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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

#561

Post by dnissley »

WalterBright wrote: post #528
cityofdelusion wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all injuries are at a gross level. Tendons and muscles get micro tears, cartilage gets worn down into mush, bones get tiny fractures. The human body repairs the best it can, but there’s a reason so many older tradesmen have bad backs, bad knees, degenerative arthritis and so on. Not to mention major injuries are still a big risk factor. Broken fingers, destroyed shoulder joints, missing fingernails, deep burns, s…

Why do I not hear this happening with, say, the older set running triathlons?

As many others have mentioned, the conditions are far more controlled and consistent for athletes. On another level we're also talking about different socioeconomic classes. For obvious reasons it's much more common for upper class people to talk and think about their longterm health and take both preventative action and spend money and time going to the doctor/PT if something is causing them even minor pain.

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

#562

Post by [deleted] »

hinkley wrote: post #553
rybosworld wrote: post #503

"Youtube university" has most definitely had an effect. Particularly in regards to the lack of pay increase in the trades. My toilet is leaking? 10 years ago I'd call a plumber. Now I diagnose the problem and determine if it's within my skill level to learn the repair (it usually is). For me, this wouldn't be feasible without online how-to videos. A plumber/carpenter/electrician will charge me $50-$100/hr for work th…

You used to get this stuff off of PBS. Hey hinkley, how come you know how to fix these things? PBS. And living in a fixer-upper as a child. But mostly PBS.

[deleted]

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

#563

Post by Teever »

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?

How can you be so capable Walter, yet so oblivious to the fact that people who make their money with their bodies end up wearing that body out well before their life is over?

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

#564

Post by missedthecue »

FatActor wrote: post #481
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…

> are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. I was told not to major in "underwater basketweaving" in 1983, or otherwise I'd be garbage man--as if that were not one of the most important jobs in a society! It's been the same class-warfare BS for coming up on half a century: demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand.

"demean low paying jobs at all costs for reasons I still don't understand."

A lot of the demeaning came from the low wage workers themselves. Both my grandparents were blue collar. One painted houses, one was an elevator mechanic. They essentially forbade their children from going into the trades. "Learn to make a living with your brain, not your back" was what my dad heard constantly from his father while growing up. And so my father went to college and became an engineer.

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

#565

Post by Manuel_D »

viraptor wrote: post #548
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…

I feel like it's a weird situation when the pay is low, but there is overtime available and there's pressure to work fast. Why wouldn't a company raise prices, increase pay and slow down if there's more than a standard day of work available and customers ready/waiting? Is it more of industry issue or that specific company issue then?

Because business is a market. If your competitors are offering cheaper, faster jobs why would they pick you? As long as the corner cutting doesn't affect the customer, the latter is a better deal. The cynical reality is that safety violations affecting workers don't really matter to most customers, the end result and the cost of obtain it do.

The more realistic scenario is less pay in exchange for slower hours.

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

#566

Post by anonymouskimmer »

acover wrote: post #486
frankreyes wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example being a software engineer outside the US, working for a local business, selling to local customers. In Latin America, programmers can make about 10 or 20 times less than in the US.

Why does this happen?

Most software ultimately automates menial labor. If the menial labor that's being automated is highly paid, the software engineer is highly paid. If the menial labor is lower paid, the software engineer is lower paid. Adjusting also for the amount of menial labor which is automated.

In a poorer society equivalent menial labor is more poorly paid than in a richer society. Edit to add: And in a poorer society some of the highly paid menial labor that exists in richer societies may just not exist, or at least not in the same amount.

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

#567

Post by actionfromafar »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #511
chx wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lack of elevator technicians, crane operators, industrial HVAC, PLC programmers, train conductors, air traffic controllers Blame Reagan. Seriously. I am not joking. Blame Reagan. These need to be union jobs. These used to be union jobs. For a more nuanced history read https://wwnorton.com/books/Invisible-Hands/

Is the argument here that unions are needed to guarantee minimum pay and benefits for these highly specialized jobs so that they feel safe enough to specialize? Wouldn't that depress effective wages for these techs and make the jobs as appealing as less skilled labor?

Some stuff still needs to be done, by code (which should be enforced) or by that people want basic services like electricity to actually exist.

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

#568

Post by chrisdhoover »

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?

Lineman, controls, fire alarm, even commercial is probably better then stapling romex and ruining joists.

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

#569

Post by hinkley »

Avshalom wrote: post #36

A lot of these threads devolve into "have you tried paying more" but I'd also like to highlight "have you actually tried telling Gen Z that". I'm 35, from basically as early as I can remember until sophmore year of college I was told constantly by every adult (and I mean every adult not just the ones that had degrees) in my life to go to college, get a degree, any degree. So yeah I went to college. It was aggressivel…

Gen X chiming in. Several of my uncles were skilled laborers. It was good work, it paid well, most of my cousins had a pretty good life. Most of them better than mine in fact. But there was always a bit of a stigma over their heads about being blue collar instead of white collar, and the general feeling was that Grandpa's generation never had that problem. This was something new, accelerated by things like the 1980's recession and in particular the rise of imported automobiles.

So the Boomer parents saw this going on and encouraged their kids to go to college, which was the last generation where that advice mostly worked, and we, seeing our uncles and cousins and highschool friends struggle, doubled down with the thing that seemed to help us, but was already starting to look like a crapshoot when we went through the system.

It's all class warfare, with a heavy dose of horizontal aggression.

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

#570

Post by Manuel_D »

falcolas wrote: post #118
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…

> 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 this squares with the statistics shared in the article that the average (not sure if median or mean) ages of many trades is in the 50s. Evidently they can continue to perform these jobs into middle age and beyond.
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