51–60 of 251 posts
I'm a little surprised it cites carpenters make more than real estate agents. I'd assume a full time agent (not your neighbor who just happened to have a license) could make more than 50k a year. If I recall, average home price now sells at 300k. A realtor keeping 2% after fees...buy/sell 10 houses and that's 60k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. to pay ppl enough $ to entice them to do carpentry is not profitable, hence so few of them. I remember climbing a 4,000 ft mountain in a day in the hot sun..you could not pay me enough $ to ever want to do that again, and even if you could, it would never be profitable. That's why things are airlifted.
> they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".
there is a market for hand-made furniture but Ikea stuff dominates.
If software engineering and carpentry paid the same, I'd be a carpenter.
Even after getting into the IT field, I tried to learn carpentry. I went to local shops that had the tools. No one was receptive to me for some reason. They were either closed during the times I could go after work, or defunct, or only wanted people who already knew carpentry (WTF).
Anyway, I entered software development because it was the only field that would hire me entry level. Aaaaaandd the only field I could actually self-teach. I am grateful for that fact...that you can teach yourself through books (back then no StackOverflow haha) nor Youtube, nor Udemy, etc. Just plain push yourself through the text books available. I spent a LOT of time at Borders books and Barnes and Noble, trying to figure things out.
You can't really do that with carpentry. Maybe you can self-teach auto repair. But as a woman, not even my family members would spend time to teach me (I had a cousin that was embarrassed to have me help out at his auto shop).
I got away with self-teaching IT as a black woman because it is not nearly as sexist or racist as other fields, with Indian and other immigrants showing the way to enlightenment to a great degree (in my personal experience).
My parents met when they were both working construction. My mom was a surveyor and a laborer at various times; she helped get my dad into the union (Philly) and he was a carpenter. My mom stopped it to raise me and my sibling; my dad did it until it entirely broke his body. (I would not be writing this as a college-educated adult if he hadn't had a union pension that kicked in on disability.) I know precisely one per…
Here in Germany about 50% of high school graduates go into a traditional vocational program, many of which are crafts. Electrical work, the car industry, machinery, carpentry, woodwork and so forth. My family (with me being the first exception) is all blue collar and I understand that construction is uniquely taxing physically but from my parents and people younger I've never heard horror stories about lost fingers o…
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.t05.htm
Even on following-the-rules job sites, "safely" is always kind of relative; when lifting and carrying and repetitive motion can be the causes of disabling injuries, it gets really hard to define bright lines with which you can protect yourself over decades. To some extent, taking time and being careful are the guards you have, but ... any American workplace knows that having your employees exercise wide individual discretion to set an appropriate pace -- well, that doesn't sound like Maximizing Efficiency, does it? (Sorry, I did try to tone down the bitterness here.)
Actually, there's a specific gauge on that I'd be curious to compare against, even anecdotally, for how things differ there: how common are people getting hernias at work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. to pay ppl enough $ to entice them to do carpentry is not profitable, hence so few of them. I remember climbing a 4,000 ft mountain in a day in the hot sun..you could not pay me enough $ to ever want to do that again, and even if you could, it would never be profitable. That's why things are airlifted.
> they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".
The last 50 years of American prosperity was built primarily on the exploitation of labor as unions declined and Capital starting consuming an outsized amount of Labor’s productivity (with a fair amount of help from globalization efforts). Until the scales tip (and there are signs we’re headed there) and labor has more power with stronger unions, people should not expect workers to take garbage jobs (even in trades w…
What would carpentry work have to pay before the demand is satisfied? It is my view that many people don't want to do trades at any reasonable rate. I would imagine most people my age would rather make $60k a year answering emails and doing zoom meetings than $120k going to a jobsite early every morning in any weather all year long.
Maybe the $60k to do zoom is too much, and the $120k to work in the early morning in the cold and rain should be $200k.
I guess we will find out soon enough.
My parents met when they were both working construction. My mom was a surveyor and a laborer at various times; she helped get my dad into the union (Philly) and he was a carpenter. My mom stopped it to raise me and my sibling; my dad did it until it entirely broke his body. (I would not be writing this as a college-educated adult if he hadn't had a union pension that kicked in on disability.) I know precisely one per…
When people come to work on my house, I've noticed that everybody who is around my age (58) is hobbling and broken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. to pay ppl enough $ to entice them to do carpentry is not profitable, hence so few of them. I remember climbing a 4,000 ft mountain in a day in the hot sun..you could not pay me enough $ to ever want to do that again, and even if you could, it would never be profitable. That's why things are airlifted.
> they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or US government can start to issue large number of temporary "fruit picker" visas.
New Zealand does exactly this, and I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, it seems easy to say that if you don’t have enough workers, you’ve got to raise your price - it’s a free market, right? Except it’s not. NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP) and this means that being un- or under-employed is a viable option. On the other hand, the jobs also bring in a lot of money for the isl…
It helps local labor sellers to be in higher demand and hence negotiate higher prices who may have taken the option to pick fruit and vegetables.
If software engineering and carpentry paid the same, I'd be a carpenter.
Maybe go work for Etsy? Dogfood your own product.