Back in the '60's, after completing my military service and a stint with NASA, I returned to the commercial world. I learned from my colleagues that graduate engineers with about 5 years' experience earned about $25K, tops, per year. I read in the paper, that steel workers in the U.S. who had been on the job about 6 months and whose training took less than two weeks and was paid-for by their employer and not by them, as they were paid for attending, was also about $25K per year, in addition to which they were paid for overtime and got outrageously extravagant health and retirement benefits. Engineers, who were on the "exempt" payroll, hence got no payment for overtime, didn't get those benefits either.

Of course, nowadays, some of those engineers are retired, while the funds that pay retirement benefits to those steel workers are largely bankrupt and the workers have been left to twist in the wind, owing to their collective greed, as imposed on their now-nonexistent employers by their overzealous union.

RE