I absolutely agree that lower skill jobs should get more status as many are very important and hard jobs.

But I would like to add that I believe you can make more skill oriented jobs while also catering to people who don't have a natural knack for higher education. With the Norwegian vocation training system, you only have to spend 2 years at the school bench rather than the normal 3 years Americans spend in high school.

The remaining 2 years are as an apprentice focused on hands-on skills. Also those first two years will be far more oriented towards skills you need in the profession you pursue rather than a lot of generic subjects that many who are tired of school dislike.

By giving these students an actual program and certificate at the end, you give them a paper that attest to their skill and competence. They are not reduced generic unskilled worker out of high school.

But I totally agree that part of raising the status is tied to salary, and that ties in with another one of my pet topics which is unions. I think the sectorial bargan system used in Germanic countries is really the only union system which has proven itself to work. The enterprise model followed by the US, UK, Canada and other places don't seem to have succeeded. Instead you are left with unions have a very bad reputation.

I think that is in part because the enterprise union model more naturally leads to destructive behavior. I know people who tried to work at US car plants and who got sabotaged by the unions. When unions do not federate and work in very large organization they become weak and derive power more from sabotage than from leverage from large numbers.

My father was in Britain in the 1970s and we come from a family with strong Labour party and unions roots. My grandfather was a union representative and my great grandfather was a powerful union boss for soap cooker unions. Yet my dad described the union situation in Britain in the 1970s as an absolute disaster. Conflicts and strikes constantly. Of course not all of this was on the unions. Part of this is also from a more divided society where the willingness to compromise was weak on both sides.