It's still looked at as a "glamor job". What other gig lets you travel everywhere and have hotels paid for in metropolitan areas around the world? It can be pretty cool if you get a good crew, it doesn't feel much like work on the good days. See the sights, bring home a bunch of international goodies for the family and friends, it can be great!
The flip side is:
The glamor wears off quick after you realize that you're not staying over in London, NYC, Tokyo or any other attractive international destination after one flight there, a long layover, then one flight back. You're junior so you don't have a planned flight schedule for the month, on call for 4,5,6 days in a row, you've been assigned a couple day-trips necessitating trips to the airport early in the AM and not getting done until late at night, then get assigned a multi-day 12+ leg trip that has you overnighting in Pittsburgh, Midland Texas, and Raleigh NC. You're exhausted, got reassigned thanks to weather delays, now you've got a Fresno overnight instead of Pittsburgh, all the passengers have been a PITA because it's your fault the airline can't control the weather. No food because of the delays and you've been running from flight to flight and you have been subsisting on diet coke and pretzels, tired because the overnights have been whittled down to minimum rest, and when you finally get to your two days off you have to commute home, feed the cat, do laundry, sleep in your own bed for one night and then commute back to base to be ready for your next on-call stretch. (many crew don't "live" in base, you can't afford to live in a NYC airline base on $27k a year, they get a crashpad, usually shared with multiple roomates to defray the cost of a place you just need to hang out at for the night before a trip you can't fly in for same-day or wait for a on-call assignment).
So a LOT of flight attendants don't survive the first few years when they realize that you need to be at the airline for probably 25+ years before you might approach the "glamor" side, the pay sucks, being on-call (reserve) for years and years... You can actually make decent money if you tough it out, but it;s a long road. People like the image, but it's a really steep price to finally make it to good.
Well, yes…I’ve been union for decades so I’m quite familiar. This comment is helpful to summarize for some people a bit of how unions do things, but when I originally commented it was more a question about how the two compared as far as earnings. Do you have to constantly jump around non-union jobs to keep up with union wages? Will the mobile employee outpace union wages? At what rate? Overall lifetime earnings? My understanding is that union gigs for comparable jobs may not offer high pay off the bat, but over a lifetime often do better than non-union with wages, benefits, and retirement. However, some normal jobs will allow you to jump right in to good pay relative to a union gig but you may not advance much in pay or have to leave to advance.
I wonder how this looks when compared to a decent union shop. In union shops you probably tend to not move jobs a lot, or like in some trades you take your union creds with you no matter where you work.
You certainly can increase pay by jumping around a lot in regular work, but union gigs tend to have set progression based on seniority.
Ok, maybe I wasn’t clear. Usually a company is already in some sort of trouble when the vultures descend on it. That was the point I was trying to include in what I said in the last paragraph.
Yes, absolutely, disassembling a company and offshoring is profitable.
No, I don’t think so. CEOs don’t just make these decisions for strictly monetary gain. Otherwise literally every company would be constantly conducting layoffs or whatever short-term tactics to push the stock up so the C-Suite could cash in.
The BoD and shareholders absolutely do have clout in company decisions, mostly large shareholders pressuring the BoD, but the a smaller shareholder selling off and helping tank stock value has power as well though unfortunately they’re usually the last to get their order in.
Would some CEO knowingly start pulling strings to maximize short term gain and sell off assets to make a buck on a company that’s not doing well? Sure. Happens all the time, Sears comes to mind as a fairly recent company that got fucked over for a buck. Toys’r Us too. But those companies were in real trouble. If Best Buy goes that way you’ll know it.
Well, there’s better answers than mine here, but there was a recent article on ChatGPT offering better job advice than many other sources, so might be worth a look?
As far as the meme goes, I despised “networking” as a concept since I realized it needed to be done. Probably cost me 6 figures so far in lifetime earnings thanks to missing job opportunities.
I hate kissing ass or chatting with people that I have no interest in other than the purpose of using their position and knowledge to further my own goals. I can’t “fake” interest. Other people simply view it as a social interaction to grease the wheels and excel at gab.
That said, Zoomers sarcastically seeing “networking” for what it is is refreshing, but it unfortunately doesn’t change the “it’s who you know” part of the equation at all.