I wrote: "qualified labour is often better able to negotiate higher wages because of its indispensability."
If you look at the DoL data, you'll see that the US official unemployment rate is highest for construction workers and production workers, and lowest for managerial and professional workers. Now obviously this is not something you can just explain by saying that managerial and professional labour have more juice. Americans live in an economy where producing something with manual labour and one's own work effort, or teaching young people something, is systematically devalued. J.
