I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “how in the world did Mike Rowe wind up in the digital pages of Fortune Magazine?” Allow me to explain.
I’m an optimist, by default. So, it’s awkward to find myself in a room filled with lots of other optimists and tell them about our workforce problem – especially in the wake of so much good news. It makes me sound like a killjoy. A downer. An alarmist. All of which I’ve been called at various points over the last seventeen years, whenever I talk about the difference between creating jobs, and creating enthusiasm for those jobs. But that’s what I was doing last month, at the Pennsylvania Energy and AI Summit – being a wet blanket.
The fact is, most elected officials are hesitant to acknowledge the various reasons why America’s work force participation rate is far more relevant to our economic health than the current unemployment rate. They’re more interested – understandably – in focusing on the investments being made in energy and AI, ($90+ billion for data centers in Pennsylvania, alone,) then they are in the conspicuous lack of skilled workers on hand to build these things. They don’t like to talk about the millions of able-bodied Americans who are not only not working, but not looking for work, because they don’t like to imply that their constituents might lack work ethic. And they don’t talk much about the undeniable fact that boomers are retiring much faster than Gen Z is replacing them, or that skilled labor is bearing the brunt of that exodus, because there’s nothing they can do about the simple fact that for every 5 tradespeople that retire, 2 replace them.
You don’t need to be an expert to understand how unsustainable that ratio is, but it does help to have one or two on your side. And so, when Chris Kibarian over at Lightcast told me that the concerns I voiced in Pittsburgh were backed by endless stacks of incontrovertible data, I was gratified. And when he asked me if I’d like comment in the attached editorial he was about to submit to the mainstream media, I said “sure.”
Anyway, that’s how I wound up in the digital pages of Fortune Magazine. Please give it a look and share it, if you’re so inclined.
The real problem gripping rural America and the jobs of the future: A sitdown between Mike Rowe of ‘Dirty Jobs’ and a top labor analytics CEO
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