The dumb,the deaf and the blind.

What is it with these clowns in Washington? They can not think! They can not read! The can not see!
The examples on how to handle youth unemployment to improve the economic outlook of this country's young people and thereby giving new hope to our inner cities and economically deprived areas are all available for our politicians to see and follow - if they could only see, read and think.
Just as in youth training and employment there are many industrialized countries having excellent health care systems
ready and proven, but "NO" - these dummies in Washington can not see. They keep coming up with new plans that have no chance of working, because they are put together by a bunch of political cronies who have managed to bluff their way up to a leading position in Washington by using the only thing they really know: Blah, blah and blah. Promise everything
to everybody.
Read here what some knowledgeable researchers have discovered: PwC press room: Report charts success of OECD countries in developing potential of younger workers

Same Shxx Different Day, SSDD

What makes you think that young people from our "inner cities and economically deprived areas" want to work? Hanging out on the street corner waiting for someone to rob is easier.

Dennis

Somehow, when I read this thread title, I thought it was gonna be about people who know better but still start threads with titles which will undoubtedly get them locked!

juergenwt said:

What is it with these clowns in Washington? They can not think! They can not read! The can not see!
The examples on how to handle youth unemployment to improve the economic outlook of this country's young people and thereby giving new hope to our inner cities and economically deprived areas are all available for our politicians to see and follow - if they could only see, read and think.
Just as in youth training and employment there are many industrialized countries having excellent health care systems
ready and proven, but "NO" - these dummies in Washington can not see. They keep coming up with new plans that have no chance of working, because they are put together by a bunch of political cronies who have managed to bluff their way up to a leading position in Washington by using the only thing they really know: Blah, blah and blah. Promise everything
to everybody.
Read here what some knowledgeable researchers have discovered: PwC press room: Report charts success of OECD countries in developing potential of younger workers

Click to expand...

It's said that people get the politicians they deserve and reading post #3 with the thinking applied maybe what's said is true.

I can't even begin to imagine what it'd be like to be young again and unable to get a job. By job I mean of course one that pays enough to survive on and support a reasonable living standard.

All candidates claim they want to bring jobs and manufacturing back to the US, but nobody has any idea of how to do it. Close the borders. Send all illegals back. Now these are just the jobs for the unskilled and should be easy to fill - right? Don't look for it to happen.
Now about bringing back manufacturing. Are you going to resurrect the old style manufacturing capable of employing thousands of unskilled workers? I don't think so.
So you will have to go with high-tech production facilities employing highly skilled workers. How else except by using new training centers and a program to train skilled workers who than would have a future if industry can be persuaded to invest in the inner cities and depressed rural area. The success stories are out there where mostly European companies have opened training centers. Unfortunately so far not in the inner cities where a culture of people depending on Gov. handouts is now the rule for the third and fourth generation. A precondition for any program to succeed here would be the elimination of crime in the area. Again our representatives in Government can think of nothing better than keep the money rolling.
Young people in the inner cities are not born lazy and criminal. That comes later when we try to force them to four years of useless High-school. So why not copy some of the time proven solutions being used by countries in Europe and send young people starting at age 14 to learn a trade? A two tier system seems to be the answer. Not everybody is college material. In many European countries a Plumber,Butcher, Carpenter, Painter, Electrician etc. etc. with a Master degree ranks very high and at least on the same level if not higher than most engineers.
First we need to get rid of the stigma attached to a "non college" person and return to promoting trades as a desirable alternative. If we keep going the way we have than I see no future for our country.
Sure, in a democratic society like ours it is not easy to set up any kind of training program and make it a success. But keeping on going the way we are going now will most certainly get us deeper and deeper
in trouble. And that is about all they are now doing in Washington.

Modelman said:

What makes you think that young people from our "inner cities and economically deprived areas" want to work? Hanging out on the street corner waiting for someone to rob is easier.

Dennis

Click to expand...

Sitting home on the parents retirement is easier than that .. till they are gone and the house is lost.

But a new CNC lathe for the dumb,the deaf and the blind not that would be something... just a start cycle button..

dumb,the deaf and the blind are true handicap people, they deserve a break and some help..
People who look but can't find a job them also.

People who don't want to work should not be so well off.

