Trades pay shit. I have friends that are electricians and they made more a decade ago than the current journeyman rate. Nevermind inflation, we're talking only nominal pay.
My plumber and electrician bill the same rate that I do.
The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
131–140 of 915 posts
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are you finding small wage plumbers or carpenters? All the trades here (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, carpentry (perhaps more on the finish side vs framing though) are extremely expensive, with hourly rates between $80-$150/hour. (source - did a lot of renovations on my house, and my BIL is an electrician).
The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.
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Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Independent plumbers/local plumbing businesses can easily earn $1,000/day with 2-3 service calls. Not sure how universal healthcare, PTO, immigration, and more pay have to do with this. Edit: Thank you for all the downvotes for me calling out the weird correlation between tech benefits/politics and plumber skill-shortage + high-reward wages. Your wokeism will forever benefit society.
The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.
Get a job with the local power company, or one of their contractors. You will have to work in bad weather, after storms, and travel a little bit.
The average salary for a journeyman lineman in Michigan is $161,000 per year
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The median income for a plumber is $50k, only 10% make above $91k. https://insights.workwave.com/industry/plumbing-electrical/p... 6-figure incomes for plumbers are rare.
Where is all the money people paying tradespeople going? If I need any plumbing work done it costs me $200 an hour or more. Even with overhead and expenses, 10 hours a week gets you more than $50k a year. Twenty years ago my grandfather was a marine plumber and made $200k a year. How many apprentices and part-time plumber are in these datasets?
If retail stores are making record breaking profits, why are service workers paid so little? If medical costs are so high, why aren't nurses and nurse aids making more?
It's not rocket science. People aren't getting paid for the value of their labor, and productivity has rocketed up while wages have stagnated for decades. Your plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#135Trades pay shit. I have friends that are electricians and they made more a decade ago than the current journeyman rate. Nevermind inflation, we're talking only nominal pay.
My plumber and electrician bill the same rate that I do.
Yes, the way to make money is to own a business.
Doesn't change the fact that the pay rates haven't changed in 15 years for those who are getting into the career and will have to work for others to learn.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#136Tradespeople will be the new software engineers in the late 2020s through 2030s. Enough that I'm considering leaving my cushy FAANG engineering manager job to become an electrician. On top of the huge supply shortage, consider that the majority of the U.S. housing stock was built during the Baby Boom suburbanization from 1950-1970, and that the average lifespan of a house's internal systems (plumbing, electrical) is…
Nah, tradespeople will be replaced with lego buildings, the same way that furniture makers were replaced with ikea
Will that happen faster than the shift of AI into knowledge work? Because the current trajectory has robots taking our "manipulate bits" jobs far faster than our "move atoms" ones.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is actually one of those predictions that might not turn out the way you think. Economies are all about supply and demand, not how long or complicated the job title is. The government is increasingly ignoring the problem, the higher-education-industrial-complex is grabbing workers that would otherwise go into the trades, mass-importation of unskilled labor is slowing down as it becomes more of a politica…
Economies are about supply and demand. But wages are not directly tied to the demand for the trades. Wages are controlled by the bosses. Even if the price of wiring up a new home goes up, I would not expect the bulk of that increase to be reflected in the wages of the electricians (at least in the US).
Trades are one of those areas (along with software engineering) where it is relatively easy to be your own boss. The market in general is pretty competitive on both the buyer (lots of individual homeowners needing work done) and seller (lots of small independent contractors selling their labor) sides; that should make overall prices & wages reflect industry-wide (or at least local) supply & demand pretty well.
ConstructionPhysics has a pretty good series about why the construction industry never really realized economies of scale the way most other industries do. Even when you have large homebuilders like D.R. Horton, their primary competitive advantage is usually reduced cost of capital, which goes away if capital becomes expensive for everyone.
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-...
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#138Could this be a place where "automation/globalization/whatever" has actually destroyed the jobs? I'm not overfamiliar with a lot of them, but I could see that e.g. being a carpenter or electrician today might be different from in the past owing to "cruft" -- fewer unions, more gatekeeping in the form of regulations and guild type deals, the unreasonable scale of business, more proprietary crap to deal with, etc?
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#139I was working for an aerospace manufacturer for a while. We were getting 40/50 year old apprentices for the trades, guys coming off the production floor.
Electricians, millwrights, CNC machinists... we couldn't find enough of them.
I get it. Nobody wants to stand in front of a machine (or 5-6 machines) for 10 hours a day. Nobody wants to be in a 90 degree factory all day. Nobody wants to work 2nd or 3rd shifts.
The pay isn't incredible. $25-30/hr. You get overtime. You get health insurance. You're a union member. As long as Boeing and Airbus are still flying planes, you'll have a job.
But we just flat out didn't get many applicants. And the people that we'd get, would only work for a couple days, or a couple weeks.
Some people think it's because there's drug testing. Some people say young people "don't want to work". All I know is if I needed a job, I'd apply.
Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z
#140Trades pay shit. I have friends that are electricians and they made more a decade ago than the current journeyman rate. Nevermind inflation, we're talking only nominal pay.
My dad is a licensed electrician and sewage treatment plant operator. I made more money than he did by the age of 19 with a semester of community college under by belt. He owns a 1/4 share in a business and I'm far from working in a FAANG (meaning, he's near the top of his game and I'm close to middle of mine).
In 2009-10, he had no work. I don't think people realize how hard recessions hit trades. You don't become "unemployed." You have to go to work then stand around half the day not getting paid until enough people stop showing up that there's enough work. All of my friends working in trades from when I was younger switched careers in the Great Recession (the military was a decent option, since they'd fast-track skilled people to E-5).
This is the real reason why millennials are under-represented in the trades. The media prefers to just call us lazy.