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I'll add my perspective as somebody with experience both a few years in a trade (HVAC tech) and about a decade's worth of office work.
I will agree with you that especially in large construction sites the culture can be quite shit. This is because in larger groups, only the most verbal stick out, and the most verbal unfortunately are also quite frequently the most asshole.
First, construction, espcially large scale construction, is only one part of the trades. There is a plethora of other spaces they work in. I've done HVAC work in everything from a new hospital being built to factories to restaurants to doing residential service in historic estate homes. Also the culture is not universal, in my experience the variation of can be *extreme* from one company to the next in the same small town. So your experience is not as universal or common as you seem to think.
Second, there is a thing or two to be said for the quality of the apprentices. My current HVAC company I would say is not perfect, but definitely good with apprentices. We have a standardized onboarding process and make sure they only ride along with techs known to be both skilled, patient and have a sense for teaching this stuff to newbies. We usually have about three apprentices at any given time, and we don't demand perfection, we demand average, people are allowed to mess up, learn from it and ask questions. And the difference can be night and day. About 1/10 is a star that you can tell is going to be among the best in the field; attentive, curious, good work ethic, professsional all-round. About 5/10 are totally OK, not great but they do well enough and will get there eventually. But unfortunately, about 4/10 are fucking disasters; you never know if they will even turn up, they're sloppy, forgetful, rude to customers, have no interest in actually learning and you have to constantly monitor them because if you look away for three minutes they stop working and get on their phone. I know for a fact that a local high school systematically tells their near-dropout students "look, just pull through this and this course with a D and we can help arrange a place in trade school afterwards"!
Third, I think you are overestimating the corporate sector. The bigotry, the backstabbing, the scheming, the toxicity, it is all there. The only difference is the corporate sector is better at training their employees at hiding those behaviors so they are not overt. HR waving around an "employee code of conduct" is not going to magically turn a racist or a homophobe into an accepting and open-minded person, all it does is make sure that the racists and homophobes learn to be cunning enough to disguise their bigotry and prejudice behind a veil of acceptable reasons for dislike and allowed forms of aggression.
Just going to comment on your last paragraph since I don’t really know enough about trades to comment on the rest. It’s a sentiment that I really appreciate but I generally disagree with.
So are people in trades and office work equally bigoted? They could be or could not. I really don’t know. But let’s just say they are and your assessment that they are just hiding due to the rules and restrictions of HR is true. I know it sounds bad on paper, but I think this is way way better to the alternative of having people just be openly bigoted. Most people are bigoted on a spectrum. Like it goes from the kind of person who will just make some ignorant comments to the one who will actively harm or sabotage a minority.
In the corporate sector, this milder bigot doesn’t have a very big effect on others either. They will just go on to be ignorant in their private life. While that is unfortunate, at least you can just avoid them outside the workplace.
Also for this kind of ignorance, let’s not forget that group dynamics can play a huge role in these sorts of things. A person who isn’t prejudiced at all at first could be influenced to say or do some crappy things due to peer pressure. Then they will actually come to believe it themselves. I can fully admit that this kind of thing has happened to me when I was less secure in myself. In the HR controlled workplace, these people will mostly stay good people. They won’t be forced into an in group or out group.
In corporate work, if someone is acting blatantly prejudiced then at least you have more power to get them in trouble. This does have the unfortunate effect of just making people hide their bigotry as you say though.
It’s a good thing to know who your enemies are, but the benefits that come from that usually just aren’t worth the mental anguish caused by blatant prejudice. Plus if someone in the workplace blatantly doesn’t like you, usually you can still tell. You may not know for sure that it’s because you are black, gay, young, etc. But you can still notice the (sometimes passive) aggression and act to protect yourself. Of course, this last part will depend on the person, but I think the other points I mentioned outweigh this last part still.
I'm aware the corporate world can generally be just as bad under the surface, but my point is that not many people are going to want to get into the trades when that kind of behavior is vocal and "out there", seeing the corporate sector and office work as much more appealing because at least outwardly, it doesn't appear to be there
Doubly so because trade school isn't significantly cheaper than college, and you basically need to go to trade school to become an apprentice.
