tmm99
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- May 15, 2008
- Messages
- 5,228
In the early 80's, I was sitting in a watch center late at night, looking at news magazines (which were allowed reading). There was an article about GM auto workers, basically factory line assemblers; my age, uneducated, unskilled, all with homes, multiple cars, boats, and other nice things that I couldn't afford. I felt like, "What am I doing here, and why did I work for that college degree?"
Well, it was a little bubble in time and space, which burst a few years later. Those people would all be in their 60's now, like me. Wonder how retirement is going for them?
I remember those days as well. It seemed that there were many more jobs available in the 80's for people without education/skills but they could still make a decent amount of money. I also remember some families having mining jobs and oil industry jobs without educaiton good money. My ex-husband's father was one of those people (silver mining). He lived in south Tucson and his house was basic and his car was old, but he had an RV - they went fishing a lot. The town near by became a ghost town after the mining business went down hill. The area he lived in was a blue color area. Everyone's house was pretty basic with no fancy cars. I remember one guy on the street was a truck driver. Another worked retail. Their kids, for the most part, didn't go to colleges and they had similar, blue colour type jobs after high school.
When I lived in northern California (Silicon Valley) (late 90's to 2015), I didn't get to know a single person who had a blue colour job. Everyone I met was a business professional of some kind who most likely had good education and made good money. (One person I knew made only $50K/yr doing admin type work in the financial industry.) I think living there gave me a pretty skewed idea about how other people lived. I moved to the Buffalo NY area back in 2015 for 6 months before moving to Canada, and I had a rude awakening (or re-awakening) to see poverty all over the area. I got to know a few people there in a short time and realized that some people do not have a lot of means to get out of poverty. Even if you could land a job and work hard, the pay was low and it would be hard to get ahead and buy a house or save a lot of money.