Overqualified and underpaid

[Deja Q]

http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/30/news/economy/overqualified_underpaid/index.htm

Maybe this is why the US economy might not recover?

[theoldman]

1. This always happens when the job market is down.

When employment goes up, salaries go up. The problem over many years is that we have lost the high paying jobs in technology and replaced them with jobs at McDonald's and Wendy's.

[Deja Q]

2. Thank you for the post.

The media will sensationalize and we often fall for it, because the economy is the one thing closest to our livelihoods. Well, for some of us - some people prefer sex, but that's their business.

And you're right on the core problem; replacing high paying jobs with low paying drivel - it might be genuine as a possibility to fathom this is playing a role in the dumbing down of our students. They are becoming apathetic because of the ambient environment. That perception might be an over-rationalized, hog shit wrong too. All I know is, teachers say many students show little work ethic. (Whether that is a problem or a symptom of a problem is still up for debate, of course.)

[KansDem]

3. McDonald's and Wendy's? Those are "manufacturing jobs!"

In the New Economics: Fast-Food Factories?

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: Friday, February 20, 2004

Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?

That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy.

The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered.

In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy.

Counting jobs at McDonald's , Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.