In this monologue, 20‑year veteran CEO Michael Girdley examines why millions of white‑collar workers in the United States are unemployed or underemployed despite headline economic indicators that suggest a booming economy. He traces the problem to a chain of macro‑ and micro‑level forces: massive COVID‑19 stimulus (PPP, ERC) that injected 27 % more money into the U.S. money supply, the resulting inflation surge (prices up >8 % YoY) and the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest‑rate hikes that forced businesses to cut costs and lay off staff. The wave of layoffs flooded the labor market with highly‑qualified candidates, driving down wages and creating fierce competition for jobs that once paid six‑figures. Simultaneously, the pandemic accelerated remote work and offshoring, with two‑thirds of firms now employing at least one offshore function, further compressing domestic wages. The rapid rise of artificial‑intelligence tools is automating many high‑paying white‑collar tasks such as programming, project management, and customer service. While overall job creation numbers remain positive, growth is concentrated in healthcare and government (partly due to the Inflation Reduction Act’s hiring of IRS agents), whereas sectors like tech, media, and law are seeing sharp declines. Girdley illustrates the human impact with a personal anecdote about a friend forced to accept a junior, half‑pay position after a layoff, and contrasts this with booming blue‑collar wages (e.g., roofing, HVAC, plumbing) that are rising 20 % YoY. He critiques misleading employment statistics that count under‑employed or low‑pay workers as “full employment,” and argues that policy fixes such as protectionism may help individuals but harm the broader economy. Finally, he draws historical parallels to the Luddites and stresses that a mindset shift—accepting that technology, regulation, demographics, and geopolitics constantly reshape the labor market—is essential, while still offering sympathy for those in pain.
Chapters
So really bad news out in the recent job numbers for white-collar workers. It hit an all-time high of bad news for them. 1.6 million workers in the US have been out of work and looking for jobs for over 6 months. And the majority of those are white-collar workers. But look, the economy is like supposedly doing really awesome. We set a record in 2024. The S&P 500 hit an all-time high 50 times through the year. That's triple the normal average. So look, if, if the economy is so good, why are all these white-collar workers hurting so bad? Well, there's a story behind it, and we'll explain it in this video. Hi, my name is Michael. I am a 20-year-plus CEO, started multiple businesses, hired hundreds of people, and I love teaching and talking about business. I am a business nerd. So if you like that, please subscribe. So how we got to today dates back to kind of one of the most trying economic things that happened in my life, which is the 2020 COVID pandemic. And the way the government reacted to the 2020 COVID pandemic was to pump money into the system. They gave out PPP loans, ERC grants, all this different stuff, grants to individuals just to try to keep the economy going. Because if you were running a business back then, and I remember doing it when COVID first hit and all the shutdowns happened, me, my friends, and other CEOs, we were all having meetings talking about, well, how are we going to deal with all of our demand for our business shutting off like a light? And how many people were we going to have to let go? It was horrible. But I know as much as people hate the PPP scheme, uh, which was abused by a lot of folks and there was a lot of grift around it, what it did do was amongst myself and every other business owner that I knew that had employees We knew we were going to be able to keep paying those people because we were getting PPP loans and it stopped the economy from unraveling. And so the government, through the PPP loans and all this other stuff, basically kept the economy going. It kept it from stopping during that period of time. And if you look at it over 2020 and 2021, we injected 27% more US dollars into the money supply. And that is the greatest and highest growth in money supply in any single year in history of the United States. So look, money's flowing freely. There's huge demand for all kinds of stuff. If you remember back in 2020, 2022, just trying to get something off of a boat to sell it to a customer here in the US for an imported good or deliver a service, like you couldn't find the stuff you needed. Everybody was doing a radical transformation of how they were living lives. So companies hired like crazy. Brought people in, basically just to try to go and meet that demand. Everybody had cash and they were looking for a place to spend it. Well, when you do that, there's a downside to the economy, which is inflation starts to come in, and that's where dollars are worth less year after year. So the Fed, which is the Federal Reserve, normally wants to keep that around 2%. Well, that number peaked at over 8%. And so the only way the Federal Reserve can slow down the economy and put a brake on it and try to reduce inflation because too much inflation is bad. You don't want that. Uh, for various reasons that are not a factor in this video, the Fed starts to go in and puts the brake on the economy and starts to raise interest rates. And look, people know who run businesses and who invest in the economy and invest in businesses know what the situation is when interest rates happen. They've learned the old line, never to fight the Fed. And when you fight the Fed, you tend to lose because the Fed controls the money supply and you do not. So in this case, businesses in 2023 saw the rising of interest rates and started to, well, basically slow down. There was a 98% rise in the number of businesses doing layoffs and getting into cost-cutting mode from the year before. Things started to work just as the Fed wanted them. They wanted to slow down the economy and raising interest rates certainly did that. And look, I've seen this personally. As companies started to reduce hiring and lay off people, the market suddenly got flooded by folks who were classically in industries that had tons of demand. Computer programmers, salespeople, all these types of things were— well, it was pretty easy to get a lifetime good-paying job in those industries, but suddenly the market was flooded with those candidates. So on one hand, you have a situation where companies are dumping a lot of supply of these type of candidates on the market. So what does that do? That increases the competition for these jobs, and it also over time will reduce wages of what those people are able to get in the market. So suddenly a lot of these high-paying white-collar jobs, project management, programming, well, suddenly a lot of those people who are making $150,000 or $200,000 a year are suddenly fighting over $75,000 entry-level jobs. So that's domestic pressure on