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A Look At America's Unions; Did Katrina Teach Us About Preparing For Disasters; Ten Jobs That Pay Six Figures

Aired September 02, 2006 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR, IN THE MONEY: Coming up on IN THE MONEY why there is so little labor in Labor Day these days. We will look at the state of America's unions.
Looking at the last time for tips on the next time. See if Katrina taught America anything about preparing for a natural disaster.

And the $100,000 question. Find out about ten jobs that can pay you $100 grand or even more. All that right after a quick check of the headlines.

(NEWSBREAK)

CAFFERTY: Welcome to the program. I'm Jack Cafferty. Coming up on today's edition of IN THE MONEY, union blues. It is Labor Day weekend but do America's labor unions have anything to celebrate, see if organized labor is on its way out or perhaps on its way back.

Also ahead, storm warnings. Hurricane Katrina had lessons to teach about handling a disaster. Boy, did it. Find out if Washington has wised up any.

And give yourself a raise. You wouldn't believe some of the jobs that pay $100,000 a year, or even more. Stick around, we might have a few surprises you'll enjoy learning about.

Joining me today a couple of IN THE MONEY veterans, we have Jennifer Westhoven and we have Andy Serwer. We have gas prices for the first time in a long time apparently coming down. There is one national survey I read said they could hit $2 a gallon by Thanksgiving. That might be a little optimistic, but they're lower right now than they have been since April 20th. What's going on?

ANDY SERWER, EDITOR AT LARGE, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Well number one, I mean I think it is a blip. But that's just my take. It is also a big running debate right now whether they are headed to $2; go back to $3 or $4. The folks at the Chrysler Corporation seem to be suggesting they're going to stay up for a while. Other people, maybe rose-colored glasses, think they're going back to $2 but I'm not one of them.

JENNIFER WESTHOVEN, CORRESPONDENT, "HEADLINE NEWS:" Do you want to put in your cynicism about the election here?

CAFFERTY: Certainly thought to cross my mind. I mean the oil companies have a vested interest in seeing that the Republicans remain in control of the federal government. I mean they wouldn't --

SERWER: Coincidence, or not?

CAFFERTY: They wouldn't pull prices down before the mid terms now. Would they?

WESTHOVEN: Even if it is temporary. It seems like it could help a lot of people, we have been seeing a lot of these corporate earnings from fancier retailers like Williams-Sonoma saying they're having problems, a lot of people are struggling with higher gas prices, furniture sales are up, Wal-Mart, Costco saying the expensive stuff is not selling.

CAFFERTY: There are a couple of real things going on. Crude oil is below $70 a barrel. Hasn't been that low in a long time. One of the reasons that I read was the hurricane season hasn't been what it was expected to be and the price of a hurricane season like last year was already built into this year's gas prices.

SERWER: You've got that Jack, and you've got Iran and you have Venezuela and Nigeria. Any of these things could erupt or turn bad or anything at any point. Blaming it all on the hurricanes or trying to suggest that the hurricanes are going to be good this year I can tell what the hurricanes are going to be like in October, that's tough stuff.

CAFFERTY: All right. Whatever the reason, we'll take it. If it goes to $1, that would be OK too. That will never happen.

Funny to have a holiday that uses to be all work wound up being more about play. Back in the beginning, Labor Day was part demonstration, part celebration. Labor unions all across the country held parades on this day to show their strength, the workers then got together for parties afterwards. For the most part as far as American workers are concerned today, Labor Day weekend has now become about getting out of town or getting into a big sale and workers it seems have a lot less to party about.

Labor consultant Beth Shulman is going to help us understand how we got to where we are and we are going from here, she is the author of "The Betrayal of Work, How Low-Wage Jobs Failed 30 Million Americans." Beth nice to have you with us.

BETH SHULMAN, AUTHOR, "THE BETRAYAL OF WORK:" It is a pleasure to be here.

CAFFERTY: Fifty years ago one-third of the non-agricultural jobs in the United States were union jobs: good wages, good benefits, a pretty good middle class life. Now there are 9 percent of the jobs left, nonagricultural jobs that are union jobs. What's going on?

SHULMAN: Well certainly what we have seen, well first of all I think it is important to remember that unions were absolutely instrumental in bringing the American dream to a large percent of Americans. We saw manufacturing jobs go from kind of bad jobs, dirty jobs, to the good jobs of the 20th century. And what happened was certainly the decline of the manufacturing sector, globalization, and deregulation. But I think the untold story was the real assault on unions. Certainly by corporations and by government.

You know, Americans today, if they want to organize a union, they are confronted by employers firing them, they're harassing them. A human rights watch story showed that in fact a huge percent of workers end up being fired just trying to organize a union. So that's been a large part of the story. But I'm optimistic this Labor Day. I really see a resurgence of the American labor movement in organizing the growing service sector.

