Drinking Water Contamination, Why We Don’t Plan For Retirement, “Reskilling America”

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After years of off-shoring manufacturing jobs, companies are starting to commit more dollars to creating products in America only to find a shortage of skilled labor. Our guest makes the case for revamping the country’s education system to focus on skilled trades. We also learn why some of us are bad at planning for retirement and talk about a new investigative report finding that some Wisconsin drinking water is contaminated by fecal matter.

Featured in this Show

  • Time To 'Reskill' America's Workforce With Vocational Training, Labor Expert Says

    A labor expert is calling for increased vocational training to help equip the unskilled workforce in the U.S. with the tools needed to fill good-paying jobs that are are already available in today’s economy.

    “It’s a pretty big problem,” said Katherine Newman, author of “Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the 21st Century,” and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “In manufacturing alone, there are some 600,000 jobs that have not been filled for lack of people who have the right skills.”

    Newman added that number will only grow as the current workforce is quickly aging, leaving fewer people stepping up behind them as they retire.

    There has been a lot of talk during presidential debates about American jobs going overseas and college becoming unaffordable. But the problem, said Newman, isn’t that there aren’t enough jobs here. It’s that employees aren’t being trained or prepared to fill some of those vacant jobs.

    “I think there has been a long standing skepticism … about vocational training,” said Newman. “In part, it’s part of the long debate that goes all the way back to W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, who argued vociferously about whether training for pragmatic economic opportunity was more important or less important than training for liberal arts education.”

    Over the years, Newman said so-called blue-collar jobs have become stigmatized. That was particularly true with the post-World War II romanticizing of white-collar jobs, which tended to lead through the gates of universities. Since then, generations of high school students have been steered towards university campuses.

    “The technical training that I’m talking about in ‘Reskilling America’ is absolutely critical if we’re going to be at the top of manufacturing, or IT, or any of the new emerging areas, and that isn’t necessarily what four-year universities can do. So, we need both. Not either or,” said Newman.

    Newman said part of the solution is a combination of funneling money from the educational budget to technical schools, rewarding teachers working in these fields and creating apprentice partnerships.

  • Why It's So Hard To Save For Retirement

    Two years ago, a Bankrate.com survey found that about one-third of Americans have nothing saved for their retirement.

    Psychologists might argue that those later years are distant and hard to perceive for some people, but according to author and personal finance columnist Helaine Olen, the biggest obstacle to save for the future is that the present is too expensive.

    “I would make the argument that still the greatest problem we have in this country is the fact that a good portion of people simply can’t afford to save for retirement,” Olen said. “You can say put money aside for your retirement, put money aside for your children’s college education, but there’s plenty who are going to say, ‘But I need to pay the rent on the first of the month.’”

    But people aren’t necessarily avoiding saving money altogether — a lot of people with families are saving for the future, just not their own.

    “There’s sort of this common scolding thought in personal finance writing that people are saving for college for their children when in fact they should be saving for retirement,” Olen said, adding that the advice to put more funds toward retirement over a child’s college education is counterintuitive for a lot of people.

    “You’re kind of asking people to put themselves over their children, which I think we all know goes against some basic human instincts,” she said.

    In addition to advising people to save for retirement and college educations, financial counselors also encourage allocating money towards saving for a house and for three- to six-month emergency funds. But Olen still acknowledged doing that while living in a country where higher education costs are rising and the state doesn’t cover health insurance for most people, makes opting out of long-term saving understandable “a completely rational reaction.”

    For Olen, the solution to many Americans retirement crises ultimately lies in the now-dwindling social security system.

    “Try to lobby and protect things like social security which is there precisely because people don’t actually save for their future selves,” she said. “The money comes out, (and) you don’t have anything to do with it.”

    But in the meantime, Olen recommends replicating the Social Security system with on your own by signing up for retirement accounts at work, and having about 10 to 15 percent of one’s money taken out of the account.

  • Human Waste Contaminates Some of Wisconsin's Drinking Water

    Wisocnsin drinking water is known to have been polluted by manure from large-scale dairy farms, but a new report from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found that some of the state’s drinking water sources are contaminated with human waste. Our guest tells us about who is being affected by the contaminated drinking water, and experts’ calls for stricter standards for clean drinking water.

  • Why We Don't Plan Ahead For Retirement And More

    Many Americans aren’t planning ahead for retirement, according to recent research. Part of the reason, according to a writer on money and finance: we have a hard time imagining the old-age versions of ourselves, and what our lives will be like.

  • Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century

    Presidential candidates on the campaign trail speak often about American jobs being sent overseas, but our guest says that there are plenty of middle skill jobs in the U.S. that are being left vacant and that it might be time to shift some of our attention away from four-year colleges, and focus more on vocational training like America once did.

Episode Credits

  • Rob Ferrett Host
  • Haleema Shah Producer
  • Rob Ferrett Producer
  • Katherine Newman Guest
  • Helaine Olen Guest
  • Ron Seely Guest

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