these types of jobs. Well, it turns out COVID also taught us a lesson about allowing people to have jobs done remotely. And we're at a point now where all that got accelerated during the COVID times such that 2/3 of American companies now report having at least one job function done offshore. And companies are starting to say, well, if I can hire a project manager or an accountant in Kansas and save 20%, for a high-quality person, why not move it to Argentina and save 70%? But wait, there's more. 2023, 2024 has seen the rise of artificial intelligence. High-paying jobs like customer service, project management, many types of those things are subject to, well, getting put out of business by AI, right? You're seeing massive improvements in the ability for people to build programming and code and all that kind of stuff. That wasn't even possible a decade ago. One person could do the job that maybe took 10 or 15 people just a few years ago. So if you go back to the job numbers and the measures of the economy, we talked about the S&P 500. And now I want to talk a bit about how much we're seeing in terms of month-by-month new job numbers. You're seeing just the economy continuing to print new jobs, right? Well, if all these people are in pain, where are all these new jobs coming from? Well, just like most things, the numbers behind the numbers really matter. The growth in new jobs and the growth in the economy, it's not uniform. Things like tech, media, law, those are the things getting absolutely brutalized these days by the, by the change in the economy and the change in technology. What's not getting brutalized and showing in over half of the growth in jobs is two things: healthcare and government. And if you remember back to the Inflation Reduction Act put forth by the Biden administration a few years ago, part of that was hiring 87,000 IRS agents. So yeah, you can see where the puck is going on some of these, these jobs and employment. So I recently had a friend who basically got laid off from a high-paying project management job at a big corporation and He spent 6 months looking for a new job doing kind of the same thing. And basically he went and finally found a new job that he was thankful to get. It was a relatively entry-level junior position doing the same kind of work at half the pay. And stories like my friend are why, if you look at the numbers, job growth or job wage growth showed its lowest increase for these types of jobs year over year in recent memory. It grew 4% year over year. But ironically, we're in a rock and a hard place for those types of workers. If my buddy had wanted to go become a roofer, which by the way, roofing as a career, I was like, I looked it up this morning, pays on average over $50,000 a year building roofs basically with no college degree. I don't think you need to— I think you need to be able to read and write to do that job. But wages for those types of roles, forklift drivers, truck drivers, engineers, the types of technicians, HVAC, plumbing, on many of those categories, they're growing in wages 20% year over year because we're in a situation now where tons of people have these white-collar jobs, but the job growth is actually in the other end of the spectrum, in the blue-collar job. And to some extent, when people get unhappy, it is a gap between expectations and reality. And we have a whole group and a whole generation of folks that were promised good jobs, the American dream. If they were able to just basically go get a college degree and then go out in the workforce, there would be a good future for them. But it turns out in reality, the job growth is at the other end of the spectrum and not what they're seeing. And so that's why these people are unhappy. And for many, they're just not willing to go say, hey, I'm going to give up on my dream and go become a roofer or something like that. And so if you look behind the white collar and all the job numbers, you're like, man, these job numbers look really good. Well, you have to remember how you measure data like that is really important. In many cases, they're counting things like underemployed and part-time people or somebody driving from Uber as somebody who is happy with the job market and happily employed. Or you count my buddy who went and got a job paying half of what it was before. The statistics show that he's somebody who's fully employed and all that kind of stuff. But if you go ask him now, he's pretty pissed off. And look, the obvious argument that most people make next is this is really unfair. Like, people were promised these good-paying jobs. They were promised the American dream. Let's go regulate it and change the economy through regulation and protectionism to try to keep this type of destruction from happening and reshuffling of the job market from being a thing. But the reality is, if you do that stuff, it actually helps individuals, but it hurts the whole. And if you do it too much, you end up in a place where and a trap where a lot of countries like Argentina have got. You're stuck with this inefficient economy and everybody loses in the end. And look, I think there's two lessons from all this. And lesson number one is just people need to understand that this is the unfortunate nature of things, right? If you go back in history, there were days when the weavers who were like doing, uh, doing running looms and like building like carpets and stuff stuff, textiles, like those people would go in with the Luddites and like go break down the machines because they were automating them out of jobs, right? Uh, and that is just the reality of technology moving forward. Changes in demographics, changes in regulation, changes in trends, and changes in geopolitics, like these all feed into changing just the nature of how the economy works. And it's always changing and always shifting, you know. And 15 years ago when I was a young man, learn to code was something that could totally work. Well, turns out learn to code isn't the right thing anymore. It's kind of like learn to wire in some electrical lights, right? Is the right slogan there. And the second lesson, which is the thing that I think makes it more acceptable, is we have to endure pain in corners and segments of the industries that we're in because of this change. Some will end up going out of business. Some will be things that just— jobs that don't exist anymore. Some will be jobs that just the economy doesn't want because consumer demand isn't there. So in the end, you know, I think it's a mindset change that's really important. But of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have sympathy for the people who are going through pain. I've certainly experienced it as industries I'm in have sunsetted or gone through pain themselves, leading to pain for the workers and owners of those businesses. So it's a balanced thing as always. But look, in the end, it's the right thing. This is why the pie keeps growing. And over time, we just keep all working to have our fair share of it.