WESTHOVEN: Well, after all this systematic weakening of workers bargaining power, as you call it, we've really seen though a split between the AFLCIO and some of the other big unions out there. A lot of pundits and headlines that came out of that were people who were basically starting to write the obituary saying this was the death for organized labor. What do you think is the state of it today? What gives you hope that things are coming back?

SHULMAN: Well I see great hope. I see if you look at service sector certainly, you're seeing janitorial jobs becoming good jobs when they're organized. If you take a janitor and unionized employer, they're making $13 an hour, have health benefits and pension plans and time off, as opposed to the non-union janitor that is making $8 an hour. Security guards are being organized. We are seeing the same increases.

In a lot of the service jobs, like home health care and janitors and hotels, and nursing home aides, security guards, these are the growing jobs in our economy and they can't go anywhere. So once they're organized, they're not going to China, they're not going to India, and they're staying here in the United States. And we're seeing an increasing amount of these jobs being organized across the country.

SERWER: Hey, Beth, one of the leading lights of the union organization, Labor Union Movement, I should say, and perhaps the only leading light, is Andy Stern of the Service Employees Union. He is seen by many people as a radical. Do you see the union movement having to radicalize to really make in roads?

SHULMAN: I don't think Andy Stern is a radical. I think he is absolutely mainstream in saying, look, profits are up, productivity is up, and Americans' wages aren't even keeping pace with inflation. That's not the American dream. That's not the promise. He's saying, look, if productivity is up, if profits are up, normally what happens is that wages went up, benefits went up. And we're saying, look, he's saying look, and the labor movement is saying, look, Americans are entitled to a fair share of those increases.

You know, we look at the fact when unions went down in terms of the mound of people they ended up representing, what we saw was, wages stagnating, the number of people uninsured have skyrocketed to more than 46 million, traditional pension plans have gone by the wayside. What's happening now is unions are organizing workers, more than 60 percent of American workers say if they had the chance to organize a union, they'd want to. And what American labor is saying is, let's go ahead, let's get out there and organize these workers that want to be organized.

CAFFERTY: I saw a great bumper sticker the other day, said "Nafta plus Cafta equals Shafta." I think there is something to that. Jobs that used to pay big bucks have been outsourced and sent to places all around the world where the companies can get them done for one-third or less of what it use to cost them. We've got between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens running around this country. Nobody knows much about them, how many there are, who they are, except they've driven American wages down. What about the impacts of those kinds of things on the ability of American middle class workers who get a fair shake in this country these days?

SHULMAN: Well, certainly our global trade agreements have never taken into consideration any kind of labor standards, which they need to. And we need to ensure that immigrants have the kind of status they need --

CAFFERTY: I'm not talking about immigrants. I'm talking about illegal aliens. Immigrants are different from illegal aliens.

SHULMAN: Well, the real issue here is whether or not we're going to allow Americans to organize unions. And right now they don't really have that right. If they do, what we see is that we can change these service jobs that aren't even in the global economy, like a nursing home worker.

CAFFERTY: Or like Wal-Mart.

SHULMAN: Or a home care worker. Or Wal-Mart, for example. These jobs aren't going overseas, so once they're organized they are going to become the middle-income jobs. You know, there was nothing inherently good about an autoworker or steel worker. They became good jobs. And the same thing that can happen we can do here with regard to the growing service sector in our economy.

CAFFERTY: But, let me just follow up though. If there are illegal aliens willing to work for half of what American citizens expect to be paid for, whatever kind of job you are talking about, and as long as there are companies that are willing to hire them, how are you going to overcome that?

SHULMAN: Well, we need to ensure that we raise the minimum wage that's been stuck at $5.15 an hour. We need to make sure that there is wage floors beyond which employers can't go. That's the important thing. We need to have some standards here in the United States that say, look, if you work hard, you should be able to support yourself and your family. And we need to have standards here that ensure that.

CAFFERTY: All right, Beth. Interesting stuff. There is a lot of work that has to be done if we're ever going to get back to the days when an American middle class job represented the kinds of things it used to back when I was growing up. Hopefully we'll get there at some point.

SHULMAN: Absolutely. I see hope in the future.

CAFFERTY: Good. Beth Shulman, author of "Betrayal of Work."

When we come back on IN THE MONEY, making the best of facing the worst. We will see if America is any smarter about dealing with crises after hurricane Katrina.

And beyond petroleum. The BP slogan fits like the company maybe never intended now that its problems go well beyond that pipeline mess in Alaska. We'll look at that in some detail.

