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You are here: Home / Politics / Education / For Discussion: Where Are the Plumbers of Tomorrow?

For Discussion: Where Are the Plumbers of Tomorrow?

by Anne Laurie|  July 13, 20218:53 pm| 122 Comments

This post is in: Education, Excellent Links, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

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maybe it was a bad idea to spend so much time from, say, the mid-90s until the late 10's for us, collectively, as a country, from left to right, to act as if trade and labor jobs were where you ended up if you had no other skills or value https://t.co/5nzHATUHIM

— ANTI-HUSTLE MACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 12, 2021

My old man always told us: Any job you can do indoors, sitting down, is not a ‘bad job’. But then…

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. – John W. Gardner

trade and labor industries have done less than zero to help this situation, just to be clear. most of them are still old boys networks even while projects are dying on the vine.

— ANTI-HUSTLE MACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 12, 2021

From a professional online training designer:

… i’m probably at the tail end of my generation in having been able to pick up a professional job without any college education, and my generation’s the last who were able to do so, and if i could do it differently, i would’ve chosen something other than this to do.

the worst part of this is that we’re in a pretty deep hole, labor-and-training-wise, it’ll take a long time to dig out, and there aren’t very many politicians working very hard to even start digging us out of it

having all sorts of brilliant STEM graduates won’t help us when we don’t have any buildings for them to work in and they can’t get to their offices or laboratories and there’s no one to actually build whatever they’ve designed

i also don't think anyone's learned their lesson here. i think even the brightest lights on the left* intrinsically value academic or scientific jobs significantly more than they do trade or labor jobs.

*there are no bright lights on the right

— ANTI-HUSTLE MACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 12, 2021

this is one of those areas that i think liberals/democrats are super vulnerable on, and it would be doing a lot more damage to them if republicans hadn't basically given up welders in favor of car dealership owners

— ANTI-HUSTLE MACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 12, 2021

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Reader Interactions

122Comments

  1. 1.

    frosty

    July 13, 2021 at 8:59 pm

    Two of them are my neighbor’s kids. Working for a plumbing contractor in (this small) town.

  2. 2.

    Spanky

    July 13, 2021 at 8:59 pm

    So the latest home sale in the neighborhood is probably the largest. A waterfront home on the river went for $1.4 million. Sold by a plumber to an HVAC guy.

    Another piece of anecdata: The Maryland license “HVAC” is on a Maserati I used to see on my daily commute through Annapolis.

    I don’t think there’ll be a shortage of tradesfolk in the coming years.

  3. 3.

    RepubAnon

    July 13, 2021 at 9:00 pm

    Plumbers, electricians – can’t get those services over the web, or outsource them to a low wage country…

  4. 4.

    JMG

    July 13, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    Not that I’m old or anything, but this winter when we had a very minor heating system problem this winter, the young man who answered was the GRANDSON of our original HVAC guy whose names are still on the trucks and is still alive and thriving, just not working. His son did all our work from about 2010 on, now it’s his son. That’s why trades won’t die out, they’re mostly family businesses.

  5. 5.

    tom

    July 13, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    @Spanky: a guy I went to high school with is in residential construction – academics were not his strong suit. He owns outright a 5-bedroom house right on Torch Lake in northern lower Michigan. I’m a software engineer and I sure as hell don’t own a house on a lake.

    ETA: and good for him. He worked hard for it.

  6. 6.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 13, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    @RepubAnon:

    Plumbers, electricians – can’t get those services over the web, or outsource them to a low wage country… 

    Exactly.

  7. 7.

    WaterGirl

    July 13, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    I was absolutely certain that this was going to be a Cole post.

  8. 8.

    raven

    July 13, 2021 at 9:06 pm

    My buddy was an EMT in Ft Meyers and he gave it up an moved up here and he and his son are plumbers.

  9. 9.

    Baud

    July 13, 2021 at 9:06 pm

    I’m not sure how our side hadn’t valued trade jobs except to the extent trade workers don’t like paying income tax.

  10. 10.

    Doug R

    July 13, 2021 at 9:08 pm

    Anti-hustle has blocked me I think because I expressed doubts about Phylicia Rashad a couple of weeks before she showed her ass supporting Bill Cosby when he got out of prison.

  11. 11.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 13, 2021 at 9:09 pm

    @WaterGirl: I read the post title, and thought of Tricky Dick, so I had no idea what to expect.

  12. 12.

    raven

    July 13, 2021 at 9:10 pm

    @Baud: And they are by-and-large Trumpers.

  13. 13.

    JMG

    July 13, 2021 at 9:10 pm

    PS: Forgot to mention. My wife’s youngest sister married a landscaper. He got injured and on disability. Her daughter, oldest of the two children, is on the middle class success track, college, good summer jobs, like that. If it weren’t for the pandemic, her son would never have graduated high school despite being a two-sport star (football and wrestling). Susie had me tell him about NCAA entrance requirements and he listened politely and still wouldn’t go to class. As the pandemic eased, kid’s started his own landscaping business and it’s doing well. His dad, much to Mom’s surprise and happiness, has become kind of a senior consultant, Moral: Some people just hate school, but still have talent.

  14. 14.

    Baud

    July 13, 2021 at 9:12 pm

    @raven:

    Aren’t most white tradespeople?

  15. 15.

    dmsilev

    July 13, 2021 at 9:13 pm

    @JMG: At my previous employer, we had a carpentry contractor that we used a lot. Great folks, did excellent work (and charged accordingly). Their business history  with the university went back five generations and over a hundred years.

  16. 16.

    cmorenc

    July 13, 2021 at 9:13 pm

    Nursing is a great in-between occupation that straddles a whole lot of nitty-gritty messy hands-on work that sometimes puts their own health at risk and cannot be outsourced or performed remotely on-line, but for R.N. level nursing it does require a college degree nowdays.  There’s good reason nurses are included with police, firefighters, and other community safety responders as a critical backbone of society.  (Disclosure: my younger daughter is an R.N. nurse).

  17. 17.

    Frank Wilhoit

    July 13, 2021 at 9:13 pm

    This is only one aspect of the ill effects of the destruction of the educational system and the abandonment of the educational enterprise, from birth to graduate school.  Those “brilliant STEM graduates” don’t exist; American business has been entirely dependent upon engineers from China and India for decades, and those pipelines are going to dry up in another 20 years because those countries’ ruling parties are going to have to destroy their educational systems in order to remain in power.

    A frightening amount of technical and non-technical business processes are already being worked on a cargo-cult basis by people whose retired predecessors taught them what to do but no theory, no principles, no rationales, no context — and no edge cases, and certainly no process improvement.  When external drivers absolutely force change, consultants are brought in whose [poorly] hidden agenda is to sell fantastically expensive turnkey systems.  Then when the O&M money runs out, those systems in their turn become white elephants.

    We are coming closer than anyone realizes to a time when entire industries are going to have to de-automate because the people to run and fix the technology simply won’t exist.  The part of the economy that trickles down from Defense procurement will survive the longest, but they will have to educate their intakes from scratch.

  18. 18.

    raven

    July 13, 2021 at 9:15 pm

    @Baud: My buddy isn’t but yes.

  19. 19.

    Roger Moore

    July 13, 2021 at 9:15 pm

    There’s no reason someone who went to college can’t change careers and become a plumber or electrician.  I’ve seen it happen! There was a woman at my work who started as a postdoc but decided she enjoyed doing stuff with her hands and transferred to our facilities department.  She was great at it, since it was helpful for someone in facilities to be able to talk to the scientists at their level.

    Unfortunately, our facilities department was too much of a boys club, and they pushed her out.  This is something we really need to look at if we’re going to get more people into those lines of work.  Those kinds of trades skew very strongly male, and we’ll have trouble filling all the jobs if they keep driving women away.

  20. 20.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:16 pm

    I think a lot of young people don’t know about it, or how big it is:

    If the Building Trades training system, which includes both apprentice-level and journeyman-level training, was a degree granting college or university, it would be the largest degree granting college or university in the United States — over 5 times larger than Arizona State University.
    • If we were a public university system, we would be the third largest public university system in the United State — almost twice as large as the University of Texas system.
    • And if we were a K-12 school district, we would be the fourth largest school district in the US, only behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

    That’s the joint apprentice training committee (JATC), so the training centers that are operated by unions and contractors.

