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The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

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Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#291

Post by nemo44x »

WalterBright wrote: post #266
vanderZwan wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company sending you a high bill doesn't automatically mean the guy who fixed your house gets paid well though, does it?

They were one man shops. 20 years ago, the going rate for installing a socket in an existing wired and ready to go junction box was $50. It's about a 5 minute job. I know it's about 5 minutes because I've done a lot of them myself. I'm sure prices have gone up a lot in the last couple decades.

You're going to pay for a couple of hours no matter what. He isn't just getting salary either. There's employment taxes that need to be paid, tools and transportation costs, insurance, benefits, etc.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#292

Post by WalterBright »

ehmish wrote: post #286
WalterBright wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how your body parts wear out. Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out. Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that. How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?

I've got a friend who went into the trades instead of going to university, he (correctly) recognised that what he was passionate about wouldn't even pay for the degree (composing music) so he figured he'd do it on the side and do a trade to earn a living. Unfortunately due to a workplace accident he cut the tendons in his wrist with a box cutter, which means he can't now play the piano for any reasonable amount of ti…

I'd buy the cumulative injury theme, but not the exercise part.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#293

Post by falcolas »

WalterBright wrote: post #260
falcolas wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It isn't a bad career But there is a finite end to the career - when your body gives out. That's the biggest problem with the trades, you're selling your health and body. And eventually the body parts will wear out, on a schedule decided as much by genetics as how you live.

I'm not sure how your body parts wear out. Football players ruin their bodies through accumulated injuries, not wearing their bodies out. Do athletes wear their bodies out? I've never heard of that. How does doing plumbing/electricioning wear your body out?

Ask a construction worker in their 50's how their body feels.

Respectfully, pedantically limiting the phrase "wearing out" to some subset of conditions that conveniently excludes accumulated injuries, the deterioration of cartilage, and other load/repetition-induced joint debilitation adds nothing to this conversation.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#294

Post by ryandrake »

nostrademons wrote: post #153
Ekaros wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if they were, who could afford to pay them that? Other tradespeople? Ultra-rich?

That part is relatively easy to answer. When there are only enough tradespeople to maintain 10% of homes, the top 10% of income earners will get their services, and the top 10% will spend a majority of their wealth on home maintenance. It's already happening in areas with a lot of rich people and few tradespeople - it costs me $1000 to run a camera down my sewer line, $4K to roto-root it, about $20-30K to fix a colla…

Most of the trades companies around me won't even pick up the phone for a job less than $10K. And even then, they're booked out months in advance. These companies are making a fortune. Not sure how much of it trickles down to tradespeople wages, but from reading other threads on this article, it doesn't look like those guys don't get paid a lot, as a percentage of what's billed to the customer.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#295

Post by WalterBright »

jjulius wrote: post #284
WalterBright wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't be worse than yoga. Edit: Downvote me all you like. I've done yoga, I've done plumbing, I've done electrical. Yoga takes the cake by a mile for most painful contorting. And yet I know an 86 yo woman who has been doing yoga 3 time a week forever and is fit and sharp.

Huh? Yoga poses are purposeful, they're supposed to be beneficial. Contorting your body all sorts of odd ways while performing a trade is an entirely separate thing from a yoga pose.

Have you ever tried yoga? You might change your mind if you had. It's not a joke.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#296

Post by [deleted] »

welshwelsh wrote: post #233
joecot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…

>since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job This makes it sound like a degree is worth less today than it was in the past, which is not true. The income and wealth gap between college degree holders and non-degree holders is higher than at any point in history, and it grows bigger very year. Most degrees have an unemployment rate of about 5-6%.…

[deleted]

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#297

Post by colechristensen »

eddsh1994 wrote: post #48
UncleMeat wrote: post #33

"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article. My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworke…

This is why Unions exist, no? Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)

The people I’ve known in trade unions locally spent a lot of time not working waiting on the bench for the next job. The work was much closer to being a short term contractor not at all in control of finding new work.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#299

Post by threetonesun »

dionidium wrote: post #174
joecot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…

> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me. Of course I knew that some maj…

As someone who went to school for English in 2000, I can say that while those jokes existed the context here is misunderstood, they were told by business majors about the liberal arts, or anything academic. Heck in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree, and if you looked at the preceding decade you'd see that was statistically true.

The change for the current generation is that for everyone graduating in underwater basketweaving in say 2000, many would find unrelated careers and, because they had a college degree, do fine. With rising college costs and more expectations that workers in high paying fields have specific degrees, that's no longer true.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#300

Post by baremetal »

WalterBright wrote: post #241
UncleMeat wrote: post #33

"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article. My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworke…

Every time I employ a tradesman to fix something around here, I get an astonishingly high bill.

There is an old joke about a doctor who calls a plumber.

He gets the bill and says "That's outrageous, that's more than I make as a doctor".

The plumber replies "Yeah that's more than I made as a doctor too."

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