Actually, it’s because manufacturing is becoming increasingly automated, and thus, creates fewer jobs.
And the displaced workers generally don’t have the skills or training, and, often, the aptitude, for the more difficult, technology-intensive jobs that remain.
This is an increasingly common problem as things go on: we are literally creating work that only a small portion of the population can do.
The flip side of the problem, is the one Mike Rowe often addresses: the lack of Skilled Labor. The schools push kids towards College and away from “vo-tech” fields, which are often hurting for lack of qualified skilled labor. . . .
It’s not the boys who are being lured towards college, as anyone who has step onto a college campus in the past two decades knows. If boys are not going to college in greater numbers and they are not going into the skilled trades, what are they doing? Drug dealing and gang banging?