    I think some of this is regional. We have a tri-county vocational high school here that is well-regarded and turns out a lot of people and it is always fully enrolled. Has been for decades. It is in no way considered “lesser” than the college-track high school. It’s competitive to get into some of the programs.

  21. 21.

    Soprano2

    July 13, 2021 at 9:17 pm

    It’s not a new thing to think these trade jobs are lesser or lower, either. Plus, they’re hard on your body. You should see some of the guys I work with – some of them are old before their time, or almost disabled. You can make a good living this way, but it’s hard, dirty work and you can be on call nights and weekends and holidays.  Thanksgiving is a big day for plumbers because of garbage disposals, and 20 people in grandma’s house where normally two people live.  They’re cyclical, too – during the Great Recession lots of construction people went out of business. I have a co-worker around my age (60) who said everyone told him in 2007 he should go into business as an excavator rather than take a city job. He said he would have starved to death if he’d done that. Don’t romanticize these jobs, they’re good work but hard.

  22. 22.

    Old Newby

    July 13, 2021 at 9:18 pm

    My sister is in the trades (tool and die), and has been for about 25 years. She makes very good money, and likes a lot about her work, but she has faced tremendous sexism from Day One. I’m sure it’s NOT ALL TRADES, but it’s probably enough that a significant number of potential workers are excluded on the basis of sex. I expect there are problems with racism, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and other forms of discrimination as well. A trade that really wanted to recruit would make sure they were open to all sorts of diversity.

  23. 23.

    Villago Delenda Est

    July 13, 2021 at 9:19 pm

    Shoddiness in philosophy: anyone who pays the slightest attention to Ayn Rand.

  24. 24.

    raven

    July 13, 2021 at 9:19 pm

    @Soprano2: Ask Ozark

  25. 25.

    zhena gogolia

    July 13, 2021 at 9:20 pm

    @JMG:

    We have a roofer like that.

  26. 26.

    Villago Delenda Est

    July 13, 2021 at 9:21 pm

    @Frank Wilhoit: ​
    The parasites of the .01% do not give a fuck about everything you wrote. They have theirs; fuck everyone else.

    They need tumbrel therapy.

  27. 27.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:24 pm

    @Soprano2:

    The reason people say this about Democrats (not valuing trades) is because there was a genuine debate in the Democratic Party about it. Some Democrats didn’t want kids “tracked” too young – the fear was lower income kids wouldn’t be college tracked- so were wary of GOP efforts to create two systems.

  28. 28.

    NotMax

    July 13, 2021 at 9:25 pm

    Have you priced getting plumbing work done lately?

    Ay caramba.

  29. 29.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 13, 2021 at 9:25 pm

    @Baud: Not in the People’s Republic of MA, where I live.

  30. 30.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 9:27 pm

    Sorry, I don’t buy this argument. Tell me what the GOP has done for tradespeople. They pay lip service and nothing else.

    BTW, the percentage of women in the skilled trades is growing. Construction sites are a difficult place to work if you’re not a straight dude. This has a lot to do with the worker shortage.

  31. 31.

    geg6

    July 13, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    My ex was a vocational educator for his entire career, first as a welding teacher and later an administrator in charge of co-op agreements and OTJ with local employers.  I spent 18 years living with him and immersed in that area of education, first helping him with the writing of his MEd thesis and then just experiencing his trials and tribulations at school.  It is an undervalued thing for a student with the talent in welding or carpentry or HVAC or auto mechanics to try to get their parents and home schools on board with encouraging students who aren’t interested in academics and who like to create and work with their hands.  Even providing salary information doesn’t always make a dent.  Schools want to dump unwanted, unmotivated students (who are sometimes hidden gems) and parents have all been convinced that college is a must. Often, however, the parents of talented Voc Ed kids get over their qualms when their kid gets a job before or immediately after graduating high school making $50-70K with no student loan debt.

    We should be encouraging and investing in practical education.  These professionals (that’s what they are) are desperately needed and there are lots of kids in college who don’t really want to be there.  It’s really stupid.

  32. 32.

    Hoppie

    July 13, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    Old joke from 25 or so years ago:

    Guy calls a plumber, who spends a couple hours fixing the toilet, and gets handed a bill for $350.00.  Guy says “gee, I’m a psychiatrist, and I only make $125 an hour.”

    Plumber says, “Yeah, that’s what I made when I was a psychiatrist.”

    Not so new a phenomenon, I would say.

     

    ;

  33. 33.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:31 pm

    @Old Newby:

    I expect there are problems with racism

    Oh, there are. It was so bad in the 1970s and 1980’s they were sanctioned by the federal government and entered into agreements where they were required to offer slots on a percentage basis. If they didn’t comply the judges who oversaw and periodically reviewed progress on the agreements would increase the percentage. They were harsh with them- they made them comply. It can be done but you have be serious about it and you have to be vigilant, and enforce. Most of the training programs get federal subsidies, so they have a big hammer.

  34. 34.

    TomatoQueen

    July 13, 2021 at 9:34 pm

    @Kay: Voc Ed in the 70s was removed from the high school curriculum, because every student in that suburban high school in the woods was going to college, at least according to the ambitions of the principal, who bore an unfortunate but comic resemblance to Himmler.  The drop out issue then became inevitable as the substitute training-in-retail program couldn’t and didn’t accommodate those who wanted to be welders, to say nothing of the sexism rampant in the computer lab, one girl to a class and a department head who wouldn’t be tolerated today.  A lot of change from 72 through 78 or so.

  35. 35.

    Jeffro

    July 13, 2021 at 9:35 pm

    The lead singer of one of my favorite bands is a carpenter.  He did just fine last year (despite playing no shows) and will probably do even better this year.

    It must be strange to want to hit the road, but know that you can make more money staying back in your home city, building houses and what not.

  36. 36.

    James E Powell

    July 13, 2021 at 9:36 pm

    @Baud:

    I’m not sure how our side hadn’t valued trade jobs except to the extent trade workers don’t like paying income tax.

    For a large number of people “The Democrats” are represented by a know it all brother-in-law, a good for nothing nephew, or this guy at work who I’m pretty sure is a Democrat because he said he’d never fired a gun.

    ANTI-HUSTLE MACHINE says “this is one of those areas that i think liberals/democrats are super vulnerable on” but I don’t get why liberals/democrats (sic) are responsible for the current state of affairs and I’m not even sure that Republicans would be responsible.

     

  37. 37.

    Craig

    July 13, 2021 at 9:37 pm

    My buddy was working on a post grad degree at UC and since he’d grown up helping his pop in his painting business he started picking up painting gigs to help with school. Then he said fuck it and went full time. Now he has 15 guys working for him, only works on rich ass peoples houses, hasn’t actually touched a brush in 15 years and owns 2 houses in the Bay Area.

  38. 38.

    NotMax

    July 13, 2021 at 9:37 pm

    Loosely obligatory?

    :)

  39. 39.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 9:37 pm

    @Soprano2:

    Don’t romanticize these jobs, they’re good work but hard. 

    They’re also:
    1) Injury-prone. I have worked with a lot of tradespeople missing fingers or with blown-out backs and knees. Disabled by age 40 is not uncommon.
    2) The way to really make money at these trades is to own a business. That takes some business skills. It is not like some 22-year-old dude with a certificate walks into six figures.
    3) Very economically cyclical. When and where construction is moving fast, good times. But tradespeople are often the first to get let go in a downturn. It’s hard to raise a family in one place with that lifestyle.
    4) Also, lots of the high-paying jobs are temporary or for a specific project, and probably require time away from where you live. (Which is why they’re high-paying.) Pipeline welders make a lot of money but they have to work in God-knows-where and it’s a defined time.