Luckily for me, I live in a Blue State that has moderately high taxes- which means our state funds a great system of state community colleges, which teach trades.
They are not free, although there are some scholarships, and veterans can usually get the VA to pay.
I have been hiring kids from these 2 year public programs for over 20 years now.
And I can tell you they DO want to work. Not everybody, of course, but lots and lots of kids today thrive in trades schools, assuming they are public, and, therefore, affordable.
I had a young vet working for me most of this year, hired by calling the welding instructor at one of my three local community colleges, and asking the instructor (a woman) who I should hire for tig welding stainless all day. She sent me another woman, an air force vet, who was just finishing her 2 year AA degree in Welding on the GI bill.
She was one of the best tig welders I have ever employed, and, over the years, I have employed a lot of them.
She was well trained, could measure, run basic machinery, and weld like a bat out of hell.

this is pretty common, in places where the government pays for community college.
I hire a lot of college kids- my work is seasonal or project to project, so sometimes its for 2 months, sometimes for years.
There are far more kids who really want to work than jobs available around here.
The ones that get hired, at least by me, are the ones who prove their commitment by taking advantage of training available.
But more would be trained if it was affordable.

juergenwt said:

So why not copy some of the time proven solutions being used by countries in Europe and send young people starting at age 14 to learn a trade? A two tier system seems to be the answer. Not everybody is college material. In many European countries a Plumber,Butcher, Carpenter, Painter, Electrician etc. etc. with a Master degree ranks very high and at least on the same level if not higher than most engineers.

Click to expand...

Hollee shit! TWO TIER system? That sounds discriminatory to me, honkee.

Actually, it sounds very much like what we had in Chicago at the Washburne Trade School, where the Chicago Public Schools provided the building, and the area unions provided the apprenticeship programs. But the Chicago City Council got greedy, and decreed that the demographics of the student body had to match the demographics of the city, NOT the metro area it served. So, the unions moved their programs out to the suburbs, and Washburne closed, and was subsequently abandoned.

As a guy I worked with years ago said, "the only thing those people are good for is makin' vacant lots."

Dennis

So who is the deaf dumb and blind? The decision maker politicians ........or the constituents with no economic finance or business education or knowledge who wouldn't know a good plan if they tripped over it.

Your and my politicians will only do what is asked of them and not 1% of the voters have sufficient economic and business education to bring that about.. The politicians SHOULD do whats right and they SHOULD be economic experts.....but that isn't how an elected government gets in power. As for the constituents, good luck, you're in a bad place. The extent to which Americans as individuals define themselves along party lines suggest things won;t get better. All I see from this subforum is dogmatic partisanship, rhetoric and ignorance. No ones looking for answers or asking questions, it's just arguing, often in ignorance, whatever position your party has taken. Canada has proven we are more than capable of electing a complete f'ing moron, however that's just straight up constituent stupidity....I do not see the deeply ingrained partisan dogmatic belief system I see with Americans.

I'd make America great in four years if I had my hands on the all levers......but there'd be some pain.....and you'd all realize just how much cheap offshore outsourcing subsidizes your lifestyle lol

All actual "government" training and trades schools in the USA are state schools. Except for military academies.

So its not DC that makes these decisions.
Its state representatives, education department directors, and governors.
Certainly none are unhappy to get federal grants.
It doesnt take an economic expert, or a partisan of any party, to realize that education, particularly jobs education, benefits everybody.

My local community colleges, including the excellent Bellingham Technical College, have LOCAL boards of trustees, including actual graduates of the schools, making the decisions about programming and how the schools are run.
NOT "politicians", or political parties, not Washington DC.
This is how it should be done, and when its done this way, it works.

The job of the Feds is to send money to programs that work.
This does not take economic experts- it takes staff members of congress and the senate who are in touch with their local communities.
This system works, where I live- we have a local board of trustees, that in turn, communicates with the local members of congress and the two state senators.
They lobby for federal programs, and, sometimes, they even get em.

Its a very bottom up, not top down, program, when it works.
So its incumbent on YOU to vote for your local congressman or woman, and vote for ones who believe in education, trades, and jobs.
Ours actually pay attention.
We have a relatively new Marine trades training center, for example, training kids directly in trades the local boatbuilders want- carbon fiber, marine diesel mechanics, stuff like that.
We have a new program that is training small brewers for craft beer- its first batch of grads are getting hired right away.

Its not rocket science.
Although Boeing does hire graduates from some local programs to work on rockets...

Ries said:

Luckily for me, I live in a Blue State that has moderately high taxes- which means our state funds a great system of state community colleges, which teach trades.
They are not free, although there are some scholarships, and veterans can usually get the VA to pay.
I have been hiring kids from these 2 year public programs for over 20 years now.
And I can tell you they DO want to work. Not everybody, of course, but lots and lots of kids today thrive in trades schools, assuming they are public, and, therefore, affordable.
I had a young vet working for me most of this year, hired by calling the welding instructor at one of my three local community colleges, and asking the instructor (a woman) who I should hire for tig welding stainless all day. She sent me another woman, an air force vet, who was just finishing her 2 year AA degree in Welding on the GI bill.
She was one of the best tig welders I have ever employed, and, over the years, I have employed a lot of them.
She was well trained, could measure, run basic machinery, and weld like a bat out of hell.

this is pretty common, in places where the government pays for community college.
I hire a lot of college kids- my work is seasonal or project to project, so sometimes its for 2 months, sometimes for years.
There are far more kids who really want to work than jobs available around here.
The ones that get hired, at least by me, are the ones who prove their commitment by taking advantage of training available.
But more would be trained if it was affordable.

