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The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

theguardian.com

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Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#51

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

coralreef wrote: post #39
beebmam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low. There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.

What about highly specific technical roles for which there are few paths to fulfilling? Wouldn't that qualify as a shortage in labour supply?

Yes, in the short term. That's actually the original goal of the H1B program, to address immediate labor shortages in fields where the time it takes to become fully trained is very long (PhDs and the like.) In the long term the problem solves itself with things like high salaries for statisticians, actuaries, programmers and so on.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#52

Post by microcolonel »

Who cares?

If they don't get enough fellers then they will raise wages and overall comp. until they do. If they have enough, they will lower wages until they don't. It is a functioning labour market, and the degree to which people desire to work for lumber companies is reflected in the wages, and in turn the price of lumber.

If anything, at $18/hr for dangerous hard labour, they obviously have plenty of people who want to be fellers. There's no other way that wage would be so low.

If they have a shortage, lumber simply costs a bit more.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#53

Post by mikestew »

hangonhn wrote: post #38
mikestew wrote: post #24

I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high sch…

Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietn…

The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that.

An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#54

Post by ph0rque »

anotherbrownguy wrote: post #12

Seems like a lot of these workplace injuries can be reduced by making the machines remotely operated. If the workers can be far enough to not be hit by the falling logs or trees, it would be no more dangerous than just another minimum wage job.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luygMuoFnXs Ironic video description, given the original article.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#55

Post by hangonhn »

paultopia wrote: post #46
hangonhn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietn…

Do you think part of the reason the longshore industry managed to keep a really strong union was just the geographic concentration? When you only have a few major container ports, it's gotta be pretty easy to keep union solidarity...

Yes! Actually, a lot of the older port cities were eventually bypassed because of this. For example, SF and NYC are no longer ports for shipping because rather than deal with the unions and their power, new ports such as Oakland and Newark (think that's the city in NJ) with facilities for containers were simply built close by.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#57

Post by notadoc »

beebmam wrote: post #22
Boxbot wrote: post #7

> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour. So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".

This is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low. There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.

The only true 'labor shortage' is when very high skilled positions are not being filled because there is literally nobody qualified to fill them. That is exceptionally rare, it usually only applies to doctors, surgeons, etc.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#58

Post by hangonhn »

mikestew wrote: post #53
hangonhn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietn…

The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy dri…

"but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it."

This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive. Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.

I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#59

Post by maxerickson »

mikestew wrote: post #24

I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high sch…

In a lot of cases machinery means that several low skill jobs get replaced with one medium skill job. This seems likely in hay (where a lot of operations moved to those huge bales).

The article mentions that the cable anchored harvesters/forwarders replace a crew of 8.

Re: The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging

#60

Post by maxerickson »

hkothari wrote: post #28

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention any sort of social stigma against the work (beyond the low pay and danger). Logging is cutting down trees and in a world where we're raised now to conserve our forests I'm not surprised that logging as an occupation is not on the forefront of people's minds. Even if it's done in an environmentally sound way, I'd assume that there's a stigma that would be hard to get past.

Most people don't care that much.

Especially people that aren't confused about where toilet paper comes from.

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