  40. 40.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:39 pm

    @TomatoQueen:

    It’s interesting, how it ebbs and flows. I enjoy talking to tradespeople because they all have different sort of “cultures”. One of my sons is an electrician and I was telling him they couldn’t find a repairman for the ancient elevator at the courthouse. He went into this long thing about elevator people :)

    Anyway. If you’re a little eccentric and want to make a lot of money and have people begging you to come out, be an elevator repair person. The general gist was “they’re odd ducks”

  41. 41.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 9:42 pm

    @Kay:

    He went into this long thing about elevator people 

    They are THE WORST. I was on a project where we awarded the elevator contract to the team whose lead engineer literally said in the interview, “All of us suck but we suck the least.”

  42. 42.

    Starfish

    July 13, 2021 at 9:44 pm

    @Frank Wilhoit: I am deeply skeptical of what you are saying about other countries taking apart their educational systems to stay in power. This ignores the fact that education is important to people and that there are forms of government that are not going to be overcome by having an educated populace.

    The alternate tracks into tech are already starting. There will be more of them.

  43. 43.

    Jager

    July 13, 2021 at 9:44 pm

    My grandson dropped out of UC Santa Cruz after two years with good grades. He’s a licensed plumber, busy all the time. He said he could work 7 days a week if he wanted to. He doesn’t because he needs some time to surf and rock climb. He is doing one hell of a lot better than his former classmates are.

  44. 44.

    geg6

    July 13, 2021 at 9:47 pm

    @Suzanne:

    I’m not as conversant with building as you are, but my experiences with automatic door people would have me begging to differ.  I have found elevator guys to be much more pleasant.

  45. 45.

    James E Powell

    July 13, 2021 at 9:48 pm

    @Kay:

    I think a lot of young people don’t know about it, or how big it is:

    I can anecdotally attest to this. I teach in high schools. For the most part, the only students who know about the number of opportunities in the trades are the children of people who work in the trades.

    Also anecdotal, in the Los Angeles schools, teachers are very much under orders strongly urged to push “everybody has to go to college.” I had brochures from trade schools in my room and I was asked to take them out, but I do not know if that was a common thing.

  46. 46.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:48 pm

    @James E Powell:

    There was a gross thing that the Trumpsters did with apprenticeships – I have seen this before. It was KellyAnne Conway and Ivanka (who was in charge of it, for some reason) and they were just marveling that the peons could make “seventy five thousand dollars!” There’s this subtext, like they don’t deserve it. Ugh. Disgusting people.

    Their proposed program was scammy anyway. Of course it was.

  47. 47.

    frosty

    July 13, 2021 at 9:53 pm

    @Frank Wilhoit:  That’s not the case in the civil engineering disciplines I worked in or saw in the industry. Yes, some Chinese and Indian engineers but the overwhelming majority were domestic grads of U Maryland, Va Tech, Penn State, U Delaware, Lehigh,
    Hopkins, and the like.

    ETA IT and GIS as well.

  48. 48.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 9:55 pm

    @James E Powell:

    are the children of people who work in the trades.

    Exactly. Some of the trades have changed too. Auto mechanics has really changed. They can get training from a specific manufacturer and then they go out to dealerships to do service, like solo contractors. They’ll contract with a number of them – they don’t work for the dealership. They do really well and they have a lot of agency.
    It’s partly the fault of the people who need these workers. Get off your ass and go tell some high school students and put some money into training. It’s not the public’s job to find and train their specific employees. They’re going to have to put some funding and effort in.

  49. 49.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 9:58 pm

    @Old Newby:

    I started out as a mold maker, which is very similar to tool and die work, I finished up a 60 yr working career as a precision machinist. I’ve had a couple other types of jobs, professional sports, owned a bicycle shop and manufactured custom bicycles. To say that women would have a hard time in this field is a massive understatement. That doesn’t mean they don’t work in it and can do the work as good as men. It’s a matter of talent and it doesn’t take a penis to accomplish. There are things that I find a lot of people wouldn’t like about it. It’s relatively dirty. Fingernails and long hair are disadvantages, so if you have to have those it’s a problem, although I had hair down below my shoulders and a full beard, and I managed. After that it’s how you look at things, and reasonable math skills often including trigonometry. It’s not beating red hot steel into shape with a hammer. It does have a lot of safety concerns that must be taken into account for anyone in the field.

    And there has been a shortage of workers in the field for my entire 60 yr career. I employed women in the business I owned, but not many ever applied. The shop I last worked in had just hired two women to be apprentices, I don’t know if they are only working there because their uncle works there but suspect so and if they might actually decide to do the work as a career.

  50. 50.

    Narya

    July 13, 2021 at 9:58 pm

    Bro is a very good auto mechanic. His dealership has been throwing handsful of money at him to keep him, and he notes that they can’t ship his job overseas. He also notes that they can’t get good new guys for love or money, in part because people don’t realize it’s actually skilled work—in his case highly skilled.

    ETA: He also does a lot to stay in shape and has worn gloves to reduce chemical exposure, but it’s still hard on the body.

  51. 51.

    Honus

    July 13, 2021 at 9:59 pm

    @Roger Moore: i graduated with honors from UVA in 1977 and immediately went to work as a carpenter, a trade I pursued for fifteen years until I finished law school in 1995. If I’d stayed in construction I’d probably be rich now. But at least I don’t have to work outside on days like today.

  52. 52.

    cmorenc

    July 13, 2021 at 10:03 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Shoddiness in philosophy: anyone who pays the slightest attention to Ayn Rand.

    Who BTW when she got older and sick, went on Social Security Disability.

  53. 53.

    CaseyL

    July 13, 2021 at 10:03 pm

    I was brought up in a strong pro-union household, and the trades have SFAIK always been union jobs (another reason TPTB decided to de-emphasize them).  I’ve always known about the trades, but was brought up not thinking of them as jobs a girl/woman could do.  And considering the horrible, horrible sexism in those fields, I doubt I would have had the fortitude to stick it out even if I’d thought of going into them.

    I’m also old enough to remember when Voc Tech school taught basic stuff like circuitry, carpentry, plumbing, etc.  You’d get your Voc Tech training, then be apprenticed in a union, then become a journeyman, and finally finish.

    But another factor driving down trades jobs is how we build our houses and consumer goods. Most everything is built to last 5-10 years, then you replace it.  Or – with consumer electronics – it’s almost always less expensive to toss and replace than fix.  And cars are increasingly high tech: the self-trained backyard mechanic no longer exists.

  54. 54.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    July 13, 2021 at 10:03 pm

    I had a stone walk put in last fall. It is a thing of beauty, a real work of art. I was amazed at the craftmanship.

    The stone masons were seasonal employees brought in from Mexico.

    Hasn’t construction been relying on skilled Mexican labor for years?

  55. 55.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 10:05 pm

    @Ruckus:

    I’m all for government funded training but I would like it if large companies would pitch in. I listened to a Caterpillar representative bemoan the fact that he can’t find skilled workers and I’m thinking “well, you could TRAIN some. You know, with your companies money instead of the public high school’s money”. They used to train people. They could maybe try that again. They can make welders just like they do tractors, and in the same place.

  56. 56.

    Honus

    July 13, 2021 at 10:05 pm

    @Soprano2: very true, but a more robust safety net, starting with decent health care, would do a lot to alleviate that.  I had group health insurance as a payroll deduction for my crew back in the late 1980s. The guys would reliably come to work in the winter in bad weather if only a few days a week “so at least the kids could go to the doctor”

  57. 57.

    Narya

    July 13, 2021 at 10:06 pm

    @CaseyL: but bro is as good as he is in part because he’s also a “backyard” mechanic— first car was a 69 Camaro he rebuilt. It’s the combo of training and experience in all these trades.

  58. 58.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 10:06 pm

    @James E Powell:

    It was the only path discussed when I was in high school in socal. We won’t talk about how many decades ago that was.

  59. 59.

    NotMax

    July 13, 2021 at 10:07 pm

    @Suzanne

    Guy I knew owned a multi-story warehouse which had originally been built as a military hospital during the Civil War. The original elevator from when it first opened was still there (though had been altered from steam to electric probably sometime in the 1890s, and pretty much unchanged since) and in use up until he moved to new digs during the 1980s. Large enough to be used as a freight elevator, having been designed to accommodate not only people standing upright but also bedridden patients and suchlike.

