"Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class:
You're fucked. Good luck.
This is the future of America: Every public job out there that pays over minimum wage will get subcontracted out to a private company that will rehire at minimum wage. Unions will be systematically eliminated in private sector jobs and wages will be cut. Private sector part-time jobs will start universally at minimum wage, no matter the experience. Salaried jobs will go hourly in as many situations as possible, outside of retail management, which will stay salaried but eat a pay cut, so they work more hours for the same money. Pretty soon, the most high-paying, desirable jobs won't be $20/hour jobs or salaried jobs that make $50k, but $9 jobs. This will be the height to which most people aspire.
It's already happening. 29 cents per mile is what stingy corporations paid for travel 15 years ago, and now it's become a standard in the private sector. More and more retail stores are eliminating department manager jobs and only hiring minimum-wage jobs, reducing yearly increases, and making assistant managers hourly.
This is all happening as the dollar buys less, and prices and the cost of living go up.
Big business and libertarians like the Koch Brothers are trying to find an economic sweet spot where they can reduce wages to the lowest possible amount while still maintaining a precarious level of consumer spending on useless luxury goods. However, this razor-sharp equilibrium is so easy to tip that it won't be long until Americans can no longer afford pricey stuff like iPads, cell phones, cars, couches, expensive snack food, etc, which will wipe out a lot of stores, restaurants, service industries, so on and so forth, eliminating the jobs that these corporations claim their massive tax breaks creating non-existent tax burdens are needed to create.
You're entering a world in which these corporations think they are nowhere near the bottom of how low they can drive wages. Through some embarrassingly high level of cognitive dissonance, they feel that they are correcting some sort of imbalance that is irresponsibly and unfairly hurting businesses (i.e. paying wages that are needlessly high because of dirty liberal influence).
And in the process, it's destroying the American ideal of capitalism more than anything else. Why bother working hard if you're going to get shit upon? Between people looking elsewhere for employment and actual opportunity and open theft, companies are not going to get much profit once everyone is reduced to groveling serfs. At some point people stop being 'grateful' for jobs, and become complacent or just start ripping stuff off.
Good luck in this world.
With best wishes,
The rest of us working schmucks."
