“Trade” has become a code word for “nobody wants to pay me the salary I decided I deserve for my complete lack of skills, lack of adaptability and an incapacity to work with anybody who isn’t exactly like me.” The moment the evil “trade” goes away, there will be a stampede of employers rushing to hand over big bucks for the dumb, mechanical work that a machine can do 100 times more cheaply.
Trade
Clarissa's Blog 
“Trade” has become a code word for “nobody wants to pay me the salary I decided I deserve for my complete lack of skills, lack of adaptability and an incapacity to work with anybody who isn’t exactly like me.” The moment the evil “trade” goes away, there will be a stampede of employers rushing to hand over big bucks for the dumb, mechanical work that a machine can do 100 times more cheaply.
This has been a definition brought to you by Clarissa in a fit of pique.
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What pique? I’m just stating the painfully obvious. If people want to flush their lives down the toilet for the sake of this fantasy, it’s their right.
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I disagree. Plumbers, electricians, welders, and carpenters, to name a few are all “trades.” We haven’t yet devised machines capable of doing many of the jobs they do–most of which are outside of any factory. And people routinely pay a premium for their work, since a shoddy job means paying more money to have it fixed.
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Clarissa doesn’t mean “trade” as in the professions but “trade” as in the NAFTA and TPP– and most skilled trades aren’t affected by those treaties.
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Having a M. Sc. in statistics, I’m way less qualified than an electrician.
However, I cannot blame trade for my unemployability.
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When people talk about trade that can be protected by tariffs and were previously well paid and unionized, I feel like they’re talking about symbolic relics of the industrial revolution. The steel industry in and around my hometown and the attendant air pollution was long gone before I was born. So when they start doing segments on depressed factory workers in 2016, I’m confused.
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Yeah, absolutely. It’s not even an actual memory they want to recover. It’s a myth.
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