    Finding anyone willing to service/coax/goad/beat it into further continued operation it was a gargantuan headache.

  60. 60.

    dexwood

    July 13, 2021 at 10:07 pm

    I would  commit a felony if it was the price of having a good, dependable plumber again. Last good one I had, thirty years of trust in his skills, died soon after he retired because his knees and shoulders could no longer bear the load. A Mennonite who lived his creed in all things. Last next to half decent plumber lost everything, including his mind it seems, in a messy divorce that was all his fault. I try to do as much as I can, but so much is beyond my skill level and I’m an old fucker.

  61. 61.

    Cacti

    July 13, 2021 at 10:08 pm

    OTOH, you need to be honest that a lot of trade work is physically demanding, and what doesn’t seem so bad at 30 might feel a lot different at 50, when you’re not young, but still have a lot of years until retirement.

  62. 62.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    July 13, 2021 at 10:08 pm

    Problem the Trades is that is skilled labor and not trained monkey work. I’ve known plenty of guys who washed out of apprentice programs for being idiots.

  63. 63.

    sab

    July 13, 2021 at 10:13 pm

    @geg6: My step-son was completely non-academic (dyslexic) but very bright. He went to machinist and welding school, but when he got out all the firms that hired from that school wanted to sign the entry level hires to extreme non-compete contracts. So if the job didn’t work out he would have to leave the area to work in the field. So he didn’t bother even trying to look for work in that line.

    He works now as a machinist in a job he got through family connections. The family connection to the job is long gone. Now with solid experience he could go elsewhereeasily,  but that initial con-compete issue is a real problem in entry level positions.

  64. 64.

    Honus

    July 13, 2021 at 10:14 pm

    @Kay: elevator guys are kind of a group to themselves. Elevators are weird, how they work, and combine electricity, structures and mechanical aspects in interesting ways. Elevator guys understand this, and nobody else does, and elevator guys usually don’t understand anything else, like carpentry or plumbing.

  65. 65.

    Logan Brown

    July 13, 2021 at 10:14 pm

    @JMG: We are using the same roofer who my father took a chance on after he immigrated from Kabul in the late 1970s. The man is fantastic and honest as the day is long. I will not let anyone else near my roof. I hope his kids keep the business going once he retires.

  66. 66.

    phdesmond

    July 13, 2021 at 10:14 pm

    off-topic haiku:

     
    remarkable flight
    texas house delegation
    fifty paul reveres

  67. 67.

    Another Scott

    July 13, 2021 at 10:16 pm

    @Suzanne: +1

    Plus, even if you do good work and do well enough to start a business, and don’t blow out your back or shoulders or hands or knees, you have to worry about getting the customer(s) from hell that are never satisfied, trash you online and with the BBB, etc., etc.

    I remember when there was going to be a gigantic shortage of STEM workers. Yet…:

    “The debate over guestworker programs is largely based on anecdotal evidence and testimonials from employers, rather than solid evidence,” said Salzman. “Our examination shows that the STEM shortage in the United States is largely overblown. Guestworker programs are in need of reform, but any changes should make sure that guestworkers are not lower-paid substitutes for domestic workers.”

    Despite a steady supply of U.S. STEM graduates, guestworkers make up a large and growing portion of the workforce, specifically in information technology occupations and industries. IT employers look to guestworker programs as a source of labor that is plentiful even at wages that appear to be too low to attract large numbers of the best and brightest domestic students.

    Imagine that. Domestic students don’t want to take on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to work long hours at marginal per-hour-worked wages. Shocking!

    Nothing’s guaranteed and these “worker shortage” projections are usually worth less than the bits they’re written on.  In a properly functioning education and labor market, pay and benefit signals get people to change jobs or fields or educational specializations.  Industries that really need people figure out ways to get them, beyond lobbying Congress for special visas…

    Yes, reforms are needed. And Biden’s recent list of 72 EO changes (ending non-competes, etc.) is a good start.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  68. 68.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 10:17 pm

    @Kay:

    Both my dad and I had apprentices for the business he started and that I ran until the last big socal earthquake broke me. I mean me physically and monetarily.

    It was a good, in fact almost the only way to get and develop great machinists. It’s a hands on trade and it takes time and effort to build solid workers out of possibilities. The biggest thing is what you are hitting on, it takes time, it takes effort and it takes money. And many big companies would rather spend that on a nice board room and offices for the staff, and quarterly payouts rather than any effort whatsoever for the actual dirty work.

  69. 69.

    Hildebrand

    July 13, 2021 at 10:20 pm

    After the recent catastrophic flooding in Metro Detroit, we needed a new HVAC and hot water heater (amongst countless other things).  The plumbers/HVAC folks we used were awesome – all 20-30 something hipsters with excellent skills and customer service (and really good rates).  Hadn’t used them before, saw their truck on our street, called them, and are so pleased we will never use anyone else.

    When we get to redoing the basement, we already know the guy we will use for drywall and painting – a really good young guy who also works for the city of Detroit.

    One of my parishioners works for DTE, she is always recruiting folks for ‘line work’ – as she tell folks, its reliable work, union wages, something you can build a life on, and you can work your way into the ‘desk jobs’ if that is what you want.  The classes for training always fill (biggest hang-up is the drug test – though with pot being legalized that is definitely becoming less of an issue).

    Seemingly, there are plenty of good people getting into the trades – especially in metro areas.  Could be the Detroit blue-collar attitude, but it seems we haven’t seen any decline at all in the skilled trades.

  70. 70.

    Citizen Alan

    July 13, 2021 at 10:21 pm

    @Doug R: 

    Cynically, I can’t wondering whether Phylicia Rashad is really that loyal to Bill Cosby or whether she was just expecting Cosby Show residuals to pay for her retirement. Much like how the surviving cast members of the Dukes of Hazzard really wish everyone would agree that there’s nothing racist about painting a Confederate flag on the roof of your car.

  71. 71.

    ian

    July 13, 2021 at 10:22 pm

    I call B.S. on golikehellmachine

    https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/fact-sheets/2015/january/fact-sheet-obama-administration%E2%80%99s

    Export figures and industry estimates confirm that these enforcement wins are worth billions of dollars combined for American farmers and ranchers, manufacturers of high-tech steel, aircraft, and automobiles; solar energy exporters, cutting edge service providers and many others. And keep in mind that every billion dollars of American goods and services exports supports nearly 5,800 jobs.

     

    The Obama Administration has also leveraged United States resources in new, more effective ways to support trade enforcement actions. In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Obama announced the creation of the Interagency Trade Enforcement Center (ITEC) run by the U.S. Trade Representative, a first-of-its kind body dedicated to investigating international trade abuses.

    • Several cases offer especially important economic impacts for small and medium-sized businesses.  These include WTO challenges against Chinese export subsidies for makers of auto parts, hardware and building materials, furniture, and ceramics, Indian use of non-science-based import restrictions to block poultry imports, and unfair import licensing rules in Argentina.

    https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/07/09/president-obama-signs-bill-create-jobs-restore-americas-transportation-system

    Summary:

    Thanks to legislation recently signed by President Obama, thousands of construction workers on job sites across the country will continue working to improve America’s infrastructure.

    “The construction industry, for example, was hit brutally hard when the housing bubble burst. So it’s not enough to just keep construction workers on the job doing projects that were already underway. For months I’ve been calling on Congress to take half the money we’re no longer spending on war and use it to do some nation-building here at home.”

    This is right in that time period he (or she) is talking about.

  72. 72.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 10:25 pm

    @Ruckus:

    It’s just very frustrating for me to listen to because they have convinced the public that this is entirely either an individual or public responsibility and really rather than bitch incessantly that no one wants to be a welder they could train some. It’s not really our job to provide them with specifically trained workers off a shelf. They’re going to have to do some of this. I love the helplessness of it- these giant companies- “fully trained experienced machinists are no longer rolling off the imaginary machinist assembly line and showing up here”. Who do they think trained them?  Their predecessors at those same companies. They have to invest something.

  73. 73.

