While Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders continues to win over new fans, at least one person isn’t in his corner after a statement the candidate made about careers and prison.
Mike Rowe, the former host of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and the current host of CNN’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It, knows the importance of skilled labor to this country. So he wasn’t too happy about this tweet from Sanders.
At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 13, 2015
Rowe, who felt that Sanders was disrespecting skilled laborers by suggesting that many of them were felons, fired back with a long Facebook post about getting parents and educators to realize that a skilled workforce is not, and should never be, something for a country to disdain.
Rowe was careful to note that Sanders might simply have been hampered by Twitter‘s character limit, saying that perhaps it simply “doomed him to be misunderstood or taken out of context. Certainly, it’s happened to me. But regardless, the damage is in the headline, and Twitter is nothing but headlines.”
Even if the statement was taken out of context, it’s an issue that Rowe clearly feels very strongly about, because he felt it was necessary to speak up.
Forbes reported more than two years ago that America’s skilled labor force was aging and that the next generation was failing to fill its shoes. Rowe is concerned that, because our society emphasizes college so much—and counselors and parents put such high values on degrees from universities—we might be forgetting the ways that prior generations have put food on their tables (and how proud they were to do so).
Rowe later did an interview with Reason about the cost of college, and the importance of a skilled labor workforce.