I learned to weld at age 17, on the job in an apprenticeship. My colleagues and I are the highest paid metal fabricators in the state, our company is good to work for, we do some big and interesting work, we take on multiple new apprentices each year, some as young as 16.
Not everyone is cutout to be a university graduate going on to a white-collar career. I was expelled from high school because I didn't fit the mold. Leaving school and going in to a trade was the best thing I could have done at the time.
I feel many young people are under-served by school. They don't have the drive / desire to do uni and school didn't teach them anything useful, like basic financial management, how to lay a brick, or fix a leaking tap.
I mean, I totally approve of the concept of vocational training. The thing is that like most internships it undercuts actual workers in practice. It's not just the intern getting coffee while observing work as intended, it's actual business work that displaces an apprentice or secretary (illegally, but never enforced). If you mandated and enforced that such workers must be paid the full wages of their trained counterparts (or close) then I'd be highly in favor of it. But that's not the motivation of the people who make such proposals - they're looking to undercut trained workers without any sort of mitigation for the damage to wages. The NLRB has been forced into a deadlock for more than a decade against just such a possibility. This SCOTUS nomination lockout is nothing new.
On the large scale you get our current education system, where people take out big loans to get trained as a teacher and then usually burn out in 3-5 years and take a job at Starbucks.
And you especially get mentally ill people who work a register for $2 an hour and displace an able worker who needs to feed their family. There's no excuse for that, we are a modern society and we can take care of our disadvantaged as well as paying a living wage. People should not be forced to rely on the mentally ill or child laborers to make ends meet, that's simply unacceptable in modern society. We honestly don't even need every abled worker anymore, let alone the mentally disabled.
You'd rather tell a disabled worker he is worse than useless because if he wanted to work he'd be displacing an able bodied person.
If a disabled person wants to work despite being given benefits I think they should be allowed to.
Perhaps the only reason he is having to accept a lower wage in the first place is because of his appearance. (People afraid of someone who doesn't look normal) which speaks nothing about his effectiveness or capability.
You're preventing people from joining in society, because they are different. That's some prejudice and discrimination.
Who am I to tell anyone that they are worse than useless? I never said anyone was worthless - that's your Protestant work ethic talking. The reality is that in the near future we will no longer need everyone in the population to do assembly-line work. It's time to explore self-actualization - the softer arts, enterpreneurship, etc...
We are all going to have to get used to the idea that someone who isn't in the workforce isn't "worse than useless", as you put it. When you put it in so many words, that's really a hideously offensive concept. Sometimes people drop out of college and start the next Apple or Microsoft or become the next Andy Warhol. The rates of enterpreneurship in Scandinavia are nearly an order of magnitude higher than the US. Believe it or not people actually don't want to sit idle and will start working on that one crazy idea if you let them.
We can certainly find something for disabled people to do regardless of whether it's paid. In no way should we prevent people from joining in society - but society is so much more than a paycheck. There are so many things to do in society that help our fellow citizens but don't necessarily pay a check every two weeks. But until we get something like a basic income going, we also must ensure that things like mentally-disabled and prison labor don't the labor market that's actually feeding families.
That's a problem we're going to have to figure out real soon, since we're probably looking at at least half of humanity being unemployable within the next couple decades. Unless, you know, we pay everybody to dig holes and fill them in.
Raising the minimum wage is only going to accelerate the automation of low-skill labor.
I'd like to know, how did your apprentice ship look like?
With a story that goes "Expelled from HS, went to trade, best decision ever" you sound like an outlier to me.
Because in my country, vocational schools are mostly terrible. First, most employers expect you at least have a state issued "maturity diploma" that signifies that you have completed some sort of secondary education. When you finish in many of our vocational schools, you get just a vocational certificate, that most people view as a lesser to maturity diploma.
The worse thing is, that in our underfunded school system, with severe lack of good teachers, vocational schools are at the bottom of the pit. So it is highly probable, that you end up with teacher, ho doesn't know how to teach, doesn't know his trade all that well, and even if he knows, he is so under-paid he doesn't care. And you wouldn't have proper tools anyway.
Then there were few incidents where attempts to introduce already working businesses to the schooling system, to move closer to real apprentice-ships resulted in a weird system where business would take you into training for last year to work for them, but after a year they lay you off, because they know they will have steady supply of junior work-force and don't really care to have more senior workers.
That is not to say there are no good vocational schools. If you are into electrical engineering, you have lots of options where you would leave with maturity diploma as well as a certificate that lets you freelance repairing electrical equipment. And I know several chef schools that are decent, but getting enrolled can be even harder than getting to top tear high-school.
Finally, our politicians seem to swinging between two extreme positions, either (almost) everybody should end up on a university, and it doesn't really matter what they learn there, or almost nobody should even get to high-school unless they pass a rigorous, state-crafted exam and most people should do just a vocational training.
These were mostly anecdotes from Czech Republic, if anybody has counter-examples, feel free to post them :-)
Not everyone is cutout to be a university graduate going on to a white-collar career. I was expelled from high school because I didn't fit the mold. Leaving school and going in to a trade was the best thing I could have done at the time.
I feel many young people are under-served by school. They don't have the drive / desire to do uni and school didn't teach them anything useful, like basic financial management, how to lay a brick, or fix a leaking tap.