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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

#321

Post by rco8786 »

prottog wrote: post #314
rco8786 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get overtime. I think this comment represents a fundamental disconnect in cultures. The days of people "wanting" overtime are kind of gone. If I saw "overtime pay" on a job description all I am seeing is "work long hours, never see your kids, no time for hobbies, etc". Maybe that translates to me "not wanting to work", but that's the situation.

There's a similar disconnect in expectations of outcomes. The same days when people "wanted" overtime were the days where people expected to get ahead by busting their asses; sure, you could work short hours, play with your kids, have time to develop a hobby, but then you wouldn't become wealthy. That option is still there today, to work only enough to sustain oneself at a lowered standard. But it seems that there is…

> ass-busting outcomes without the busting of the ass.

Perhaps. But one only needs to look up to the original post to see that is not what we're talking about here. Busting of the ass for $25-30/hr plus overtime...not exactly getting wealthy here.

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

#322

Post by SoftTalker »

baremetal wrote: post #308
nullsense wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about the industry, but out of curiosity... what are considered the more interesting jobs?

Industrial.

Yeah, industrial/institutional, high voltage, multi-phase, transformers, utility-level stuff e.g. generation and transmission, etc.

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

#323

Post by jasondigitized »

nullsense wrote: post #220
SoftTalker wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New home/residential wiring jobs are basically the entry point for electricians. It's about as mindless and simple as it gets. I'm not sure what the licensing requirements are but those are the sorts of jobs that an electrical contractor puts their new/junior people on.

I know nothing about the industry, but out of curiosity... what are considered the more interesting jobs?

Higher voltage = Higher wages

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

#324

Post by cwkoss »

prottog wrote: post #314
rco8786 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get overtime. I think this comment represents a fundamental disconnect in cultures. The days of people "wanting" overtime are kind of gone. If I saw "overtime pay" on a job description all I am seeing is "work long hours, never see your kids, no time for hobbies, etc". Maybe that translates to me "not wanting to work", but that's the situation.

There's a similar disconnect in expectations of outcomes. The same days when people "wanted" overtime were the days where people expected to get ahead by busting their asses; sure, you could work short hours, play with your kids, have time to develop a hobby, but then you wouldn't become wealthy. That option is still there today, to work only enough to sustain oneself at a lowered standard. But it seems that there is…

The ratio of power between labor and capital has swung hard toward capital over the past 30 years.

I think the number of people who become "wealthy" due to salary income alone is probably small and shrinking. You used to be able to buy a house in 12 months instead of 18 months if you worked overtime. Todays economics make it so working overtime lets you buy a house in 13 years instead of 17 years.

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

#325

Post by prottog »

Wojtkie wrote: post #310
bluedino wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relative

It's extremely easy to clear more than 25-30 an hour waiting tables in a lot of places.

The places where you can easily clear more than $25-30 an hour as a waiter are also places with high cost of living and expensive housing. As a counterexample, in my area (a midsize city in a low cost-of-living state), restaurants universally suffered from sharp labor shortages last year. $25-30 an hour would let you live comfortably here, meaning they should have had a lot of applicants; therefore the money just wasn't there.

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

#326

Post by waynesonfire »

dragonwriter wrote: post #84

> America needs carpenters and plumbers. Try telling that to Gen Z Look, as long as we have a market economy, here's how you tell it to Gen Z: raise the wages for carpenters and plumbers (and if necessary shift some of that forward into subsidies and incentives for people to train as carpenters and plumbers) until you get as many as you say you “need”. If America isn’t willing to pay enough to get X carpenters and Y…

I don't understand who is getting paid $24 an hour when I paid over $125 per hour to get a sub-panel installed.

Could it be that after starting their own company, they found it difficult to hire additional journeymen at the rate of $24 per hour which they themselves had previously earned as a journeyman?

When everyone can get $125 an hour, there is suddenly a shortage of cheap labor! Big surprise.

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

#327

Post by artemonster »

bubblematrix wrote: post #10
Ancalagon wrote: post #4

Same labor shortage as everywhere that the government likes to pretend doesn't exist. 10 million working-age men can't or won't work. Of the ones willing to work, almost none want to spend their time learning skills for back-breaking, barely-middle class skills jobs which they'll be forced to retire from at 55 because their knees give out. Same answer for the shortage as everywhere that the economists don't want to h…

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 downvotes should be a hint for you to re-evaluate your position and maybe look for logical errors. Instead you've doubled down and threw in some ridiculous piece of your worldview (that thing with wokeism) to shift the blame away from yourself to everyone around you.

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

#328

Post by tpmx »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #197
adamsmith143 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well relatively speaking your lifestyle isn't likely going to change dramatically between those two incomes. In the US the difference is several hundred percent.

The difference in lifestyle between those two incomes is pretty decent.

Do you think everyone should be paid the same irregardless of the value of their labor/output?

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

#329

Post by asdff »

moe091 wrote: post #31
Eumenes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staring at a computer screen all day, interacting with people exclusively on video chat is good for mental and physical health? Plumbers and carpenters can earn a high wage, with no college debt, and often get a union job. Some of my best friends from high school went into the trades, and owned a nice home before most of our high school class was graduating from college.

If it's such a good deal they should have no problem finding plenty of employees for those jobs. If Gen Z is opposed to those kind of working conditions for some reason, then it's just a matter of supply and demand - like how trash collectors get paid a lot for a relatively low-skilled labor job, because not many people want to deal with trash all day. Whether we share the same aversion Gen Z does for certain types o…

Trash collecting is a much more a cushy job in most cities these days. In mine they don't ever leave the truck. One guy drives, the other operates the hydraulic arm. If a piece of trash isn't in the bin or the bin is not grababble by the arm, they just drive away. A different team handles bulky items that are to be called in by the resident. Benefits include an actual pension.

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

#330

Post by brewdad »

svachalek wrote: post #270
dionidium wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah I'm 10 years older than you and never had any thought that "any degree will do". Although perhaps I'm old enough to see that this was legitimate thinking in my predecessors. There was a time when just completing college was fairly uncommon and acted as a class signifier. I believe having a degree, any degree, would have made you an officer automatically in the military (and still does?) and would have opened the…

I think the "any degree will do" mindset stems from the fact that so many, especially in non-technical fields, never really use their degree. Even my wife who has an engineering degree has spent more than two decades working and not a single day in a job that directly relates to her field of study.

Sure, she would have never gotten those jobs with an English degree but stressing over whether to study the exactly "correct" degree for your career goals isn't necessarily worth the calories.

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