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Why America has so few carpenters

thehustle.co

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Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#161

Post by nikita2206 »

bluGill wrote: post #156
nicoburns wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they’re both correct. House building standards seem to have been trending downwards for at least 100 years if not more. Some things have gotten better of course (fire safety, insulation, etc), but the construction itself tends to be optimised for cost over quality these days.

Standards have been trending up. Modern houses are much more likely yo survive a hurricane, and have much better insulation. Most people have no idea what makes a house good and so are impressed by things that don't matter. A lot of this is because the important parts are hidden inside the walls where you can't see them.

As other person said it’s a survivor bias as well.

From 100 years ago most of the houses that you see are either stone/brick houses, or timber-framed houses (thick post and beam, not what people in the UK call timber framing today). Those houses are always impressive compared to todays 2”x4” frames

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#162

Post by gumby »

jimnotgym wrote: post #128

I left a job as a carpenter and joiner in 2008 when work dried up. My father stayed at it. I had done some study with the open university and used that to get into office work in Finance. I miss using tools, but I don't miss the way you had to rush to make money. I always did a good job, but it was constant pressure. The article mentions that the longer time on the job reduces what can be paid vs a plumber. This is t…

> The other big change I saw was the nailgun and chopsaw revolution

This.

I hired a union shop to build my house, and am thankful for it. for various reasons, construction is mostly lowest quality possible, but everybody on my house had a ticket and the result is obvious (not just appearance but lower cost of maintenance).

When I worked at Terrajoule we were not a union shop but we often hired union contractors for specific jobs (particular high pressure welds) or temporary extra manpower — after a couple of terrible experiences, it was clear that union people always knew what they were doing.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#163

Post by avidphantasm »

According to this, it seems the skilled trades have a similar problem to medicine, where there is/was apparently a shortage of primary care doctors: people enter specialties that pay more.

The other part of the story I think is that we fetishized the 4-year undergraduate degree and de-emphasized trade schools over the last 30 years. They touch on this in the article:

“And many former paths have closed. In Seattle, Smith notes, 17 public high schools once had wood shop classes, a number that shrunk to 3.”

Curiously enough, this change in policy occurred around the same time a de-industrialization in the US (in the wake of NAFTA, normalizing trade relations with China, etc.).

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#164

Post by mauvehaus »

throwaway742 wrote: post #92
bsder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But no one would allow me (female) to apprentice. Wow. That's really shitty. IBEW (electrical workers union) seemed to be pretty decent about apprenticing in Southern California. My situation was the reverse: I wanted to get some training in electrical code, but didn't want to apprentice. That completely discombobulated everybody at the union--it was like they were seeing a space alien. They had no ability to accom…

Why would they want to train a rat?

I think framing this question as either "in the union" or "a rat" is pretty counterproductive. There are good reasons a person might want to learn something without pursuing it as a career.

I'd feel pretty impoverished if I was only allowed to know the skills required to do my job because learning the skills required to do someone else's job was forbidden by some cloak of secrecy by those who knew the skills.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#165

Post by iandanforth »

gumby wrote: post #162
jimnotgym wrote: post #128

I left a job as a carpenter and joiner in 2008 when work dried up. My father stayed at it. I had done some study with the open university and used that to get into office work in Finance. I miss using tools, but I don't miss the way you had to rush to make money. I always did a good job, but it was constant pressure. The article mentions that the longer time on the job reduces what can be paid vs a plumber. This is t…

> The other big change I saw was the nailgun and chopsaw revolution This. I hired a union shop to build my house, and am thankful for it. for various reasons, construction is mostly lowest quality possible, but everybody on my house had a ticket and the result is obvious (not just appearance but lower cost of maintenance). When I worked at Terrajoule we were not a union shop but we often hired union contractors for s…

"had a ticket" <- I'm not familiar with this phrase. Can you tell us where it comes from?

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#166

Post by kasey_junk »

Gareth321 wrote: post #111
rascul wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hauling materials breaks your body over time. I know from experience.

This is quite interesting to me, because I've been into lifting and body building at times in my life and the research was clear: within limits, this is very good for the human body. So I'm quite confident to say that there's nothing inherently bad about lifting, pushing, twisting, pulling, turning, and holding heavy things. Quite the opposite. So the question then becomes: is this about technique? Are these labourer…

Besides all the other things people are saying about the difference between work and lifting in the gym have you spent much time with older power lifters? Almost uniformly they’ll have joint, neck and back issues.

The human body needs to run in a pretty thin zone of activity. Too little and you get the obesity issue, too much and if breaks. And that band is changing as you age.

If that physical activity is by choice and easily changed you can stay healthy a very long time, but that’s not how it is when it’s your job.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#167

Post by maccard »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #4

If software engineering and carpentry paid the same, I'd be a carpenter.

Having done some light home renovation, I would prefer installing printers over carpentry. And I hate printers.

no, nobody deserves to have to install printers. Thats a human rights violation

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#168

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

webwanderings wrote: post #76

All these professionals from vocational fields are horribly expensive in America. And then there are articles like these claiming they don't make money. BS. America has no public/private vocational school/training culture. People don't even teach each other unless you are born into the family of craftsman.

Which is weird. Germany is full of vocational schools where everyone who wants to, young and old can learn various trades for cheap/free and yet labor is still expensive.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#170

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

brabel wrote: post #108
laingc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sweden also. Berries and mushroom are picked almost exclusively by foreign workers. The government even had to open an exception to COVID restrictions to allow those workers to come in and to their job, as otherwise a whole harvest season could've been lost as there's no way swedes would do the job themselves.

I kind of dislike these industries that depend on imports of cheap labor from poor countries and the governments pandering to them because the locals won't do that kind work, since in that case, the government (read, the taxpayers) is subsidizing unprofitable business that cannot survive in free market conditions by manipulating the labor market in the favor of business owners through the import of cheap labor below local market rates.

This practice should be stopped, or we should reconsider the so called "free market" if the government can manipulate it to bail out the business owning class whenever they're not profitable.

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