Used to be able to get a job at the local factory, farm, machine shop, construction site, restaurant, whatever, and work your way up. A lot of these jobs either a) don’t exist anymore or b) have been filled by droves of illegals or c) priced out by unions or d) have been marginalized by the high bar of the margin between working vs. gov’t bennies.
Those jobs once did not exist, they existed, and now they don’t. That’s not new. The market place is continually changing.
What has changed is that just after WWII, the feds decided to subsidize education to help unemployed GI’s become employable. Unfortunately, they subsidized education to such a point that it became uneconomical for any business to continue to train its own employees, so now businesses don’t.
Since businesses don’t train anymore, they’re expectations have changed. Now, because they are paying taxes for people to spend those years acquiring skills, they expect employees to be able to hit the ground running, in terms of being able to do their jobs.
Consequently, it doesn’t matter if I am of good character, willing to work deadly long hours, and do everything possible to earn a profit for my employer, if I am not a good fit for the way society trains its people, I’m hooped.
Not everybody is a good fit for the way we train people. I’m not. I need to have a deeper understanding of material, than most people to make it work, but our education system is set up to keep people moving, whether they have acquired to necessary skills before moving up or not.
That was then... You need to stop living in the past and live in the present.. Besides I don’t recall anything in the Constitution about a good paying job being a right.