The Most Common Jobs in America Are “Meant for High School Students” (According to Many Republicans)
“That job is not meant to be a career” or “that job is meant for high school students” are phrases loved by Republican pundits (and Republican meme posters) when discussing the difficulties faced by low-paid workers. However, the “low-skill” jobs they are talking about really are careers for tens of millions of people. The four most common jobs in America are:
- Retail salespeople (3.7 mil)
- Fast food and counter workers (3.5 mil)
- Cashiers (3.3 mil)
- Home health and personal care aids (3.2 mil)
And if you look at the top ten jobs listed on the Bureau of Labor and Statistics website, very few (probably only registered nurse and ‘general and operations manager’) would be considered “good jobs” by the job-judging pundits (and by those who like to post job-shaming memes). Considering how many low-skill jobs exist, and how many of them require working during weekdays and late at night, suggesting they are for high school students is ridiculous.
“But those people could learn a trade” is another phrase used by Republicans to belittle the low-skilled worker. Yes, a fast food worker could learn a trade and get better pay and have a higher likelihood of having benefits (but no guarantee). However, in a free market society (or even in a socialist society), there can only be so many people working in the trades — and there have to be a whole lot of people working low-skill jobs. So, while one fast food worker may learn a trade, and get a better salary, that doesn’t change the fact that someone else now has to do his or her job at the fast food restaurant. Saying a person should just learn a trade does not, in any way, address the problems faced by low-skill workers — and it’s just as silly as saying low-skill jobs are for high school students.
In a completely unregulated free-market society, the people doing low-skill jobs will receive little compensation. So what it comes down to, is do we think the people doing the low-skill / most common jobs in the economy should have to live in or near poverty with less-than-adequate healthcare? Or, should the government find some way to help them (at least a little)? Higher minimum wage and/or unions would likely help their situation — as would universal healthcare. Many other countries take these steps to improve the lives of the people who do the most common jobs in the economy, and the result is that these countries end up having less income inequality.
If you believe that people doing the most common jobs in America should have to live in poverty without good health insurance, you are entitled to that view. One of the biggest problems with this notion, however, is the concept of social mobility. If you compare someone whose parents are in the top 20 percent of wage earners to someone whose parents are in the bottom 20 percent of wage earners, the child of the high earning parents has an almost seven times greater chance of making it to the top 20 percent of wage earners. Hard work is important for financial success in America, but how much money your parents make and where you grow up end up playing large roles as well. It seems to me that there’s too much random chance (the random chance of who your parents are) involved in who is doing low-skill jobs to not at least make sure all workers have good healthcare.
Maybe a paradigm shift is needed regarding low-skill work. For example, factory jobs (jobs where you make something) are considered okay by today’s job judgers. But, if you go back 100 years, factory jobs had low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. Thanks to unions and government safety regulations, these jobs got better. So, why can’t we just decide that a full time job working in a restaurant is an honest job that has value to society — and the person doing such a job should at least have the same health insurance as anyone else in society?
For much of the last decade, we’ve been at what economists consider “full employment”. Now that the COVID pandemic is getting under control, it is once again getting easy to find a job. But, as long as low-skill jobs do not provide decent healthcare, salary, or benefits, America will continue to have the biggest gap between rich and poor in the developed world as well as some of the lowest social mobility in the developed world.
There isn’t an easy fix. Just raising the minimum wage to a livable wage will cause many jobs to disappear. But, when you look at what other countries do to give those doing society’s most common jobs a better life and make society more equal (universal healthcare / somewhat higher minimum wage than America / more unions), you realize the programs actually work (and the counties don’t turn into Venezuela, as Republicans often suggest).
Originally published at https://www.mikehemmingsen.com on June 14, 2021.