And return on investment. A new book looks at how effective advertising dollars are. Find out whether Madison Avenue is cheering or weeping as we move forward.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WESTHOVEN: There has been a lot of talk this week about renewal and recovery in New Orleans. But what about learning our lesson and making sure we're more prepared the next time a major storm hits? Christopher Cooper joins us now to talk about Homeland Security's failures last year and whether it's improved since then. He is the is the co-author of a new book titled "Disaster, Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security."

Chris welcome to the program. My first question is if we got hit by the exact same storm now, what would be different? Has our government learned anything?

CHRIS COOPER, CO-AUTHOR, "DISASTER, HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE FAILURE OF HOMELAND SECURITY:" Well I don't know what our government has learned but thankfully the city is half-empty now. They've made some cosmetic changes to the way the Department of Homeland Security operates, but very few structural changes. There are structural problems with that big lumbering bureaucracy that they invented a few years ago.

SERWER: I know you're very critical of FEMA and the feds and the state and local authorities, but can we really expect anyone to anticipate a disaster like this, or even 9/11? I mean to quote the great disaster expert, Nicholas Cage in the new movie "World Trade Center," when he's driving down and he says, you never can get prepared for something like this, I mean isn't it almost too much to expect anyone to kind of dream these kind of scenarios up?

COOPER: Well, Mr. Cage doesn't are to worry so much about being surprised. That's not his role in life to counter surprises. The Department of Homeland Security is a little different. I mean that is what they do. They anticipate things that are going to happen. But in this case, you know, two years ago the Department of Homeland Security made up a list of the worst disasters that could visit the nation, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of them.

So they knew there was going to be real trouble there if the hurricane hit. Remember, this thing came at walking speed. I mean it's not a streak of silver across the sky. They knew a week out where this thing was headed. CAFFERTY: There was some pretty smart folks that suggested back after 9/11 that it was a big mistake to fold FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security and now after Katrina, there are even more people suggesting that was a really stupid thing to do, and that the thing should be separated and taken out and re-established as a private entity, FEMA. They actually were quite good at responding to some of the kinds of things like hurricanes and that tornado damage and stuff like that, until they became part of this new government monolith, whatever it is. Why doesn't anybody listen when people who know about this stuff? Say this was a mistake, we should undo it? And past experience reinforces what people know about this stuff are telling us?

COOPER: The problem is that FEMA is natural disasters are not homeland core franchise. They're interested in stopping terrorist events. They're interested in stopping disasters. So when disaster hits, like a hurricane, which you can't stop, they're less nimble about it because their system is completely backwards. FEMA is crammed down in the basement of this 180,000-man department, they are one of the smallest in the 22-agency department, and they're considered janitors, so too speak. They come in and clean up and --

CAFFERTY: But why hasn't that been addressed? Why hasn't there been a change made? We've had a fairly glaring example of the inefficiency of the current arrangement. Why won't they address that?

COOPER: Well, I don't know. This administration is marked for better or worse by its loyalty, insistence on doing the things, doing it the way that it always has. I don't think you necessarily need to take FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security, but you need to clear all the brush off the top of it so the man running FEMA has a direct line to the president and can use that as a bully pulpit.

FEMA doesn't have planes and helicopters and all this stuff. It has to borrow them from other agencies. As we note in our book, the very first day, Michael Brown is on the phone to the Pentagon saying, I need an airplane to go pick up this urban rescue team out in California, and the guy on the other end of the phone is like, who? I don't know you. And that would have to be approved by Rumsfeld and he's out in San Diego at a baseball game. So call back.

CAFFERTY: Yes.

WESTHOVEN: Are there people who you think in the government haven't taken personal responsibility who need to for us to move on? I don't mean just personally, for them to say in this job, I should have done this. You know, it seems at this point we have lots of finger pointing, Michael Brown talking about the talking points, everybody talking about Chertoff, but who's really someone who should take some leadership here and say in this job I should have done x, y and z?

COOPER: Well, this isn't really a natural disaster. It is a man- made one. Levees failed below their designed grade. Last year the federal government war games what would happen if a hurricane hit New Orleans, and they concluded that the state and the local governments would be completely and absolutely overwhelmed. So when people talk about whose fault it is, I mean the federal government knew that the locals weren't going to be much help. But that said, I mean the locals did a pretty good job of evacuating that city.

They got between 80 and 90 percent of the populous out, which a lot of people, a lot of cities in Florida would envy. So I don't know. Whose fault is it when local government fails? Why do we have a federal government if not to step in when the locals fail?

CAFFERTY: And the bureaucracy has been this way for probably longer than I've been alive. We do have an opportunity coming in November to vote every incumbent officer in this country out into the street, which is probably what, ought to happen.

