There are still jobs like that, but living standards have increased so much that they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones, to the point that it's considered like a "boomerism" to suggest doing jobs that people in other countries are happy to take to live at a 1970's standard of living.
Even in the US there are seasonal blue collar jobs like that. Youth generally last until 25 or so now though, and that's partly just a skill issue/matter of mindset, because it didn't sound weird for a 20 year old to work in a factory or on a boat back then like it does now.
IMO the giant difference between now and then is the massive gap in income/wealth between people just starting out or working 1970's style jobs, and jobs with global reach and high leverage (ie the most capable produce 2-100+ times the value, but the average person produces nothing of value or negative value). There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's. I think that's what causes most of the angst tbh, that there is so much more opportunity cost and variance in outcomes now because of global trade/technology, if you just want to work to live you're not going to the same results as people who live to work, or people living places where they literally have to "work to live".
To be honest I don't think the boomer mindset of just working to live and play with your expensive toys was ever a very good one, because it led to the consumerism that makes people think they need $10M to retire or seek $200k jobs right out of college without actually wanting to do those things enough to achieve them (and not needing them anyway)
This is not a new problem and does not lay at the feet of job seekers. Manufacturing trades are a few decades ahead of software development in this respect. Before off-shoring, being a tool and die maker was one of the most consistent paths to getting a really well-paying job. It took a long time to get into it: often a decade or more of on-the-job experience and only the best machinists qualified. But they’re crucial to most manufacturing, so most companies, even small ones, had a path to progressively bring new, inexperienced people into the trade, build their skills, and turn them into the people that companies needed. Then, off-shoring meant that they didn’t need as many tool and die guys as they used to have, so they mostly stopped taking apprentices. As time progressed, they had a seeming never-ending stream of experienced people to fill those dwindling roles, but now, there’s a problem: almost all of the people from the original system are retiring, and almost nobody’s been training apprentices, so the entire industry is at risk of losing that crucial manufacturing skill. Meanwhile, China has tens of thousands because 80s executives sent all of our knowledge over there in the 80s and 90s and they just kept progressing. As an aside, anybody who says “there will be new jobs,” as a response to the possibility of AI-driven job loss should visit the rust belt. There were new jobs— we as a society just didn’t care enough about the people we discarded to help them see the benefits of that.
Companies in the US right now, tech notwithstanding, largely see no commitment to helping maintain a labor pool, or help individual workers progress into more useful workers. They think it’s immoral to spend a dime on anything that isn’t going to contribute directly to this quarter’s bottom line.
> there are jobs like that
Yes I understand this. I’m a tradesman and I encounter all levels of blue collar workers far more frequently than just about anyone around here.
> they aren't considered worth taking when you can hold out longer for better ones
People don’t hold out on those jobs. I see people doing them all the time. They’re no different from uber or DoorDash. You just don’t see people doing those jobs as a career because they can’t provide you, let alone your family, with basic necessities.
Firstly, those jobs aren’t stable enough to bet your housing on, let alone with kids or whatever. Secondly, they never offer health insurance, which is an absolute must in the United States where your kid breaking their arm could put a low-wage family in the red for literally years. Let alone getting cancer or something.
> living standards have increased so much
Standards of living have not universally increased- the cost of convenience goods, electronics, entertainment, clothing, and other things have decreased. The cost of many necessities, such as housing, health care, and education, have all increased much more quickly. Go look for some visualizations that juxtapose the basic cost of living with wage growth since the 1970s— life, in general, was SO much cheaper then. It was SO MUCH EASIER for young people to get their adult lives started. Then look for a visualization that shows, for each year, what the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of the federal minimum wage was since the 70s. Blue Collar wage growth peaked in 1981.
> There are WAY more opportunities to benefit from that now than there were in the 70's.
To whom, how many jobs are there vs the population size, and how long does one basically need to be floated to get into it surely enough to make it a career? One of the biggest correlating factors among people who successfully founded businesses was having enough family support (money, connections) to float them through multiple failures and get a foothold. Even if there are more people for whom that’s true, that does not mean it’s a generally viable path. It requires starting on second base.
The amount of wealth concentrating in the higher echelons and the widening chasm between them and everyone else show how little those opportunities avail themselves to most people.
Life has gotten much better for the wealthy. Everyone else is hurting and cheap flat screen TVs don’t change that.
Hard pass, I'd rather talk to his union rep.
I currently work in a trade. My sixty-something boss constantly makes side comments about a life of backbreaking work, for more hours and in the midst of more hardship than any of the kids these days. But interrogate it lightly and you’ll hear about a guy that got a union apprenticeship right out of high school, was making a solid adult wage by 22, moving back and forth between another trade he had a house at 25, and was a classic truck collector and eventually fabricator in his 30s. Now that he’s in his sixties he’s going to retire with TWO pensions for life. If you talk to anyone in the industrial trades, they’ll know one or more of these ”I’m only bitter because I worked too damn hard for everything I ever had” guys that spent most of their lives under competent union representation, never had any serious threat to their lifestyle that wasn’t of their own doing, and owns a vacation home, a motorcycle, a boat, and multiple cars.
I’m sure they genuinely believe it. And I’m sure if they wrote a book about it, they would paint a picture of indentured servitude where the houses and cars and everything were sources of stress and financial burden. Then, they’d say, “hey, check out my cool cars and lake house,” and then talk about how living with your parents after age 18 is a moral failure.