Good article.
Seems like the Corbyn/Sanders movement wasn't so much fuelled by blue collar working class wanting to lift themselves up, but rather by the white collar uni/college graduates wanting to avoid downward social mobility.
The disappointment at the diminishing returns of the expanding higher education was at the core.
Lot of talk about free college & uni, which is a good idea. But didn't hear ANY democrat mention the awesome union apprenticeship system even once in the debates?
@LeoSammallahti Your argument for union apprenticeship makes the assumption that it's a viable option. I don't know about the UK, but Thatcher and Reagan put both on a similar course. In the USA, union jobs are hard to come by and they don't pay nearly as good as in the past.
The article doesn't mention outsourcing, which is a key factor in the decline of both union and office jobs (now including management). Outsourcing in manufacturing is due as much to looser regulations ...
@LeoSammallahti ...reducing costs as to cost of labor. In engineering and management, it's mostly salary and benefits cost, so it has been a slower adoption.
Hardware engineering was hit much harder than software engineering, because the costs are fully understood. Software has not adopted a viable measurement definition, so it is still "magic" to management (and unfortunately many practitioners). This same mechanism has made management view software engineers as fungible...
@LeoSammallahti ...resources, which has made outsourcing more attractive. If you can't measure software, you can't understand which skills best suit your needs, and you can't gauge the productivity of your workers, which is a key economic factor. You also aren't able to gauge your quality very well.
I digress.
