>I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell

>I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me. Americans, as the saying does, live to work. Many tie their individual worth to the jobs they do. We invest a lot of ourselves into our jobs (those we care about anyway), and oftentimes the output doesn't equal the input. >Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector? You greatly overestimate the average person's drive to better themselves. Plenty are fine to get something that pays the bills and that's it. >Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? You're going between 2 extremes that I didn't mention. My comment about companies offering jobs comes from the understanding of how positions (mainly in the white collar industry) used to be in the 50s/60s/70s vs. today. People that worked at the IBMs/RANDs/GMs/etc. of yester-decade worked there for decades. They were loyal to that company, almost to a fault. When they retired, they were given an expensive Omega with their name engraved in the back. Some even got pensions. Note this was also largely in the context of the pre-globalization age. Nowadays companies have no problem axing whole divisions to meet their bottom lines. They will go overseas. They have no problem leaving an area they've been at for decades. All the while, baby boomers continue to wonder out loud why their kids don't have the same earnings potential as they did. Not saying any of this is good or bad, it just is.