Disappointment in Biden transcends political party lines
President Biden’s path toward the Democratic nomination was relatively unobstructed despite an overwhelming majority of Americans disapproving of the country’s current direction. Despite record polarization amid a presidential election year, disappointment in the president transcends party lines.
According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 45% of Democratic primary voters oppose Biden’s candidacy as the party’s nominee, while only 23% indicated enthusiasm for Biden assuming the Democratic nomination. So what gives?
Quite simply, all jobs are not created equal. The administration’s failure to distinguish between quality and non-quality jobs has cost Americans’ confidence in their futures.
According to Jobs for the Future, quality jobs are salaried jobs that pay a living wage — $58,000 per year for a two-adult household, with potential for upward career mobility, health care benefits and predictable pay increases.
Non-quality jobs are dead-end tracks that keep people hopelessly trapped at wages below $20 per hour. The way the United States classifies and tracks job growth has barely changed since the 1930s, even though citizens tell pollsters that the economy and jobs are their No. 1 priority in surveys.
As we’ve seen over the last several years, not all Americans have done equally well in Biden’s economy. The working class has seen their wages grow by 9%, the middle class has barely kept up with inflation, which rose 8 percent in 2022, and professionals — who make more than $100,000 annually — have seen their incomes increase disproportionately.
This decidedly inequitable recovery has fostered an angry, dissatisfied class of Americans drawn to dangerously populist leaders who pander to their growing fears.
We must do better. Economists and academics have studied the labor force for decades and know the difference between hourly part-time, hourly full-time, and salaried quality jobs, and between minimum- and living-wage careers. It’s time to start tracking these trends with more intention and reporting in ways that drive actionable change.
We need to help Americans stuck in non-quality jobs find pathways to prosperous and promising careers, especially in the care economy and no-collar jobs. The service economy is moving rapidly away from the retail, food service and hospitality sectors — which often produce “bad jobs” with limited mobility — to the health care and technology industries.
Care economy jobs, also known as essential worker jobs, are flourishing. This is due to an aging population’s health care demands. No-collar jobs are technology and data jobs that command higher salaries, and they are expanding across every sector as software and AI continue to eat the world.
Unlike most non-quality jobs, no-collar and care economy jobs offer significant career progression.
Technology and data jobs, for example, have a defined ladder for employees to climb, often starting at an analyst position then moving up to manager, engineer, designer, scientist and architect.
Care economy jobs have a similar trajectory, albeit with different titles.
Neither job category requires a four-year university degree, which burdens young graduates with mountains of student debt. Instead, these well-paying and highly in-demand career paths — often the stepping stone to the middle class — require only a technical certificate or certification. These credentials take six months to a year to earn and generally cost less than $15,000 in tuition.
It is no surprise that these certificate program registrations are growing almost 10 times faster today than traditional university degree programs.
Our federal government spends $175 billion annually on higher education, including loans, Pell grants and many other programs. Less than 1% of these post-secondary investments go toward certificate and certification programs, and the vast majority fund traditional undergraduate and graduate programs.
To unlock America’s talent, we need to amend our financial aid laws and regulations to allow and encourage students to use their higher education grants and loans for certificate programs. The Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act is a small step in this direction.
Americans are figuring out the advantages of pursuing no-collar and care economy pathways and gaining confidence that there will be enough quality jobs in both sectors. Regardless of socio-economic background, ethnicity or other factors, as long as people get upskilled there is hope for a brighter tomorrow.
When leaders say America needs to “invest in its people,” the promise often sounds empty and vague. By embracing the no-collar economy and carefully tracking the growth of quality jobs, millions of Americans can better target career pathways and upskilling to improve their economic well-being dramatically.
Jason Palmer is an entrepreneur and Democratic presidential candidate. Palmer won the American Samoa Democratic presidential caucuses on Super Tuesday, becoming the first challenger to win a primary contest against an incumbent president since 1980.