Christopher Cooper thanks for being with us, nice to talk to you. Co-author of "Disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security."

Been there before, showing them the door. There is a little slogan for the mid term elections.

Time now for this week's look ahead. On Wednesday the Fed releases the beige book it is filled with economic data, it will be used to help decide the future of interest rates.

Speaking of interest rates on Friday, we'll get a look at the state of U.S. consumer debt with the July credit report. It's one of my favorites. I like looking at the pictures. We'll find out if Americans are still giving credit cards a workout.

Coming up after the break on IN THE MONEY, checking the oil. But the problem is piling on for BP. How the oil company's stock is looking.

Plus, missed messages a big chunk of the cash spent on TV ads never hit its targets. We will tell you about the results of a five- year long study and what they found out.

Outsmart your boss. Quit begging for a raise and stick around for the lowdown on some surprising jobs with big, fat six-figure salaries. And you don't need a PHD to get them, either.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SERWER: I'm guessing British Petroleum CEO John Brown isn't the happiest guy in the world these days just a couple of weeks after the company had to shut down much of its Alaskan production because of corroded pipelines. BP revealed that federal investigators are examining whether it manipulated crude oil and gas prices. That's our "Street Talk" for this week.

And of course BP had other problems, too, because they're investigating the propane business, price fixing there. Last year there was the lethal fire and explosion in Texas City at its refinery. You know, it's supposed to be this green company. I was noodling around on their Website earlier. It is like you're at Ben & Jerry's. You hardly think they're an oil company. We're all about the future, oil and love, we've got values, and it is green and good. Here they are in more hot water than Exxon, which is the big, bad ugly company. The guys at Exxon got to be laughing at them, saying you spent all this money on this public relations campaign and it means nothing.

CAFFERTY: How does a company that makes what is it, $6 billion every three months in profits? How are they going to find enough money to maintain that pipeline in it is just not there? You know what I'm saying? Times are tough.

WESTHOVEN: There were some reports about people who said that they saw it was corroded and BP was just skimping out on the money. Speaking of Lord Brown having not such a happy day, there has been a court ruling asking him to come to Texas City where that explosion was to testify because they think that he had knowledge about the kind of safety record that was going on there. But what a contrast to that ad campaign, some these allegations.

SERWER: It is interesting; too, we talked about that Alaska situation. Here's oil that's in the United States, it should be the safest supply that we have. And there are no hurricanes there. There are no earthquakes there. All you have to do is get it to the ground and put it in a little pipe and they managed to screw that up.

CAFFERTY: The Eskimos don't go and tap into the pipelines.

SERWER: Neither do the reindeer.

CAFFERTY: Nobody bothers those.

SERWER: They're in the thick of it; it will be interesting to see how they get out of it.

Coming up on IN THE MONEY, fewer bangs for the buck. Find out how much of the money spent on advertising buys absolute nothingness. That's a little pun.

Also ahead, type your way to $100,000 bucks. Court reporting is just one of the surprising jobs that pays you more than you think.

And later, fee circus. Allen Wastler of Money.com is going to wade back into the telecom fee mess. This time he's brought his hip books. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, I'm Fredricka Whitfield, more of IN THE MONEY after the top stories making news.

The remains of tropical storm Ernesto knocked down trees in New Jersey today. There is also flooding in Maryland and Virginia. 400,000 customers there do not have power. At least six deaths are being blamed on Ernesto.

Hurricane John is bringing heavy rain to Mexico's Baja peninsula today. The storm rolled ashore with 100 mile an hour winds but it is slowly weakening. Forecasters say John could bring drenching rain to the southwestern U.S. But that's long after it fades from hurricane status.

The "Atlantis" astronauts are back at the Kennedy Space Center today. NASA has rescheduled the space shuttle lift off for Wednesday. Ernesto interrupted last week's launch. Crews say they found no damage to "Atlantis" from the tropical storm.

And a celebrity apology. Brooke Shields calls an in person "I'm sorry" from Tom Cruise heart-felt. Cruise publicly criticized Shields last summer for taking anti-depressants. As a scientologist, Cruise claims that depression can be treated with exercise and vitamins. More news at the top of the hour, now back to more of IN THE MONEY.

CAFFERTY: Love this. The department store magnate John Warnamacher (ph) once said half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half. Well a couple of ad industry guys have spent five years trying to find out which half. Or to be more accurate, which 37 percent. I guess there's been a little improvement in the last 50 years. Greg Stuart's the CEO and president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And along with Rex Briggs, he's the co-author of "What Sticks, Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee yours Succeeds." Greg, nice to have you with us, welcome.

GREG STUART, CO-AUTHOR, "WHAT STICKS": Yes, thank you.

