One of the most enjoyable things at the Plex conference in Atlanta earlier this month was a chance to listen to and spend a few minutes chatting with Mike Rowe, the host of the Discovery series, Dirty Jobs which profiled all kinds of interesting jobs cleaning sewers, mucking coal and worse.
He is a very entertaining speaker. Importantly, he is humble. He did not record the shows as a high minded TV host. He acted like an apprentice to each of the workers he profiled. As his mother says in his book, Profoundly Disconnected, “if there was a joke to be made, it would always be on Mike, never at the expense of the people he worked with. I liked that”
In listening to him I found so much in common in what I found in my research for Silicon Collar. We have inflicted many manmade wounds on the job economy and yet we are hysterical about machines killing jobs.
Here is what he told Bill Maher
“We’ve got millions of people looking for work and millions of jobs that nobody wants. College graduates are a trillion dollars in debt and struggling to find employment in their field of study. Meanwhile, 88 percent of all the available jobs don’t require a four-year degree. They require specific training. So what do we do? We push a four-year degree like it’s some sort of a Golden Ticket. We remove vocational education from high schools at the time we need it most. We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back, educating them for jobs that no longer exist. I’m no expert, but I’d say that’s profoundly disconnected.”
I particularly like his poster which you can order here (along with his book) which positions the modern day blue collar worker as more self-fulfilled than a white collar college graduate.
We need a lot more of this thinking.
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