The title indicates that the article is about how a trade war would hurt many factories in the US. That is how the article does start out, and how it concludes.
But as the article progresses and the reporter talks to more people, the article becomes all about how the rural working class really hates change.
No matter how many times it is pointed out to the rural working class that 85% of job losses in the United States are due to automation rather than trade, the workers will still rant on about how foreigners are taking American jobs.
At one point, the article mentions how a worker with advanced technical training can earn a solid middle-class salary.
Indeed, for workers with two-year degrees in fields like automation, metal fabrication and advanced manufacturing, employers are offering $50,000 to $60,000 to start. “We call them gold-collar workers in the state,” said Susan May, the president of Fox Valley Technical College.
But the gist of the article is that rural workers really don't want to get any advanced training.
This seems to be part of a pattern of the rural working class:
1. They will not move from their community, no matter how bad things get.
2. They are reluctant to pursue job training or college.
3. They blame all their problems on outsiders (China, Mexico).
This is one more piece of the puzzle in education policy in the US.
Elites debate whether the workers should go to college or pursue vocational skills.
The reality is that the bulk of the rural working class wants neither. They want jobs, and they want to those jobs to come to them in their out-of-the-way small towns.
In the article, the workers assert that they want to have the same jobs as their parents and have the same exact lifestyle.
Something like this can be found in this article on short-order breakfast cooks in Las Vegas.
Some of the cooks are brilliant and talented chefs, but they have no desire in pursuing advanced culinary training. They tend to be immigrants from rural Mexico. One of their supervisors explains that village life revolves around the rhythms of daily life, the cycle of the seasons and the passing of the generations. This is the fondest love, highest ideal and great truth of rural life -- the familiar. Familiar places, familiar faces. In contrast, middle-class people from the suburbs are smitten with novelty, and they want to become elite chefs working on the latest cutting-edge cuisine at an Michelin-star restaurant in the city.
One can find the ethos of provincial conservatism in the character of Mr. Fezziwig in Charles Dicken's "A Christmas Carol", who represented the old-time, pre-capitalist small businessman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Fezziwig
Jorkin: "Mr. Fezziwig, we’re good friends besides good men of business. We're men of vision and progress. Why don't you sell out while the going’s good? You'll never get a better offer. It’s the age of the machine, and the factory, and the vested interests. We small traders are ancient history, Mr. Fezziwig."
Fezziwig: "It's not just for money alone that one spends a lifetime building up a business…. It's to preserve a way of life that one knew and loved. No, I can't see my way to selling out to the new vested interests, Mr. Jorkin. I'll have to be loyal to the old ways and die out with them if needs must."
The insularity of the small-town mentality complicates further one of the challenges of American society and its relationship to education -- a relationship that is already complicated.
Eduction in the US is starkly different from the educational system in Germany, where students are given an aptitude test at the age of 12 which determines how they will be educated and trained and employed from then on.
In contrast, so many young Americans imagine that they are going to become movie stars and celebrities and music producers, while they might be better off gaining a realistic appraisal of themselves and their prospects.
Complicating this, there are in fact so many extremely successful Americans -- Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs -- who would have never gone on to their great success if they had been tracked into a more "realistic" career path at the age of 12 years.
As a compromise, one might think that such an aptitude test could be given to American students as a mere useful suggestion of what they might want to do with their lives, without ensnaring them in a system that insists they be tracked into vocational training.
But the rural working class would not understand this, either. They don't want great success, nor do they want vocational training. They want to do what their parents did. They want their parents' lives.
This attitude affects the prospects of economic diversification. Here is an article on rural West Virginia, which was historically a Democratic bastion since before the Civil War.
One resident points out how it is so strange that despite being represented by some of the most powerful Democratic politicians in the US (e.g., Senator Robert Byrd), there were no efforts to diversify the local economy away from coal, even when the coal jobs began to disappear in the 1970s with the advent of strip mining. No matter how harsh and dangerous the jobs are, and no matter how much less the residents earn in those jobs than they would with advanced skills, they would rather do what their parents did. In a small town, economic diversification is the last thing on anyone's mind. (Perhaps, they might even fear it.)
One issue is the cost of living. People complain that the cost of living keeps going up.
But there is a creeping sense of having to work harder just to stay in place, as salaries and lifestyles erode amid pressure from globalization and the unceasing demand for ever-rising profits in corporate America.
“People are working similar jobs to what their parents did but are not able to maintain the same lifestyle,” said Mark Harris, a former mayor of Oshkosh who is now the Winnebago County executive. “That’s causing anxiety.”
“We had eight kids in our family, and my mother didn’t have to work,” Mr. Olejnik said.
“Grocery stores weren’t open on Sunday and you spent time with your family. Now, the mall is open on Christmas Eve. We’ve lost a lot.”
Is that really true? Does the cost of living keeps going up?
I read back in the 1990s that if one wanted the lifestyle of a middle-class American family of the 1950s, one would only need to work ten hours a week. But what would one own?
- a flimsy house half the size of the average home today, and that needs constant repair.
- one black-and-white television with three stations.
- one radio.
- cheap, factory-made furnishings that are always falling apart.
- a big, simple, unsafe car that won't last long.
Today, we associate that kind of lifestyle with the developing world.
An example of how the standard of living invisibly improves and the cost of living invisibly declines would be cable TV programming. Once upon a time, The History Channel actually had shows about history; today, it is mostly reality TV shows about working-class rural whites scrambling for money. What happened? Educated people who used to watch cable TV have cut the cord. Now it is "poor" whites with 100 channels of cable who watch "History" (the new name of The History Channel).
The standard of living rises, thanks to technology. But that same technology makes jobs obsolete. But many of those who enjoy the benefits of that technology do not want change or self-improvement.
Educational policy might be better off embracing paradox.
Perhaps the US, like Germany, could adopt a system of early testing for aptitude -- albeit without the rigid tracking.
Likewise, the US could also adopt the ideal of developing a "college ready" school population -- albeit without the expectation that all or even most of the students would actually go to college.
So students would be exposed both to vocational options and to a college curriculum. Some students might become interested in becoming a physicians assistant. Other students might become interested in history and literature.
But it seems like right now they are largely exposed to neither.
Also, going to college for working-class students has been described as "moving to Paris". How to prepare students for that? More broadly, how does society prepare the rural working class for culture shock of moving in general, now that the small town is economically obsolete?