    Citizen Alan

    July 13, 2021 at 10:26 pm

    @Frank Wilhoit: I’m suddenly flashing back to Asimov’s Foundation. It was a major plot point in the first book that, as the galactic empire began to collapse, no one outside Foundation (a colony founded by the protagonist, Hari Seldon) actually understood anymore how their own technology worked. To the point that Foundation took over half the galaxy by folding all off-world technical programs into a made-up religious dogma so that most people thought the lights would only come on so long as the Great Space Spirit was pleased.

  74. 74.

    sab

    July 13, 2021 at 10:27 pm

    Every successful contractor I know is married to a bookkeeper or accountant, so they don’t have to pay to have the books and payroll done.

  75. 75.

    Charluckles

    July 13, 2021 at 10:28 pm

    A better safety net would go a long way towards making trade jobs more attractive.  I know too many people with blue collars and busted bodies to freely recommend a lot of these careers.  Young friends who thought they were on the gravy train and ended up physically and/or mentally burned with little savings and no health insurance.

  76. 76.

    TriassicSands

    July 13, 2021 at 10:30 pm

    Carpentry, building houses and finish carpentry are enjoyable, skilled work. Plumbing and hanging drywall just rip up your body. Obviously, it’s not always that simple, but I built houses for a time decades ago and really enjoyed the work. There were challenges, much to learn, and one could take pride in a job well done. Plumbing is physically demanding (though there is a difference between construction and service work) and all of the plumbers I’ve known have had various work-related health problems by the time they were in their 40s. Back problems seem quite common. Finishing drywall well takes skill, but hanging it is terrible for the long-term health of one’s back. Roofing is supposed to be the most dangerous construction trade.

    I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend carpentry to a young, physically able individual. To anyone considering plumbing, drywall, or roofing, I’d recommend college or drugs. But different people like different things.

    Number one trade of the future in the U.S.? Local militias. Instead of lugging around a bunch of tools, you get to tote a soul-enriching assault rifle. If you’re lucky, you might get to shoot someone — every true American’s real dream.

  77. 77.

    Citizen Alan

    July 13, 2021 at 10:35 pm

    @Starfish: Education is important to some people. My fear is that twenty-five years from now, a third of all white teens will be functionally illiterate b/c their parents pulled them out of school and homeschooled them to protect them from “critical race theory” and transgender kids in the bathrooms.

  78. 78.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 10:35 pm

    @Honus:

    elevator guys are kind of a group to themselves

    That’s exactly what he said. I was “oh, good. Tell me about them. The oddballs”

    We do legal work for sheet metal workers. Once you get one they talk and if they’re happy they refer so you get more. They’re their own niche subculture too.

  79. 79.

    James E Powell

    July 13, 2021 at 10:40 pm

    @Ruckus:

    I graduated from a suburban high school in 1973. About 1/3 of the students were vocational students. I was one such student because commercial refrigeration was my family’s business. I never considered college until several years after graduation.

  80. 80.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 10:43 pm

    @CaseyL:

    I’ve always known about the trades, but was brought up not thinking of them as jobs a girl/woman could do.  And considering the horrible, horrible sexism in those fields, I doubt I would have had the fortitude to stick it out even if I’d thought of going into them. 

    I am seeing small-but-growing numbers of women in construction trades. Most of them that I have met are immigrants. A construction site is not an awesome place for women. I have stories.

    I will also note that it is also not awesome for the LGBTQ crowd. I had a PM with a major, national general contractor tell me that he would never knowingly hire a gay man for any jobsite role, because it would freak out the other tradesmen (yes, the men) and cause too much drama and distraction.

  81. 81.

    Martin

    July 13, 2021 at 10:45 pm

    Whoa. Where to begin.

    Ok, the war on trade workers started with Reagan who did everything in his power to break organized labor. Yes, there was a push toward degrees – but that always been there. No nation has ever regretted having a more educated workforce – ever. What changed was parents reading the tea leaves of the future and recognizing that the career pathways that they recognized was being undermined by two forces:

    1. Right to work legislation, which was illegal before 1947. 10 states added it since 1970. Only New Hampshire has reversed their right to work law.
    2. Automation of many industries which really started to ramp up in the 80s.

    My grandmother was a clerk for an insurance company, her job is now affectionately known as cell 23H on an Excel spreadsheet somewhere.

    So, one was a political act to block workers from undermining our precious bodily profits. And the other contributed to the problem by leaving people unclear on what were safe and unsafe careers for their kids to move into. Even in central Pennsylvania at the time I graduated college, the kids who went to trade schools were looked down on – mid 80s.

    One, all faith that trades could be a good career were in tatters. We’ve always had both utopian ideas about pushing a button on your car and having it fold up into a briefcase, and aspirations to unload  the least desirable jobs to other methods. The old adage ‘the world will always need ditchdiggers’ is a bit antiquated given that almost nobody digs ditches by hand any more. That’s what heavy machine operators do now. They’re pretty decent jobs all things considered, unlike ditchdigger.

    So if you aspire to improve working conditions (something liberals generally champion) and you have this innate sense that technology will advance and help obsolete certain jobs – at an accelerating rate, no less – how do you advise your kids? Well, you steer them into that larger category of people that will be part of that world, that have a set of skills that are difficult to obsolete. That’s what college degrees generally sell. And some are also trades – like nursing. And if you don’t go the college route, services are generally more durable industries than manufacturing which is particularly susceptible to disruption.

    And generally this is good – I for one am thankful I don’t have to live as a subsistence farmer as my relatives 3-4 generations ago did. The downside is that in the face of these kinds of occupational and economic changes, people need guidance. They need assurance that certain careers have longevity, and one way the government has done this in the past is by investing and promoting them. The country needs plumbers, or is facing a replacement problem – you invest in schools that train in that industry, you fund students to pursue that career, and so on. We used to do this all the time – until Reagan.

    Coincident with this is who does the work. Historically, these have been an immigrant path. Sandhogs in NYC, railroad workers, etc. Part of that aspiration function is that my grandparents dug ditches after getting off the boat, but I get to go to college and be an accountant. And so much of this is also driven by local views on immigrants and labor.

    Why is the US south so terrible at agriculture?  Because the US south was so invested in that work being done by slaves, and then by people they wanted to treat as slaves, that they completely gutted their own economy, their own knowledge and skill base, and they’ve never tried to fix that. Farmwork was slavework, so how can I send my kid out to do farmwork?  CA is decades ahead of the rest of the nation on agriculture. Yeah, we don’t really do the million dollar John Deere tractor thing out here, but we don’t grow crops that are easily automated. One guy can plant and harvest a thousand acres of corn or wheat or cotton, and that’s what the midwest and south do. But grapes? You gotta do that by hand. 2 workers per acre on average. All of CAs agriculture is labor based, which is why ⅓ to ½ of all farmworkers in the US are in CA, and virtually all are immigrants and most are undocumented. We literally could not sustain the majority of US agriculture without immigrants who know how to prune fruit and nut trees, and a zillion other important skills. But this is wrapped up in a bit of a catch-22. What happens if the immigrants stop wanting  to come?  How do we elevate that work to a status where kids will aspire to do it? Picking strawberries in Fresno when it’s 117 out is no fucking joke.  They tried it 1965 – getting high school students to replace farm workers after the US/Mexico labor system was taken down. It didn’t go well. That was 55 years ago, not the mid-90s.

    At the same time, CA build out the other side of this. We have one of the largest concentrations of engineers as part of the workforce. CA is the largest manufacturing state in the US. Los Angeles is the largest manufacturing hub in the US. But we tend toward emerging manufacturing areas. We’ve always had aerospace, but Tesla is here and BYD set up an electric bus factory here, there’s a lot of greentech, biomedical industry, etc. CA is mostly in the business of using our higher education focus to build R&D industries that are designed to eat Ohio’s jobs. We relocated Detroit here. Not so much the building of the cars, but the designing and R&D of them. And we’re going after WV and Oklahoma and Texas jobs in energy, and on and on.