Click to expand...

It's kind of a dog-chasing-its-tail circular logic.

To pay taxes to fund those programs, the workers need skilled jobs. In order to obtain those skilled jobs, the employees need skills training programs. In order to hire those skilled employees, the employers need an industry that that creates jobs which allows them to hire the skilled employees who'll pay taxes to fund training programs to generate more skilled employees who'll pay taxes.

What I currently see in my neck of the woods is a whole lot of unskilled labor looking for jobs that don't exist because the government, environmental do-gooders, and foreign competition have shut down all the industry. And, to make up for the people who aren't paying taxes because they don't have skilled jobs, the government wants to raise the taxes on the people who do pay in. Further, businesses are often discouraged from moving here because there is not a skilled labor pool available because we don't offer skills training to those who need it because there isn't a need to offer a training program where there's no demand for the training.

There's a circular logic to it.....

I may be completely off-base but that's at least how I see it based on my anecdotal observation.

juergenwt said:

What is it with these clowns in Washington? They can not think! They can not read! The can not see!
The examples on how to handle youth unemployment to improve the economic outlook of this country's young people and thereby giving new hope to our inner cities and economically deprived areas are all available for our politicians to see and follow - if they could only see, read and think.
Just as in youth training and employment there are many industrialized countries having excellent health care systems
ready and proven, but "NO" - these dummies in Washington can not see. They keep coming up with new plans that have no chance of working, because they are put together by a bunch of political cronies who have managed to bluff their way up to a leading position in Washington by using the only thing they really know: Blah, blah and blah. Promise everything
to everybody.
Read here what some knowledgeable researchers have discovered: PwC press room: Report charts success of OECD countries in developing potential of younger workers

Click to expand...

Oh yeah. Just close off the border between the USA and Mexico and all of the sudden our youngsters will think picking fruit for a living is cool. NOT.

A couple of months ago the GM plant that I retired from was getting ready to hire some new people. Our local union president posted about it on facebook so I shared his post. My posting got exactly zero likes and zero comments. When I told one of my fellow retirees that he said the kids nowadays just don't want to work. I know that there are some young people who want to work but many of them are cool with living with their parents until they are something like mid 30's.

I struggled to find skilled workers, I hired some who said they knew what they were doing and I found out fast that they didnt have a clue. I have solved the problem of finding and keeping workers. We have 8 fulltime workers and I pay them really well at least for Tucson. I hire young people who want to learn a trade. I found that I couldnt find any manual machinists who were not retired or near death. I hired a girl who was 21 and she has worked for me for 4 years fulltime. She runs our lathes and mills as well as the grinders and the hobbing press. She is now training two eighteen year old guys. I pay them fourteen dollars an hour to start. They show up eager to work and I dont hear any complaining. They work hard and pay attention. I found that if you pay someone a decent wage they actually give a crap about the job. They get sick time and two weeks paid vacation and all federal holidays. All this complaining about lazy people is a bunch of crap. I am a lazy sack of crap when I am getting payed seven bucks an hour and being told to work faster. Give a person hope and reason to show up and you will be amazed how hard they work. Plus they wont leave me because no one pays as well as we do.

kpotter said:

...She is now training two eighteen year old guys. I pay them fourteen dollars an hour to start. They show up eager to work and I dont hear any complaining. They work hard and pay attention. I found that if you pay someone a decent wage they actually give a crap about the job

Click to expand...

Good for you to have found employees who appreciate having gainful employment, but bear in mind there are people reading this thread who are probably thinking capitalist paying slave wages... Where you live, that's a pretty decent starting wage for a trainee.

Oldwrench said:

Good for you to have found employees who appreciate having gainful employment, but bear in mind there are people reading this thread who are probably thinking capitalist paying slave wages... Where you live, that's a pretty decent starting wage for a trainee.

Click to expand...

Remember, anybody can start a company, hire people pay them wages, keep the books, pay all the fees and taxes, nothing is preventing you to do it except the fear of failing at it. Now how to make it successful is a bit of a trick.


dee
;-D

kpotter said:

I struggled to find skilled workers, I hired some who said they knew what they were doing and I found out fast that they didnt have a clue. I have solved the problem of finding and keeping workers. We have 8 fulltime workers and I pay them really well at least for Tucson. I hire young people who want to learn a trade. I found that I couldnt find any manual machinists who were not retired or near death. I hired a girl who was 21 and she has worked for me for 4 years fulltime. She runs our lathes and mills as well as the grinders and the hobbing press. She is now training two eighteen year old guys. I pay them fourteen dollars an hour to start. They show up eager to work and I dont hear any complaining. They work hard and pay attention. I found that if you pay someone a decent wage they actually give a crap about the job. They get sick time and two weeks paid vacation and all federal holidays. All this complaining about lazy people is a bunch of crap. I am a lazy sack of crap when I am getting payed seven bucks an hour and being told to work faster. Give a person hope and reason to show up and you will be amazed how hard they work. Plus they wont leave me because no one pays as well as we do.

