Read full text: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/04/15/can-the-work-ethic-make-a-return/#more-365151
Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), I’m as excited as anyone about the prospect of a return of American manufacturing. But there are huge barriers, among which is the profitability metrics of accounting. Will it make sense from an economic point of view? Without that piece in place, political wishes… www.theburningplatform.com |
Talk to any serious person in any midsize company today and they will tell you of their struggles. The regulations and taxes are vexing but it is the labor problems day-to-day that really inhibit their operations and progress. It is exceedingly difficult to find workers who will do what they are supposed to do in a timely way, with attention to detail, and without constant hand-holding and praise.
This decline of the American work ethic traces to the educational institutions in part, but also to the reality that most young people in the top half of income earners have never worked a day in their lives until after having earned their credentials.
They are clueless about what it means to embrace a hard job and stick with it until they are done. They resent the authority structures in the workplace and attempt to game the system in the same way that they gamed school for 16-plus years.
It’s one thing to develop skills for survival in classrooms, and a radically different thing to have skills for a new world of manufacturing. Shop classes in high school are mostly gone (only 6 percent of students take them versus 20 percent in the 1980s) and two-thirds of teens eschew remunerative employment completely, simply because it is not necessary. It’s been generations since most people knew anything of farm life, to say nothing of factory life.
Trump is seeking to solve a half-century-old problem in four years. This is a serious challenge, and I cannot say that I’m optimistic. That said, there are real opportunities now for people like the shopper I mentioned above, people who work hard, work well, stick to the task, and are grateful for their opportunities. Sadly, those traits largely elude the graduates of our nation’s most prestigious educational institutions.