    We have 2.5 million students in our community college system, and not that many of them are on a path to a 4 year degree. Most are in certificate programs and 2 year degrees, learning to be HVAC technicians, welding techs, and so on. We hire the local community colleges to train our 4 year engineering students how to operate CNC mills and such. But here in CA, the trades are almost exclusively latino. Our house painter is great, but he immigrated from South Korea. He came to America knowing no english and proceeded to learn Spanish, because he needed to be able to talk to his crew. The boss of the crew speaks English, so he translates – we tell the crew boss, he translates it Spanish so the Korean owner knows what we want.

    Here’s the bottom line. In all of these fields domain expertise is king. It doesn’t matter if you’re a farmworker in CA or a plumber or a rocket engineer. The ability to displace your labor is a function of the ability of folks up the foodchain to apply your domain expertise to a more efficient process. The person who invents a machine to pick strawberries will be someone who knows how the fuck to pick strawberries. Our advice to students is to be that person – to have the domain expertise and marry it  up to a slate of skills that allows you to do something in that space. And our advice to leaders is to support this interaction rather than drive it apart.

    I disagree with Franks conclusion. I think there’s a lot more expertise in this country than he gives us credit for. Are we losing the ability to maintain diesel engines?  Sure, but we won’t end up sitting on our thumbs staring at a busted engine in despair – we’ll just replace them all with electric. That’s how we’ve always done this. If we run low on people to frame houses, we’ll stop framing houses and start prefabricating them, or 3D printing them, or something.

    For every lost fossil fuel job we created at least 2 renewable energy  jobs, and for every lost dishwasher assembly job we created two iPhone design engineer or software developer jobs. The thing I think the US gets wrong isn’t that we fail to ‘know how to do things’, I think what we get wrong is that we didn’t learn how to solve the problem when containerization came to the west coast ports. Thousands of not-great, backbreaking longshoreman jobs were about to be wiped out, and the union fought hard. They asked a fair simply question – if containerization is so great, why don’t you just buy out these guys careers? Just retire them at full pension regardless of how old they are. And you know what happened? They did. The port industry got disrupted and nobody lost. Democrats need to make that the default. WV coal miners? We’ll just buy you out. Fuck turning you into coders, just buy them out. There’s only 50K of them. Tell the renewable industry they’re going to be buying out these jobs. Solar is already half the price of operating coal, so they have plenty of room on their P&L for buying these folks out. It’s fucking cheap. And those workers will be pretty thrilled.

    And if that’s the standard, then sure, go ahead and learn to be a truck driver because if autonomous trucking is the future, they’ll just buy you out as well. Right now it looks like a career dead-end, but it need not. We can change that, and it basically won’t cost a penny, just some new policies and regulatory efforts.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 10:46 pm

    It’s hard to shock me these days but I am shocked that the entire state of Tennessee is now going anti-vacc, as state policy.

    Good Lord. Devastating childhood infectious diseases, here we come. The nutters are now going to politicize all vaccines. They’ll kill any of you for Donald Trump. We already know they’ll die for him.

  83. 83.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 10:47 pm

    @Hildebrand:

    The classes for training always fill (biggest hang-up is the drug test – though with pot being legalized that is definitely becoming less of an issue). 

    This is actually a huge problem. If you want to work construction, most contractors’ insurance policies require drug testing, because of the risk of injury if someone is impaired. Even in states where pot is legal. It is washing a lot of people out.

  84. 84.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 10:47 pm

    @Kay:

    They have to invest something.

    Money is their one and only desire. Spending it when the state should do that, even though they also don’t want to pay a damn nickel in taxes because the government wastes all of it is really the reason they refuse to understand the concepts of labor, besides that they have never done ten minutes of actual physical labor so they have no real concept of what it is or how it feels or what it takes to learn to weld or whatever. They went to a private school, college, they likely have only broken a sweat when it was over 90 deg and daddy had taken away their car keys because all they did was party and fail in school. (Yes I am being slightly facetious. But only slightly.)

  85. 85.

    Rusty

    July 13, 2021 at 10:52 pm

    I would recommend reading Shop Class as Soulcraft for a good discussion on this topic.  The author makes a good argument that high quality tradecraft is actually more intellectually demanding than a lot of white collar work.  The downside of being a plumber is that its hard on the body.  A lot of this work gets difficult to do when in the 50’s and 60’s.  It’s a reason to not raise the social security age, bodies wear out.

  86. 86.

    Martin

    July 13, 2021 at 10:55 pm

    @Kay: Here in CA JATC are affiliated with the community colleges (CCC). You earn a certificate from the local CCC when you complete the program, and the CCCs provide instructors, equipment, classroom space, etc.

  87. 87.

    mvr

    July 13, 2021 at 10:57 pm

    @tom: ​
     Torch Lake was where we went on vacation in the 70s. Beautiful lake! Read something about toxic waste in the 90s, but you could always see down to a great depth when we went there. Would enjoy going back and finding out what that was all about. Not that this has anything much to do with plumbing. (Though may dad did replumb the bathroom of the place we rented one year.)

  88. 88.

    Geminid

    July 13, 2021 at 11:01 pm

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: In central Virginia, immigrants have been a key part of the construction industry since at least the 1990s. Now it seems like most blockmasons, stucco plasterers, and framers are Latino, especially on the light commercial buildings that are popping up around Charlottesville like mushrooms.

    I worked for a masonry contractor from 2002 until the bottom dropped out in 2008. I was one of a few Anglos on payroll; probably 90% of the stone and stucco work was done by Mexican crews or a Bolivian crew. They were all good, but the Bolivians were awesome craftsmen, and it was a joy to work alongside them on big projects. They grew up speaking Quechuan, and Spanish was a second language. Their boss had legal residency but I think most others were smuggled in. I was told the cost was $12,000 each. Those were boom times in the DC region where they were based, so a new guy could make that money back in a few months of 60 hour weeks. I think brothers or uncles already working over here would put the money up.

    A lot of these guys just want to bank money to take home. But some are staying. The first wave of Latin immigrants started coming here in the 1960s, to work in the orchards. These benefited from the amnesty under Reagan, and their kids are moving into the middle class.

    I don’t see a lot of resentment towards these immigrants on the part of the native born. There probably are people who don’t like them, but right now the area is prospering and there is enough money to go around. Business owners love them, and these seem ready to back comprehensive immigration reform legislation that I think Congress will be considering later this year.

  89. 89.

    Kent

    July 13, 2021 at 11:02 pm

    My brother has been a self-employed tile and stone contractor his whole life.  He does expensive fancy kitchen and bath remodels mostly, fancy countertops, baths, backsplashes, and floors.  He loved the work in his 30s and 40s but now in his 50s he is getting worn out.  Doesn’t have much saved.  Doesn’t really know where to go from here.  He will likely be living on social security and small IRA savings and will likely end up taking social security at an earlier age, therefore permanently locking in lower benefits.

    Social security is utterly unfair to trade workers like my brother due to the way that it calculates retirement age.  Take the two of us for example.

    MY BROTHER:  Started working full time at age 18 and now is closing in on 40 straight years of full-time employment which he will reach at age 58.    He will have to work another 5 years to reach minimum retirement age, and if he wants to get maximum retirement benefits he needs to work until age 72 which would amount to a 54-year working life.

    MYSELF:  Went to college, joined the Peace Corps, messed around with itinerant jobs in Alaska, went back to graduate school, and didn’t really land my first full-time career job until age 31.  At the minimum retirement age of 62 I will have worked 31 years to his 45.

    Is it fair that we both have the same retirement age under social security when he has worked so many more years already?

  90. 90.

    mvr

    July 13, 2021 at 11:04 pm

    @Roger Moore: ​

    There’s no reason someone who went to college can’t change careers and become a plumber or electrician.

    This is true. I’m a humanities prof. But I have plumbed my own house and wired most of it as well as passed the relevant inspections. (Built my kitchen, rebuilt/restored and tiled my 100 yr old bathroom, and built a small cabin in the woods too.) The harder bit is working fast enough to make any money at it. The business angle is what most academics would hate. But our administrators in academia are going to make us hate that on our day jobs too if they have their way.​

  91. 91.