Click to expand...

KPOTTER- YES, you are doing the right thing to help your shop. Like it or not, it uncovers exactly what the problem is throughout the country. Very little or NO training at all. You are taking a person and are given her some basic training -good. You are lucky to have found someone who is a fast and a willing learner -good. Now this person goes on to train other people. The problem of course is that the now teacher has just a little bit of knowledge. Very limited! Because there are no training facilities that can provide a complete training program for a machinist. The same story is true in most other places in the country - not all. Somebody with a half a.. know-how in a certain field trying to pass on to another person some of his or her acquired knowledge and guess what.... another half a.. trained person. Usually it will be just enough to satisfy the needs of that particular company. But that is about it.
Somethings just can not be left up to the free market to fill. They must be controlled , supervised and nourished by a nationwide program, demanding a qualified teacher using a certified training program that is verified with standardized testing in order to supply this nation with the required needed craftsmen. We have this in our technical Universities and we need a program that offers certified apprenticeships to young people throughout the county and not some "sloppy cheap on the job just enough to get by" training. Just how will our small and mid-sized shops be able to compete worldwide?

juergenwt said:

So why not copy some of the time proven solutions being used by countries in Europe and send young people starting at age 14 to learn a trade?

Click to expand...

While all else is commendable, I know for a FACT that this above ^^^ is an issue by and large!

Really? At age 14?
What do yo know at age14? How do you know what you want to be when you're 20? 25? 30? Or for that matter for the rest of your life?

Don't get me wrong, I WAS THERE! I grew up in that!
I HAD TO make the choice at the ripe old age of 13 years and 6 months regarding what I wanted to be and where I needed to apply.
If I did not, a state sponsored aptitude test decided it for me.
Or, in some cases the parents had decided for their kids ( my old man and grandparents being an example )

Turns out that from my class 33 kids started school at age 14, 29 finished at age 18, and low and behold, by age 25 only 12 remained in the filed.
Just last year we've had our 30th reunion, and a whopping 2 ( yes TWO ) is in the field, with another 3 that's in a somewhat related profession.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a solution.
I know the current method of push the f'in kid through college is absolutely idiotic and it must change, but how?
Case in point, my older one is 24 years old.
Started college as an English/Teaching major and a minor in Art History.
She is truly awesome in writing, hence the English.
She wanted to make a living, hence the Teaching.
The art history was just a fad at the time.

Fast forward to today, she is getting her masters in speech pathology. Got 7 more months to go until graduation, but already has 4 local job offers for when she gets out,
the children's hospital she's doing her filed studies at put their offer in, and, the school wants to keep her on staff when she finishes.
She absolutely LOVES what she's doing, and she is VERY good at it.
And yet, at age 18 all she knew about speech pathology is the correct spelling!

So please, tell me again how you're gonna make a 14 year old decide his/her own future?
Beat it into him/her?

Oh, on edit, a couple of things.
I have two guys that I brought into the shop part time.
One was a bricklayer, the other a bicycle messenger until age 25.
Both incredibly hard working but not overly ambitious about their future.
Got them in the shop, started with the brainless stuff, then a bit more involved with machining, then detailing, then process development ....
One got a job at one of my customers, the other went to a two year program at a local tech school.
That started 7 years ago.

Today, they earn $30 and $33 / hour respectively, one works for PW, the other is a shift foreman for my customer.

My current trainee spent 8 years in a veterinary hospital, and he is every bit as good as the bricklayer or the Eddy Merckx wannabe was 7 years ago.

If what I'm reading in this thread reflects how life is in the USA today then it is a mystery to me that the USA is the richest country in the world. The only deduction I can make is that the gap between those that have and those that don't is widening.

Maybe about time some thought about growing "bananas".

juergenwt said:

The examples on how to handle youth unemployment to improve the economic outlook of this country's young people and thereby giving new hope to our inner cities and economically deprived areas are all available for our politicians to see and follow - if they could only see, read and think.

Click to expand...

There's an intended beneficiary for every program or plan but the bulk of the money ends up in the hands of special interest and/or their political affiliates. It's just lofty rhetoric with no real concern for those in need. We are a country of polarized sheep led by old hippies & young marxists. But be sure to get out & vote next Tues., maybe your chosen pile of crap will accomplish 1% of what they promised.