In the wake of President Donald Trump moving to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, his Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, says the “great jobs of the future” will be generations upon generations of Americans working in factories.
“It’s time to train people, not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” Lutnick, a billionaire, told CNBC on Tuesday afternoon (video below). “You know, this is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.”
“You know, we let the auto plants go overseas,” continued Lutnick, the former president and chief executive officer of the major financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. “Right now, you should see an auto plant. It’s highly automated, but the people, the four, five thousand people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms. They’re trained to keep the air conditioned system.”
The Commerce Secretary began by saying that the “key is, where are you gonna find the people to work here, right?”
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“You go to the community colleges, and you train people, so all the community colleges around here,” he added, “all these community colleges here are training people right now, technicians, and these are really good paying jobs.”
Lutnick described the starting pay for these jobs as in the $70,000 to $90,000 range.
Professor of Economics Justin Wolfers asked, “Do you think Lutnick wants *his* kids and grandkids spending their lives in a manufacturing plant, or are these just aspirations for ‘other people’?”
Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic & Policy Research, declared, “It’s amazing how off the wall this guy is. Does Lutnick really know nothing about the economy?”
Media Matters for America’s Matthew Gertz added, “‘People don’t want upward mobility for their kids and grandkids’ is an interesting take from a billionaire whose parents were college professors.”
“This isn’t how modern manufacturing works,” noted podcaster Fred Wellman. “They don’t even turn on the lights. These lunatics are disconnected from reality.”
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Philosopher and theologian Jay Mallow observed: “Man who has never worked a factory job ignores the historical reality that entire generations worked factory jobs so their children WOULDN’T work those same jobs.”
“The reason those jobs were once so desirable was because the workers had unions and collective bargaining,” wrote economics journalist Patrick W. Watson. “Lutnick and Trump have no interest in restoring that part.”
CNN’s Rachel Sklar, commenting on Lutnick’s remarks, said simply, “You first.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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Image via Reuters