    Kay

    July 13, 2021 at 11:07 pm

    @Martin:

    They do that here too. My son went thru a JATC. About half make it through the five year apprenticeship, which sounds about right as far as attrition. Five years is a long stretch and the first two years are miserable. He had a young woman who has a mechanical engineering degree in his “class”. She completed and is a journeyman. She complained that they kept trying to push her into “safety”- the person on the job site who does all the electrical safety checks to comply with regulations. We were laughing because she told me (sarcastically) it’s the “reading job”. Of course they would give that to the woman :)

  92. 92.

    mvr

    July 13, 2021 at 11:07 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est: ​
      Yeah well, though some of the undergrads do so you have to pay attention to what they take from that utter crap.

  93. 93.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 11:08 pm

    @Kent: 

    Is it fair that we both have the same retirement age under social security when he has worked so many more years already?

    Yes. It’s not a reward for work. It’s a safety net for the latter part of your life. This line of thinking is behind SAH parents not getting any of that time counting toward their income, and it’s bullshit.

  94. 94.

    Another Scott

    July 13, 2021 at 11:09 pm

    @Kent: No, it’s not fair.

    My dad started working at 8 years old as a pin-setter in a bowling alley.  He retired at 58 or so from his Lockheed engineering job (took a buyout).  “Only 58!”  Yeah, but working most of 50 years… – probably 10-15 years more than me (when my time comes).

    Times and societies change.  We’re a hugely rich country, too many people need to quit working while they’re able to move on their own, and not keep working until they fall over.  We can afford it; and it would make things better for younger people (giving them more opportunity for advancement, actual good-paying jobs (instead of internships/post-docs/adjuncts/etc.).

    Make it so!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  95. 95.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 11:10 pm

    @Kay: The safety person is also often resented or even hated on a job site. Toxic masculinity. Not surprising that they are pushing a woman toward it.

  96. 96.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 11:10 pm

    @Martin:

    Nice rant!

    I think that a lot of the problem is one I just mentioned. A lot of the late entry money people have no idea how to do much more than count their money and they really, really, really know how to count the outgo of their money. We’ve replaced reasonably wealthy with insanely wealthy as a goal, and the only way to actually do that is to fuck over a lot of people, job wise. What is made in this country? Consumer hard goods? Not much of it. What about the people that used to do that? “Retrain them? With MY MONEY! Hell no, let the government do that, with the taxes I don’t pay.”

  97. 97.

    Another Scott

    July 13, 2021 at 11:13 pm

    @Suzanne: Hmm… SSA.gov:

    The Social Security Act established two types of provisions for old-age security: (1) Federal aid to the States to enable them to provide cash pensions to their needy aged, and (2) a system of Federal old-age benefits for retired workers. The first measure was designed to provide immediate assistance to destitute aged individuals. The second was a preventive measure intended to reduce the extent of future dependency among the aged and to assure workers that their years of employment entitled them to a life income.

    Making people work in pain to an arbitrary age is counter-productive, IMHO. It drives up costs later.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  98. 98.

    Suzanne

    July 13, 2021 at 11:18 pm

    @Another Scott: I don’t think people should have to work at all to qualify for Social Security. It shouldn’t be about your years of employment or how much you made.

  99. 99.

    Kayla Rudbek

    July 13, 2021 at 11:28 pm

    @NotMax: the plumbers here in Northern Virginia can change more per hour than most attorneys

  100. 100.

    Ruckus

    July 13, 2021 at 11:28 pm

    @Kent:

    You just summarized my life. Physical work for 60 yrs, a craftsman for 49 of those. OK 49 yrs including about 7-8 yrs of hands on learning. Forty nine years of that 60 yrs was making things out of metal. It takes a toll.

  101. 101.

    Lyrebird

    July 13, 2021 at 11:31 pm

    @phdesmond: lovely haiku, thanks!

     

    Been thinking of those brave folks.  Recently some racist creep went to Austin for some reason, ate out at a fancy restaurant, and tweeted out his contempt for the fancy food.  (Link goes to Jesse Singal’s retweet, includes sexist and I think racist bs in it.)

    I wondered about responding to that creep, but why give him more clicks?  Wish we could send some meal certificates to the TX delegation.  I bet the BJ commenter crowd could recommend quite a few good restaurants in DC.  Most of the ones I know are over in VA, Arlington etc.  The Ethiopian place we liked most, Meskerem, is long gone, but no doubt Adams Morgan has lots of other tasty options.

  102. 102.

    Kent

    July 13, 2021 at 11:32 pm

    @Citizen Alan:@Starfish: Education is important to some people. My fear is that twenty-five years from now, a third of all white teens will be functionally illiterate b/c their parents pulled them out of school and homeschooled them to protect them from “critical race theory” and transgender kids in the bathrooms.

    Teacher here.  A few years back I had two students, both raised by single moms who both worked in the same strip mall.  Both girls were roughly equal in academic ability.  One mom busted her butt in the nail salon to make enough money to send her daughter to SAT prep classes so she could get into Stanford and eventually become a surgeon.  The other mom told me during open house that she just wanted to get her daughter through HS without getting pregnant or on drugs because she had a chair waiting for her at the hair salon.

    You have one guess as to which mom was white and which was Asian.  Oh, and her daughter didn’t get into Stanford but she did get into UW which is a pretty damn good school.  I don’t know what happened to the other girl.

    We have an immense bigotry of low expectations within the rural working class white community in this country.

  103. 103.

    Another Scott

    July 13, 2021 at 11:33 pm

    @Suzanne: Ah, sorry I misread you.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  104. 104.

    Anne Laurie

    July 13, 2021 at 11:35 pm

    @Narya: but bro is as good as he is in part because he’s also a “backyard” mechanic— first car was a 69 Camaro he rebuilt.

    ‘Shadetree mechanic’ — someone working under the big tree in the yard — was the term we grew up using.

    Spousal Unit has never had trouble finding a job as a tech writer because he’s also, he says, a ‘pretty good shadetree programmer’.   Those of our (late boomer) generation get the reference;, the Youngs, not so much.

  105. 105.

    Anne Laurie

    July 13, 2021 at 11:41 pm

    @sab: Now with solid experience he could go elsewhere easily, but that initial con-compete issue is a real problem in entry level positions.

    Chopping down those non-compete ’21st century tenant farmer’ clauses is one of the Biden admin’s big initiatives!

    Getting the Media Pundits to talk about it is a real problem — these proud ‘contractors’ think they can always pack up for another outlet, or else move to Substack.  (They’re frequently wrong about their personal portability, but that’s a whole different argument… )

  106. 106.

    Kent

    July 13, 2021 at 11:44 pm

    @Suzanne:Yes. It’s not a reward for work. It’s a safety net for the latter part of your life. This line of thinking is behind SAH parents not getting any of that time counting toward their income, and it’s bullshit.

    Except that it is.  The SAH parents will earn SS benefits based on their spouses earnings.  It may not be a fair system, but it is calculated by how many years you have worked and what your earnings were.

    We could design a different retirement pension system that would be a uniform basic income for retirees not based on work history.  But that is not the system we now have.  The system we now have is biased against blue collar workers who start their careers earlier in life than white collar workers who spend a lot more time messing around and getting education and then work in careers that are less brutal on the body.

  107. 107.

    Mary G

    July 14, 2021 at 12:15 am

    Prolly speaking to a dead thread, but here is my experience from today. The vanity I bought from the building surplus warehouse has very thick drawer fronts, so the screws included with the handles weren’t long enough. I researched and found the right type and length but was unsure of the thickness. I guessed #6 which turns out to be too thin. I told the guy doing the finish details I would order and pay for #8 screws and he could pick them up at Lowes. He literally would not listen to me. I got “the ones you bought were wrong” and a retreat into not speaking English very well. I had to text his manager who texted him. He trotted off to Lowe’s and bought them. The handles are all attached now.

  108. 108.

    Martin

    July 14, 2021 at 12:20 am

    @Ruckus: Yeah, I mean, where to start on that problem. The US is great at protecting capital, and terrible at putting it to work, in part because we turned everything over to finance, and their skill set is in doing just that.

