Women are raising their wages by moving into the blue-collar jobs which are performed by men, marking another pro-woman win for President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” economic policy.
The women are getting opportunities and pay raises because Trump has mostly blocked demands by business and Democrats for more cheap-labor immigrants to fill the jobs that are now being taken by women.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Women are increasingly being drawn into blue-collar jobs because the pool of men willing to take those jobs is shrinking, said Gad Levanon, chief economist at The Conference Board. More Americans are pursuing college degrees, leaving fewer willing to take traditional blue-collar jobs.
“That makes recruiting extremely difficult,” he said, adding that companies in blue-collar industries need to go beyond the typical pool of candidates. “Women, in many cases, turn out to be one of those groups.”
The rise of women in majority-male jobs reflects recent labor-force trends: Women have been driving the comeback in working-age labor-force participation, while participation among men ages 25 to 54—long the stalwarts of blue-collar jobs—has lagged behind.
The number of construction jobs held by women has climbed by one-fifth — 20 percent — since 2017. The number of women in transportation jobs has jumped by a third from 2017 to 2018.
The article quotes one woman who raised her hourly salary by $8 after quitting her job at a donut shop to become a welder. A housekeeper boosted her wages from $13 to $15 an hour by moving into construction, the article said.
The Wall Street Journal article does not mention immigration, perhaps because the paper’s editorials call for cheap labor and open borders.
Rising wages in Trump’s economy are creating a 202o headache for Democrats, according to Politico:
“Our view is that Democrats would be very wise to recognize how steep the mountain is on the economy,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way. “There are things about this economy that are very popular — low unemployment, a lot of jobs, there’s been some real wage increase. We attribute zero, zero percent of that to good Trump policy … But he will claim credit, as he does for the sun rising and everything else, and we have to be aware that that could be potent.”
He said, “What that means is that we need a very clear economic narrative that resonates deeply with the voters that we have to win, and we better not be caught up in our own blue bubble world.”
Read the Wall Street Journal article here.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly 1 million H-1B workers — in addition to approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and also tolerates about eight million illegal workers and the inflow of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.
This federal policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor is intended to boost economic growth for investors.
This policy works by shifting enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts children’s schools and college educations, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. Mass migration moves business investment from the heartland to the coasts, explodes rents, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
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