CAFFERTY: It has always been a bit of a crapshoot. You put the ad out there and you hope somebody sees it and responds to it. You did a five year study, that's pretty extensive stuff. At end of the day what was the most surprising thing that jumped out of the study that you didn't know before?

STUART: You know, I'll tell you, I think that even as much as John Warnamacher's (ph) quote is out there suggesting that 50 percent of his money was wasted, you know that's 100 years old. So the fact that we've only improved until 37 percent is a real problem. And in fact we actually found that 47 percent of the campaigns that go out spending any media money against them isn't doing any good at all.

CAFFERTY: Wow. Why not?

STUART: You know, I think that, there is a whole series of problem we identify in "What Sticks" what's wrong with advertising. There's an infrastructure problem, there's organizational problems, there is a lot of people just think they know what good advertising is. And I think at the end of the day it's that sense of like, I know it in my gut, that gets them in the most trouble.

CAFFERTY: Or those things you know when you see it.

STUART: Yeah and the problem is, is that's just not the case. There is just too many people are too removed from their brands. We had an example if I can tell from, we were sitting down at Hanes Company, which everybody knows what their products are. We go around the room, I say hey I'm Greg Stuart from the IAB. Guy goes around and he says, I'm John, I work in women's underwear. He had become too close to his brand, right.

CAFFERTY: Yeah, we don't want to know that about you John.

STUART: He had lost perspective. We don't use John's last name.

SERWER: It is like an AA meeting or something.

WESTHOVEN: So your title says how to guarantee yours succeeds. How do you measure if yours succeeds? How do you know?

STUART: Well, really what my co-author Rex Briggs figured out and what his company (INAUDIBLE) does now is they figure out how to take and analyze advertising in the same way that the drug companies do. And what that means is that we're able to -- if you know what freakonomics, how freakonomics what and what Steven Leavitt talked about there, is that you randomize your audience, you eliminate all variables but the one you're trying to measure. And Rex, a very smart researcher, really figured out how to do that. For the first time, advertising had never done -- that's what kind of shocking about this, is that advertising had never done that before, they had never gone to that level to really understand what's happening.

WESTHOVEN: And when you went there you found TV, not so great, radio not so great. Internet, good?

STUART: You know I'll tell you, so I represent the Interactive Advertising Bureau so I'm very concerned. And that's the problem we first set out to solve, it's just to understand online's role. And then we realized there was a much bigger problem here. And so, no, online also is really problematic. In fact, you know, I don't know if I could say that online was worse than the others but it may well have been.

SERWER: Greg, I think now is a good time for me to point out how effective advertising on cable news networks is.

CAFFERTY: Particularly weekends --

SERWER: I think that should -- put that as an aside. One thing I want to talk to you about, there has been a lot made lately of the end of mass media, that everyone is so narrowly focused that people go to these web sites where there are only 75,000 people. There are few events that all of us watch. Look at the nightly news, the ratings on that has cratered. Do you subscribe to that?

STUART: You know mass media may have shifted. And I don't know that that's such a problem. I mean, you know, that's going to change, change is happening. It's how we respond to that change is kind of the big issue when we get into the book. And in fact, you know I think the biggest concern and one of the things we point out in the book in "What Sticks" is that what's going to happen, they're not good at measuring what they do now. And yet we've got, you know, advertising in the game environment, advertising on mobile phones, advertising in a whole host of television, as it changes, too with VOD and other things. You know they're just, marketers are just not prepared to understand what that new world is going to look like and how to operate effectively in it.

CAFFERTY: So what do you tell a business owner who's watching this show and says you know, I'm just setting a budget for next year on advertising. How does he figure it out, with games and the Internet, radio, television, magazines, and yada, yada, yada, yada. I mean, you go out and hire an agency, you talk to the guy next door who is in a business like yours?

STUART: Well, I think, you know Jack I think the thing that kind of concerns us the most is actually we found very few marketers that were doing it all right. We found a number of them who had pieces of it and that's what we aggregated in the book and have put together in kind of a new approach. But honestly, it's relatively dismal. And I think that the big issue is that there doesn't seem to be an emphasis for marketers in really making sure their advertising is working. How do they really know? And we had the opportunity to sit with a CEO of a major automotive company and we watched him ask his marketing person five times the same question. And that question was, what do you mean I spend tens of millions of dollars and I don't know what it does? Now it's never good when a CEO asks the same question five times.

SERWER: Especially when the guy can't answer it.

CAFFERTY: I wonder if he is still there.

STUART: No. And that's kind of the point.

CAFFERTY: We're not still here either for this segment, Greg. We have to stop. Thank you. It's nice to have you with us. Greg Stuart, co-author of the book "What Sticks, Why most advertising fails and how to guarantee that yours succeeds." Here's a hint, buy a heavy schedule on IN THE MONEY. It's a giant of a program.

