In an uncertain world, essential jobs have never been more necessary. In an excellent interview, Reason magazine asks former Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe about how society has made “work the enemy.” Here’s a short quote from the interview:
Mike Rowe is best known for his stint hosting the Discovery Channel’s longrunning Dirty Jobs, where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don’t want to think about too much, from cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste. Rowe frequently talks about the value of the hard work that’s too often dismissed by a society fixated on sending everyone to college.
In July, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie caught up with Rowe at FreedomFest, held this year in Memphis, Tennessee. They talked about why men have fallen behind women in school and work, whether young people have been misled about the value of college, and how Rowe’s foundation—mikeroweWORKS—matches young people interested in learning trades with employers who need applicants.
Reason: You’ve talked about how we’ve made work the enemy, about how vocational and technical schooling at the high school level has all but disappeared in a mad rush to push people into a college track.
Rowe: We gave college a giant P.R. campaign—that it really did need—starting back in the ’70s. All that great press came at the expense of virtually every other form of education. As a result, we created a giant gap in the work force between blue- and white-collar jobs—white were clearly ascendant, blue clearly subordinate.
Action Line: Your Survival Guy has written a lot about Mike Rowe in the past, because I work with a lot of American small business owners, many of them got started doing some dirty jobs themselves. If you’re an American small business owner who knows what it takes to work and save, I want to talk to you too. When you’re ready, I’m here.
P.S. Read more about Mike Rowe below:
- Mike Rowe Alarmed at American Men Leaving the Workforce
- VIDEO: Tucker Carlson Interviews Mike Rowe about his New Book: The Way I Heard It
- Nevada Moves in the Right Direction with Charter Trade Schools
- Let’s Celebrate WORK this Labor Day Weekend
- Is a Four-year College Degree Really the Best Plan in Today’s America?
