A One-Man Mission To Spread the Word: These ‘Dirty Jobs’ Are Plentiful And Essential

Authored by Gayle Jo Carter via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

It’s a poster on the wall in his 1979 high school guidance counselor’s office that all these years later motivates Mike Rowe, the Emmy award-winning TV host, producer, narrator, podcaster, spokesman, bestselling author, and recording artist, on his quest to reinvigorate America’s enthusiasm, passion, and educational foundation for the skilled trades.

The poster’s caption – “Work smart, not hard” – underscored an image of “the happy graduate with his diploma and the poor schmuck who won a vocational consolation prize,” recalled Rowe in a recent interview with The Epoch Times.

All these years later, Rowe remembers his guidance counselor pointing to the poster and asking him, “Which one of these guys do you want to be?”

“It was a very powerful moment for me,” said Rowe. “I remember thinking, ‘I wanted to lean across the table and give him a slap because the punchline in that poster is my granddad—the embodiment of a skilled worker had been affirmatively caricatured and lampooned and marginalized.”

At the time, Rowe was wrestling with his own future.

“I was 17 and I’d taken some tests and done well, and he wanted me to go to the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, maybe James Madison. I didn’t have any money, and there was no way I was going to borrow. Debt was the only four-letter word that was truly off limits in my house. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My plan was to go to community college for 26 bucks a credit and figure it out.”

In the decades since that guidance counselor meeting, Rowe, who eventually did go on to a four-year college, has turned his visibility and success into the mikeroweWORKS Foundation. Launched in 2008, the foundation works hard to debunk the myths and misperceptions about the trades and help close the skills gap through job boards, corporate partnerships, and scholarships.

“The problem with the push for college when we were in high school wasn’t that college was a bad thing,” said Rowe. “It’s that the push came at the expense of all other forms of learning.”

Get Back to Hard Work

The disappearance of shop and home economics classes “turned out to be maybe the most boneheaded decision in the history of modern education,” said Rowe, who believes it’s the lack of opportunity for students to work with their hands in classes like those, along with the devaluing of skilled trades that has brought on the dramatic skills gap for the booming job market in the AI proof skilled trades.

The Towson University graduate turned opera singer turned QVC host turned “Dirty Jobs” legend tells the story of his “crooked, crooked path” nudged on by his former school teacher mother, Peggy Rowe—now a best-selling author and popular guest on Rowe’s podcast, “The Way I Heard It”—this way.

“Three years on QVC, and then eight years freelancing, probably 300 different jobs, and then a weird phone call from my mother—telling me that my grandfather was turning 90, and she had the perfect birthday present that I should get him,” recalled Rowe. “I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if before he died, he could turn on the TV and see you doing something that looked like work.’”

To honor his grandfather’s legacy and “mostly to shut my mother up,” laughed Rowe, at that time a host of a local San Francisco CBS show “Evening Magazine,” he took his cameraman into the sewers of San Francisco and profiled a sewer inspector.

“My pop was an electrician, but he only went to the seventh grade,” said Rowe. “And by the time he was 30, he was an accomplished welder, pipe fitter, steam fitter, and HVAC. I saw him build additions on people’s homes without a blueprint. He just had that chip. He just knew mechanically how everything worked. He could take that clock apart behind you and put it back together, blindfolded.”

Rowe was surprised that the profile of the sewer inspector generated so much mail and viewer engagement that a new recurrent segment, “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” was born.

“We just kind of Forrest Gumped our way on the air,” said Rowe.

Inspire a New Generation of Skilled Tradesmen

But then came the real work as Rowe discovered his true calling.

“MikeRoweWorks evolved very organically out of ‘Dirty Jobs’ in 2008,” acknowledged Rowe. As an apprentice on the TV series “Dirty Jobs,” Rowe traveled to every state and worked with plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, pipefitters, brick layers, farmers, fishers, and a bunch of other skilled workers who help keep our polite society humming along.

“And like the show itself, it was a tribute to Carl Knobel, my pop. It was a simple attempt at the time to shine a light on 2.3 million jobs that were wide open—good jobs. In 2009, the country was in a recession. There were 12 million people unemployed, but on “Dirty Jobs,” we just saw ‘help wanted’ signs all over the place. It seemed clear that there was another narrative going on that had nothing to do with the creation of jobs, but rather the creation of enthusiasm for the jobs that already existed. That was the skills gap. And that’s what got me on my soapbox on Labor Day 2008. We’ll be 17 this Labor Day.”

Rowe, who went on to narrate and host some of Discovery Channel’s most popular shows like “Deadliest Catch,” is just coming off awarding his foundation’s 2025 Work Ethic Scholarships to the tune of five million dollars to 526 men and women.

“We’ve given away, so far, 16 million dollars to over 2,600 recipients, supporting over 21 skilled trades in 46 states,” said Rowe.

Getting people interested in skilled trades—jobs AI can’t do—is helped by each and every one of these recipients who become shining examples of possibilities for potential workers.

“The workforce is out of balance,” said Rowe. “Five tradespeople leave and two replace them year after year.”

Hence, Rowe’s mission—“Work Smart and Hard”—“which began as an ad hoc PR campaign for a couple of million jobs,” turned into a lifelong commitment to the skilled trades.

“I went to Congress and I made some PSAs and stuff. The fans of “Dirty Jobs” were the ones who took it to the next level,” said Rowe.

“They helped me build an online trade resource center so anybody could go to MikeRoweworks.org and see thousands of jobs. That got the attention of Ford and Caterpillar, and a lot of other big, muscular companies that required a skilled workforce. They wanted to give me money, so I thought, ‘maybe work ethic scholarships’. That first year, we gave five hundred thousand dollars. The next year, we did 700,000. And the year after that, we did a million. It just kept building. We had 10 times the applicants this year as we did a year before. I can’t take a victory lap just yet. I’m not done.”