SERWER: Yeah.

CAFFERTY: Lots more to come on the program. Up next. the road to riches turns out you can make $100,000 or more driving a truck or being a court reporter or some other things that we're going to tell you about. You might be surprised. You didn't need a big old college education to do this stuff, either.

And fuel for thought. We'll show you some ideas for powering a car that leave the pump out of the picture. Stay with us. Have your wife push it!

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SERWER: Looking to make big bucks but feeling shut out because you never went to graduate school? Our next guest found 10 surprising jobs that can earn you six figures without leaving you swamped with college loans. Joining us now is Thomas Van Riper from a website -- it's Forbes.com. Thomas, nice to see you there.

WESTHOVEN: Andy's from "Fortune."

SERWER: I am a "Fortune" guy so I had to - THOMAS VAN RIPER, WRITER, FORBES.COM: Thanks for having me.

SERWER: You're welcome. Thank you Thomas for coming on. This is a cool article that you've done here and it's really surprising. Right don't you just start right in and tell us about some of these jobs where you can make the big bucks.

VAN RIPER: Well yeah, we thought it would be interesting to identify some jobs that pay well that do not require an advanced degree, or in some cases even a college degree. When it comes to the job market, skills are always in demand, no matter what. So we identified about 10 jobs that pay very well in which you don't need an advanced education or as I said even a college degree in some cases.

WESTHOVEN: Now the first job that you picked on this list is court reporter. I have a good friend who is a court reporter. And just tell us a little bit about it. It's not just learning steno, this takes four years of education to learn how to do this.

VAN RIPER: Right. On average, about four years. It really depends on a person's situation, how much time can you devote to your training, can you afford to quit your job for a while? Some people become registered in about two years or less, others take as much as five or six years.

CAFFERTY: Tom, Jack Cafferty, what's a life coach? It occurs to me, depending on the answer that maybe this is something I could have used along the way.

VAN RIPER: Life coach is booming. Professional coaching is a huge profession right now. There are about 10,000 of them in the world, most of them in the United States. There is a difference between business coaches and life coaches. A business coach is someone who maybe has some expertise, let's say in corporate sales, who is then hired by corporations to train their sales staff. Life coaches are really just cheerleaders, kind of a right-on for people who might be facing a decision in life, they want to try their hand at writing a book or try their hand at starting a business, or even something less dramatic such as just improving their work life, maybe shooting for a promotion within a year or so. And they will hire people and pay pretty big bucks to just sort of be their right arm, you know, encourage them, help them put together a plan, a list, to get them from point a to point b.

SERWER: Yeah, but what is a life coach?

VAN RIPER: It is a little bit fuzzily defined. Isn't it? I think it's an off-chute of what I call outsourcing our life. I mean in this day and age with so many working families, both spouses are working, you have children, people have nannies and they have gardeners and they have personal trainers, life coach is sort of the next extension of that. It's really just someone to help you put together a plan, for whatever change or whatever problem you want to solve in your life, and people will pay to do that. And if the client feels that it has value, then I suppose it has value. It may not be for everyone, but a lot of people think it has value. SERWER: I don't know about Jack, but it sounds like I could use one.

CAFFERTY: I know you can use one.

SERWER: Thank you very much Jack.

CAFFERTY: I'll take a census that you need one badly.

SERWER: Yes, yes, let's vote. A pressman, is that an old- fashioned like a newspaper job? I mean isn't that going the way of the buggy whip?

VAN RIPER: Well not completely, certainly there are fewer pressmen than there were, as the job as called, otherwise known as a printing press operator. Those jobs pay $30 an hour in some cities, which with overtime can yield a person $100,000. There are certainly fewer of them. According to the government I think there are 190,000 of them in the country right now compared to over 300,000 about five years ago. Obviously the web is dissecting that marketplace and readership of newspapers and print magazines is down from what it was, but I doubt it's going away completely any time soon. So there are fewer of those jobs, but I don't think they're going away completely and they do pay very well.

WESTHOVEN: I just want to throw in something else about the life coach. I have a question here. I know that it sounds kind of phony, right? And I notice that you don't really need like a degree or anything like this. But there are some groups, I seem to recall a "Wall Street Journal" article saying there were some groups coming up that are actually trying to make this a little bit more structured where you can go and get like a coaching certificate or some kind of a degree? Does that sound right?

