From its beginning in 1998, the financial technology company has been devoted to democratizing financial services and creating more opportunities for people to access the global economy. "But in the past, when both sectors had more union density, those jobs were even better. PayPal offers a fast, secure way for sellers and buyers to conduct transactions online and on the go. "There were times in the past where a lot of people think of manufacturing jobs and construction jobs as good jobs, and in many cases they are," Drake said. Importantly, workers without a college degree who are in unions their whole careers make more than workers with a degree, but who are not in a union - a key distinction for blue-collar workers, many of whom are powering robust gains in jobs for workers without degrees. Research from Cornell University's ILR Review has found that a worker who's in a union for their entire career was estimated to earn a million dollars more than someone who's never been in a union. "And the only way to do that is for government to subsidize it." "America's middle income workers and low income workers, they need access to care for both their aging loved ones and their children that is safe, affordable, and enriching," Boushey said. "But we're making the whole economy more resilient, and all the workers are playing a vital role in that." "By looking at where are these pain points in our economy and trying to say, 'we've got to make some of this here, it's critical,' we are creating jobs," Celeste Drake, deputy director for labor and economy at the National Economic Council, told Insider. For instance, the Biden administration has launched a massive push to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the US to reduce dependence on China and solve a pandemic-era semiconductor chip shortage, which led to skyrocketing prices and low availability for things like new cars and computers. Once again, blue-collar service work helped power the jobs engine: Leisure and hospitality continues to be one of the economy's most robust job-adders, with accommodation and food services and retail trade also doing some heavy lifting, together adding another 31,000 jobs.Ī blue collar boom could help ease some of the problems that ailed the country and led to higher prices across some sectors. "Not only has this recovery been much steeper than prior recoveries - we have added jobs faster and quicker - but we've also seen much steeper recoveries in manufacturing, which has seen a historic recovery," Boushey said. The Biden administration has been devoted to turning that around, pouring billions into projects devoted to bringing manufacturing jobs back stateside. Manufacturing and blue-collar work is picking back upįor decades before the pandemic, employment in manufacturing had been tumbling from the highs last seen in the 1970's. "The best indication of the quality of the jobs out there for the blue-collar economy, if you want to call it that, is that it looks like we're going to have a summer of strikes across the country," Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Insider. The real challenge is making those jobs - which used to be enough to support workers and their families - back into sustainable careers. As AI stands poised to potentially remake white-collar work, blue-collar work may emerge even more resilient. It's the blue-collar boom the Biden administration aimed for, and it may also be better for the economy. "When you look at this recovery overall, the president talks about wanting to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out, and certainly that's what we see when we look at this recovery in terms of jobs," Heather Boushey, a member of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, told Insider. Layoffs and discharges went down in retail trade in March 2023, and, while they ticked up a bit in leisure and hospitality, workers in that sector still felt comfortable quitting at higher rates than the economy's average quit rate. It's no secret that some tech workers are already leaving without a plan, or branching out into creating their own goods.ĭata shows that if you want security, blue-collar service jobs are the way to go. After a pandemic-era tech jobs boom - and now bust - more and more Americans are returning to blue-collar work for better pay and more security. It stands in stark contrast to the ever-withering tech industry. The jobs recovery from the pandemic has been astounding - and you can thank your local blue-collar workers for that. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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