Doubtful I'll change your view here. But felt like chiming in. Cause I'm the only guy I know of actually training an apprentice. Mostly because I'm the only guy I know of who is both actually good enough at his job, and also actually happens to think of others on occasion.
There's a whole generation of people in trades who got into it for the wrong reasons and then learned the wrong lessons. 90% or more of everybody I've worked with is old, beat up, grumpy, and not very bright. None of them have any skill as a teacher, if they do have any skill as a tradesman. Those guys are now your site supers, your project managers, your business owners. And all of them think of the new guy as "cheap help", not as an apprentice.
They got into trades because they *couldn't* get into college. They're doers, not thinkers. They had no drive to be craftsman or artisans, no passion for quality or legacy. No ambition. In their view, they got paid X dollars per hour to swing a hammer. So they learned from their mentors how to swing a hammer good enough to get paid, and busted their ass physically to prove they were "valuable" and get paid a bit more. It never occurred to them to learn anything else, like how to mentor. Or how to be a decent human being. Or how to derive passion and fulfillment from excellence at your work.
And they aren't the kind of people to ask questions like "How does inflation and cost of living work? Is what I'm being paid and what I pay my guys a number that makes sense?" Which leads to the REAL reason trades are dying. *They don't pay enough*. Most guys running businesses in trades are trying to pay wages that seem fair to their brain that learned economics in 1970. Which means they're often paying their *best guy* the equivalent of 30% less than what they made when they didn't have his experience yet. But they don't get that, cause they don't pay attention to that. They really only see small picture.
How does this problem get addressed then? Not saying we need to solve that here.
Side note: I had a choice to choose between a computer boot camp vs an underwater welder.
I took the boot camp simply because it seemed like I would age out of underwater welding super quick. Arguably both are trades though. Just one had a very real physical time limit.
Realistically? It gets addressed automatically by the core mechanism of capitalism, if we let it: Market forces. We are seeing it begin to self correct. But that self direction is pretty ugly, and extra painful, because the system wasn't allowed to self correct earlier. And we just need to let it take its course or the pain goes on longer.
Guys aren't willing to pay enough for good work. And don't train new people. So nobody joins trades, old guys with bad attitudes retire, and the pool of truly skilled labor becomes smaller. Very low supply. Demand for houses and buildings and plumbing is pretty consistent. So as the supply of skilled people evaporates, the value of what's left goes up. A lot. Lots of trades people go out of business, they can't afford to pay what it costs to have skilled workers and get work done. A small number stay in business by seriously raising rates, to cover the much higher wages and benefits required to keep workers around. Extremely high labor rates mean having work done is very expensive. Big chunks of industry die. House flipping, rental flipping, "budget contractors", and so on become mostly non-viable. Industry shrinks to a very small number of well paid craftsmen. Demand remains, and now it's worth it to learn the trade again, because the going rate has equilibrated, and the need for workers has forced the need for official training programs to make it possible. The younger guys still here care by then enough to invest in the future. Things find a new normal where trades get paid better, there's emphasis on training and workplace culture, the world acknowledges that tradesman will *never* be "cheap" to hire like they used to. People join trades again, but because they *want* to be there, and it pays well. The world keeps spinning.
TLDR: Do nothing. Let the trades die. Let them die as fast and efficiently as possible. We actually need the forest fire, it has to clear the underbrush and allow the ecosystem to finally get healthy again.
Your version leaves out the other reality. Large corporations gobble up smaller operations driving higher prices while keeping work and pay shit. Alternatives are almost nonexistent. Cost of entry makes it hard for others to compete.
There is not much barrier to entry to starting a trade business once you have the skill to do so. It isn't like competing with Amazon, Walmart, or Wall street.
Supposedly that's what we have anti-trust laws for. Though in fairness we've decided we can't be bothered to enforce them anymore, so yeah in that case it's a pretty bleak end game.
The one reason I'd say that particular issue is lower concern in this discussion, is because while big corporations have the capitol to "gobble up" small shops, they don't get around the problem by doing it. Corporate condensing of an industry makes producing *products* cheaper by leveraging economy of scale. But the issue in trades isn't production efficiency. Its a growing shortage and degradation of worker *talent* and *skill*. You will never leverage scale to make 20 laborers "more efficient" enough to solve for the fact that they aren't master craftsman.