VAN RIPER: Maybe. You know there is one sort of overriding body. It's not a regulatory body, that doesn't exist yet in any way, but there is sort of an association that is I think trying to raise the image of the profession a little bit. Because some of them are very legitimate, some are not. I think for people who are seeking one perhaps and look into it, you really have to look carefully because there is not one real overriding body that can tell you this guy is ok, this woman is not ok and so forth. And I think as this becomes a more prevalent job, that's what usually happens. Usually get an association that looks to be a little more stringent in terms of requirements and so forth. But right now there is no specific degree or any kind of certification that's needed.

CAFFERTY: But buyer beware, like financial planners and other kinds of non-regulated professions or careers that are out there, make sure you know what you're getting into.

VAN RIPER: That's it.

CAFFERTY: What about air traffic controllers? Very much in the news, the shortage of those this past week. They had that unfortunate accident down in Lexington, Kentucky, and it brought up this whole discussion about the fact that perhaps we don't have enough of these. But is the government appropriating the amount of money necessary to start hiring more?

VAN RIPER: Well in terms of the current appropriation, I'm not sure. I know that Comair accident the other day raised that issue. I know there was only one air traffic controller in the tower. I don't know that it was necessarily an air traffic control problem in that particular case. However, I know there are, according to the government, about 25,000 air traffic controllers. I guess it's debatable as to whether that's enough right now. But the demographics of the job skew older. So there will be a lot of retirements expected over the next five years and a lot more openings. And that's a job that pays $100,000 or close to it to start after a pretty rigorous training program. So if you're good at making snap decisions, if you're pretty good at handling stress and you like that adrenalin rush of kind of a stressful job for eight hours followed by decompressing for a while, it can be a good job for you.

SERWER: All right Thomas, we're going to have to leave it at that. Just quickly I wanted to mention some of the other ones that you have on your list, mine manager, sales person, you can always make big money there, truck driver, technical writer, restaurant manager. And my favorite, elementary school principal. Wow!

VAN RIPER: Elementary school principals believe it or not make $76,000 a year on the average and do make over $100,000 in some of the larger markets where there are larger school enrollments.

SERWER: Go figure. All right, thanks for coming on the program.

VAN RIPER: Thank you very much.

SERWER: Thomas Van Riper, forbes.com.

With unpredictable gas prices, interest is up in new hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles. But as Jen Rogers reports, today's fuel- efficient cars owe a thing or two to the past.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEN ROGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: From Oscar's red carpet to the local dealer's lot, hybrids are the coveted cars of the moment, but they may not be as revolutionary as you think.

LESLIE KENDALL, PETERSON AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM: There has always been engineers tinkering with the idea that there must be something better.

ROGERS: Leslie Kendall, curator of the alternative power show at the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles says at one point gas engines had plenty of competition.

KENDALL: This white steam car represents the first ever form of power for a vehicle. Because in 1769 the world's first vehicle was a steam car.

ROGERS: That's right, water helped make these wheels spin, cheaper than filling up with unleaded, but not without drawbacks.

KENDALL: The steam boiler for this car is right under the driver's seat. So you can imagine, it must have been a little unsettling for some people to realize that they were sitting right on top of the boiler.

ROGERS: The first vehicle with heated seats wasn't quite as dangerous as this mock-up for a nuclear vehicle could have been.

KENDALL: Nuclear engines are fairly expensive and it would be catastrophic if anything happened to them. So that technology was quickly set aside.

ROGERS: Another fuel source left by the side of the road, coal. Popular in Europe during World War II.

KENDALL: If you look back here, instead of a gas tank, you've got a bag of coal. Right here, that you can put in the burner, you light it and you can make it go.

ROGERS: A viable electric car has been the goal time and time again, including this version from 1897. Where's the plug?

KENDALL: The plug is in the back. The electric motor was that right there. And you can see how different that electric motor looks from those that we see today.

ROGERS: Electric, turban, fuel cell, bio diesel, drivers visiting the museum say they just want options.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm wondering why we can't run a car off of water.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The alternative source is a great idea. Just get it done. They've been talking about it for 50 years. I mean, what year is that car over there?

ROGERS: High gas prices tend to encourage automakers to experiment with alternative power, meaning new cars are on the way. Now, whether those cars end up on the road or here in a museum, well that remains to be seen. Jen Rogers, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END OF VIDEOTAPE)

SERWER: Coming up next on IN THE MONEY, that hidden fee thing, part two. Find out what happened after money.com's Allen Wastler weighed in on telecom fees.

And it's time to hear from you as we read some of your e-mails from the past week. You can send us an e-mail right now too. We're at inthemoney@cnn.com.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAFFERTY: We don't need no stinkin' Ralph Nader, we have Allen Wastler on this program. Last week right here on IN THE MONEY the webmaster talked out about some Internet usage fees and now they're gone. But not without some more controversy. Allen is here now with a bit of a follow-up.

WASTLER: There's power, people!