    The core question of socialism vs capitalism is who should get the excess capital. There’s trillions of dollars sloshing around in negative yield bonds – money doing negative work. Seize it. Tax it. Put it to work. Tax value-add vs labor because labor is no longer a necessary and relatively fixed fraction of output. The injector for the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V took over a year to make, by a bunch of guys like you. I’m sure there was a non-trivial investment in tooling for that, but you make sure you pay the guy pretty well to not fuck it up by a mistake in month 11. Today, it’s probably more money in tooling, but maybe a days worth of CNC work, or even more in tooling and laser metal sintering machine running unattended overnight. We’re taxing the wrong stuff. Tax output, and then if automation comes along and wipes out demand, just use the tax receipts from the higher output to UBI the workforce, or just buy them out.

    In the end, the manufacturer is already benefitting from moving  from marginal to fixed costs, and in the massive increase in throughput or time to market. They’re going to do this even if you change the taxation – just as the ports did with containerization.

    But ultimately, slow down the rate of capital accrual at the top, and put that money back into the affected workforce. I mean, fucking automate all of the Amazon distribution centers already and just UBI the workforce. As it is, Amazon is burning through the workforce so quickly they won’t have anyone to hire in a decade  that they haven’t already employed.

  109. 109.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2021 at 12:52 am

    @Martin:

    Once everyone has worked for them and told them to fuck off because it just isn’t worth it, who will buy anything from him? I buy from Amazon only when the cost is so much less than a local store that I’d be an idiot to buy local. And when i can get free shipping. (I’ve entered that period of American life where I have to count every fucking dollar. It’s not the first time I’ve been here, just the one I’ll be in the rest of my days. I’m not skint, just not raking in the extra bucks any longer.) I see the recently wealthy, especially those my age and older without parents to guide and smack them over the head and shut off the money flow when they act like SFB, as the ones who will never give a fuck, because they’ve never known what my parents did, and even their rich parents did, the rich will fuck up the economy so badly at some point, in trying to have not only their share but everyone’s share they can steal/manipulate/hide and it will back fire on them, taking everyone with them when it goes tits up. Those really old people are mostly gone now and history has a way of repeating itself, and mostly for the same reasons, greed and ignorance. It can be avoided but that takes effort and a working government, something that conservatives really, really don’t want, because they can’t get their racism and financial ignorance on.

  110. 110.

    The Pale Scot

    July 14, 2021 at 12:56 am

    @Soprano2:

    You should see some of the guys I work with – some of them are old before their time, or almost disabled.

    Exactly, almost all the electricians I know have back problems, 2 have morphine pumps. Framers, who aren’t union even in the N.E., don’t last past 45, especially if vertigo shows up, no more ladders.

     

    Now that the boomers are gone, along with their very successful efforts to kill shop classes keep property classes low have allowed generations of youts to never hold a power tool. This isn’t something you start at 18. Especially now that cars are all circuit boards now, there is nothing for someone who’s mechanically inclined t to get their feet wet working on growing up. Anyone remember what a timing gun is? Do younger people do their own lawnmower repairs or redo grout in the tub

    Newbies can be trained from scratch, but if they have never taken anything apart to try to fix it in their entire life, there’s no sorting process.

     

    I had a neighbor who taught a the local CC, ND masters grad. Knocked on my door one night because he had a flat and no idea how to fix it, 25 tear old guy.

    The military is concerned that Americans are so out of shape that they could never be called up. John Candy’s  8 week program won’t work because sedentary teens have tissue paper tendons, muscle mass is easy to build, tendons and ligaments need exercise while growing to be functional.

  111. 111.

    The Pale Scot

    July 14, 2021 at 1:03 am

    @Suzanne:

    Very economically cyclical.

    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  112. 112.

    jonas

    July 14, 2021 at 1:26 am

    I think with the great hollowing out of American manufacturing in the 90s and early 2000’s (and before that, the gutting of unions), we lost a lot of what I would call, for lack of a better term, a generation of blue collar social capital, that is, communities of visible mentors and other professionals who could talk to young people about going into the skilled trades and show how it could be a good career. Instead, everybody saw how blue collar careers and factory work only ended in unemployment, depair, and opioid addiction. Who would want to do that?

  113. 113.

    Ruckus

    July 14, 2021 at 4:46 am

    @jonas:

    It doesn’t always end that way. It can for sure and maybe I’m a bit jaded as I live in LA county, which I just linked to the Wiki page, but a reasonably run county, or any reasonably run state, life may or may not be as good as it can be but it is not nowhere county. There are lots of jobs, my boss says I can come back any time I want, even for one day a week. The concept that we are all fucked is a bit over blown, even if many are, because they seem to want a life that is stupid and illogical.

  114. 114.

    Chris Johnson

    July 14, 2021 at 6:24 am

    @Ruckus: I’m suspicious of anybody pushing the argument that we’re all fucked, knowing that there’s a global troll war on in which one of the avenues of attack is to persuade the enemy that they’re all fucked.

    I loved Martin’s suggestion of buying out the 50k coal guys and retiring that industry. Big difference between that and, say, drywallers or plumbers. This is a very interesting topic.

    I’m estranged from a couple family members now, which which communications have become a total loss. One’s a corporate programmer, and one is a web developer. The brother in law that I have no trouble getting along with is an HVAC guy.

  115. 115.

    OzarkHillbilly

    July 14, 2021 at 7:46 am

    Promote unions.

  116. 116.

    evodevo

    July 14, 2021 at 8:01 am

    @Soprano2: ​
      Yes..and we need a public system that is geared for this…most of the people I know in the building trades, farming or on-the-floor factory work are physically in constant pain from joint problems by the time they are 45-50 (and that includes most of my rural mail carrier co-workers, all of whom are either on painkillers or have had multiple operations on various joints, or both). The human body is not designed for constant unrelenting physical labor for 40 years – it just wears out and there is no remedy. No way the average person can do that kind of stuff long enough to retire at 65, much less at the ages they are raising SS to nowadays…

  117. 117.

    evodevo

    July 14, 2021 at 8:03 am

    @Hoppie: ​
      All I know is, carrying mail paid a LOT better than teaching, and I was a part-timer…

  118. 118.

    evodevo

    July 14, 2021 at 8:30 am

    @Anne Laurie: ​
      Yep – here in KY you wanted an oak tree, because you would use one of the more horizontal branches as an anchor for your chain hoist to pull engines, etc. LOL

  119. 119.

    J R in WV

    July 14, 2021 at 9:57 am

    @Roger Moore:

    There was a woman at my work who started as a postdoc but decided she enjoyed doing stuff with her hands and transferred to our facilities department. She was great at it, since it was helpful for someone in facilities to be able to talk to the scientists at their level.

    Unfortunately, our facilities department was too much of a boys club, and they pushed her out.

    She should be independently wealthy based upon the fines and payments from “they” who pushed her out.

    It is immoral and illegal for the “old white boys” network to push out a competent woman, and they should pay the price personally, as well as the U staff that allowed that to happen on their management watch.

    Despicable!!

    And your optimistic beginning appears to be so misleading. You did not see a successful move from academia, you witnessed an attempted move that failed completely. I have no doubt that the  woman you discuss is suffering from PTSD from her “failure” — which was actually a hostile attack. Grrr.

  120. 120.

    Miss Bianca

    July 14, 2021 at 10:05 am

    @Kay: Meantime, however, Tennessee public schools still require a whole slew of vaccinations. Or maybe they won’t after the Sooper Jeniuses of the Legislature figure that inconvenient fact out.

  121. 121.

    J R in WV

    July 14, 2021 at 10:34 am

    @Martin:

    The old adage ‘the world will always need ditchdiggers’ is a bit antiquated given that almost nobody digs ditches by hand any more. That’s what heavy machine operators do now.

    Actually, I bought a backhoe as my retirement present, and was a little surprised to learn that to actually do real work, I needed another guy with a shovel, as there are things the hoe can’t do. The detail ditching around that pesky gas line, around the water meter, etc, etc.

    All excavation equipment comes with shovels somewhere on the rig, on the trailer, in the truck…

  122. 122.

    Barry

    July 15, 2021 at 8:43 am

    @Frank Wilhoit: “The part of the economy that trickles down from Defense procurement will survive the longest, but they will have to educate their intakes from scratch.”

     

    i weep for employers actually having to train people.

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