Which is frustrating because that's how he leads.

I wish he could have just said "we have an untapped well of jobs which sit between unskilled jobs and highly skilled tech jobs. Someone has to run all these new computers. If you go to a trade school, you can get a good job in less time and with no debt."

Heck, liberals and Democrats should be psyched for this message. Because: 1) people who graduate from trade schools join unions 2) green energy production needs these skills more than older oil companies do. Sun doesn't turn itself into electricity. 3) this sort of training is usually close to urban centers, which means more business for blue-leaning cities

I don't believe in unions as the ideal situation for workers or employers, I believe strongly when a company ends up with a union, it's because they did something stupid.

Didn't pay enough, treated employees unfairly, poor working environment, any number of things, but generally something that could have been mitigated by 'doing the right thing' in the first place.

To be fair, the bigger unions aren't tied to their employers. There are, for sure, large companies with their own unions, or that might ought to have their own unions (e.g., Wal-Mart), but most of the larger unions arise from historical conditions that may or may not pertain to a given employer.

I've been a union member in the past, but I don't generally see the need for unions to exist in anywhere near the capacity that they do -- that said, for a counterpoint that justifies their existence, check out Harlan County, USA[1]. It's a documentary that illustrates how bad exploitative employers can be in the US.

And of course, the other counter to anti-union sentiment is that unions are just people. Employers have, like it or not, economic power over their employers, which could (or could not) be leveraged for abuse. Employee collusion is the fairly obvious counter to that advantage.

In short, my opinion of unions has evolved from unions are the worst -- to unions are great, in theory, but often bad in practice.

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/

Exactly. One thing that always gets me annoyed about immigration debates is about how there exist so many jobs that Americans are "unwilling to do". Why? Why is there a stigma against certain jobs? If it is a question of a living wage, surely, those immigrants who are taking up those jobs are making a "living" with those wages.

One reason why is because Americans are more atomised culturally than people from, say, Mexico or Guatamala. Americans believe that you should live independently after you graduate from HS (or else go to college) and don't generally want to live in a home with multiple families or even the same family consisting of multiple generations under a single roof.

Actually, sometimes American real-estate owners won't even rent a unit to more than N people who are not all blood relatives.

>If it is a question of a living wage, surely, those immigrants who are taking up those jobs are making a "living" with those wages.

Well no, they're not. They are not making what Americans consider a living. You might say Americans have spoiled, overly-high standards, but hey, it's America, so Americans have a right to set their own standards.

Fun story- lettuce picking used to be relatively high skilled and high paying, and the lettuce pickers were the backbone of Cesar Chavez's unionizing. This made them expensive enough that it was worth automating their jobs away. Today, a guy with an extremely fancy tractor does it.