CAFFERTY: Troublemaker.

WASTLER: Basically what happened was this -- the government said we no longer need this fee on DSL users so we'll get rid of it. It was like $2 and change and everybody, yeah! We'll get some money back, that'll be cool, right? Except Verizon and BellSouth said, oh. Well, where the government fee goes away with this, we'll just create our own fee with that. Well I was a bit upset about this. And I sort of waxed poetic about it last week. And what do you know happened? First BellSouth said about that fee, never mind. And then Verizon this week said about that fee, never mind. While I'd like to take credit for this, I'm afraid I can't. I think the FCC just sort of looked at them and said, about your fees! And they went, oh, well, ok, sorry.

CAFFERTY: Maybe the FCC wouldn't have thought of that if it hadn't been for the webmaster bringing it to their attention.

WASTLER: Maybe so. But you know, some people took issue with what I said. Because I said, you know, it's this kind of behavior, this kind of outright greed where you say, oh, the government's going to get rid of this tax on me, well fine, then I'm going to put a tax on your, I'm going to make my own fee to take its place. That kind of outright greed, that's why people say, maybe outfits like that should be regulated. And of course some people are -- he said the "R" word, regulation! I'm not saying. There is lots of pros and cons to it. I'm just saying that kind of attitude brings this subject up. So, also on the subject of sunsetted fees, you'll be glad to know that the Spanish-American war tax has been sunsetted. And that this time when you fill out your income taxes you can get anywhere from $30 to $60 back.

SERWER: Remember the name!

WASTLER: You guys were talking about ads, right. I found some ads on the Internet for you. All right, let's check 'em out. Let's check out the first one, from International Paper.

SERWER: IP.

WASTLER: Go ahead, there is plenty of more trees. Ok, now these are jokes people, ok? These -- here's another one, Calvin Klein. Be the same as everyone else. It's a joke now. I love this one, Prozac, you'd kill them without it. Just joking folks. All meant in humor in jest.

CAFFERTY: All right thank you. Jennifer?

WESTHOVEN: We continue our life after work series with a story of a man who took advantage of a foreclosure. Eight years ago Richard Busch bought a 20-acre property in Leesburg, Virginia and a 170-year-old renovated dairy barn and he built a kiln and opened up a pottery studio. Valerie Morris has more on the crafting of his dream.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

VALERIE MORRIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Retirement is a hot commodity for 65-year-old Richard Busch. Busch creates pottery from scratch in his (INAUDIBLE) fitted farm studio in Leesburg, Virginia. He learned his craft by taking classes and workshops in the late '80s.

RICHARD BUSCH, POTTER: What started out as kind of a casual hobby turned into the first kind of a passion, and then I have to admit, it became kind of an obsession.

MORRIS: Busch worked as a magazine editor for more than 30 years. In 1997 he had a unique opportunity from his company.

BUSCH: As luck would have it, I was offered a chance to retire early, and so even got a little bit of a jump start on what had become a bit of a fantasy, the idea was to have a studio and a showroom, and a place where people could come and buy things. Quite a few things that are new. I make a lot of vases. Cylinders that are used for cooling wine, espresso sets, mugs, plates, you name it. I just absolutely love coming downstairs in the morning and rolling out some clay and getting on the wheel.

MORRIS: Busch says you can find him working about seven days a week.

BUSCH: When you love what you do, you just want to keep doing it as much as you can.

(END OF VIDEOTAPE)

WESTHOVEN: We'll be right back with more IN THE MONEY. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAFFERTY: Time now to read your answers to our question of the week about how a major drop or crash in the real estate market would affect you. Barbara wrote this, "Yes, at this point we are hoping the value of our big city home will make retirement possible in the future. A market crash would ruin our golden years." Kyle in New York, "We are all in trouble if the real estate market crashes because it will drastically reduce consumer spending and hurt businesses across the board." Kyle gets it. Gloria in Las Vegas, "I'm staying in my own until they put a tag on my toe. My house is almost paid for, but my married children all have "creative" loans and I'm worried because I don't have enough room if they all end up having to move back in with me." Now there's a nightmare.

Here is next week's email question of the week. Would you join a union at your job if you could? Send your answers on that to inthemoney@cnn.com. You should also visit our show page at cnn.com/inthemoney which is where you'll find the address of our fun site of the week. On that note, thanks for joining us for this edition of IN THE MONEY. My thanks to "HEADLINE NEWS" correspondent Jennifer Westhoven, "Fortune" magazine editor-at-large Andy Serwer and cnnmoney.com managing editor Allen Wastler. We hope to see you back here next week Saturday at 1:00, Sunday at 3:00 eastern. Until the next time, enjoy the rest of your weekend.

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