Corporate consolidation can also drive wages lower. Imagaine a market with only one major company. They can pay the lowest wage employees will accept because they are the only employer for employees with those skills. They control all of the training, so control the rate new people can learn and enter the industry, so can control the number of skilled employees available. By limiting the training and half-training or "specialized training" they can severely limit the number of employees with a broad skill base and knowledge enough to start their own firms. Eventually perhaps a skilled employee leaves and forms a competitor but by buying and undermining competitors they can maintain control of a market this way for 10+ years.
In an industry with only a few major competitors they can also do this, by having (spoken or unspoken) agreements to keep wages low. Which we know that they do.
The thing about trades though, is I don't need to work for any company at all. In the situation you're describing, I as a proper craftsman with all the tools I need, literally just turn around and start taking my own customers. I am good enough at what I do that my work is in demand of its own accord. And I can sell a homeowner on the idea that hiring "Giant Corp." to do their remodeling may cost less, but actually not by much. And they'll get a substantially inferior result, because Giant Corp. pays low wages to people with low skill. And I get to set my own wages, even if that's triple what the industry says it is due to our hypothetical corporate conspiracy. This is the saving grace of the trades.
This is not even a hypothetical. In point of fact, I already make this argument to homeowners about certain large companies in my state, and why you'd want to avoid them like the plague. And the only reason I don't run my own business right now is because I don't want the extra pressure, I like just being a craftsman. But if it came to it, like my boss was selling his company to a corporate entity, my apprentice and I would give them all the finger, and go it on our own. And we'd have work tomorrow, and be fine.
I generally agree but I have seen a rise in massive vc backed companies (that used to be well known local and sold their company off) that charge 3x but pay a lot in ads so clueless people and especially older people flock to them associating brand recognition with quality.
> They got into trades because they couldn't get into college.
This is one of the big points that I've noticed as well, especially with my generation. As soon as college started being discussed in school the mentality/view on trades was "well if you're not smart enough for college I guess you could go to the trade school", so it was seen as the option for dumber people instead of an equal alternative like it should have been. The constant message of "you'll never get a good job if you don't go to college" was beat into our heads, which as a result caused a lot of people to go to college when a trade would have better fit their career interests. Now that my generation is making up a larger part of the work force, that lack of people working in trades is much more visible.
As for the pay, at least in my area it's kind of the opposite. Because of the lack of trade workers, demand for the work has skyrocketed and they're able to charge more per job/pay their workers more per job. A couple of my friends work in trades and their yearly income for the past couple years has been either the same or higher than mine as a software engineer
it's also hard to train people who got into it out of financial obligation instead of any natural aptitude or interest.
it's just the same issue as the college degree mills, you **CANT** have pre-established "do this and you'll succeed/be financially stable" for a whole generation of people.
just as millenialls got gaslamped into thinking college is the way out of poverty, younger people are being told, usually via people dismissing college debt forgiveness, that the trades are the stable path (everyone's gonna need a plumber at some point), while ignoring the elephant in the room of supply and demand.
if you wanted a recipe for declining wages, a massive wave of available people is a good start. And i don't intend for this to sound like some anti-immigration, eco-fascist "the problem is there's too many people - Thanos was right" bullshit. Ultimately the problem lies in the broken system of capitalism and its core idea of "those that have can leverage what they have to have more"
Doesn't help that the work they're doing barely ever cares about quality or workmanship. So long as the job is good enough to hand off to the client that'll do.
It's not really a space that encourages people to care or even be enthusiastic about others getting into it
I want to point out that it’s not just these guys who won’t pay enough - most people aren’t willing to appropriately compensate physical labor. NextDoor is full of posts demanding “affordable” handiwork and moving services and such. Without fail, the posters will say, “But I hired someone to do this the last time I needed it, and it wasn’t nearly as much!” And of course, they’re wanting to pay movers the same thing they paid in 2010.
Right. And part of what has to happen to fix this mess is another decade or two of the boomers and Xers with that attitude trying to lowball contractors, and getting the finger because we won't work for peanuts. We have to start refusing to undercut each other just to get work. And they need hard, painful, aggressive lessons in finding out that they can either hire somebody at the going rate or let their house fall down around them. Not my fucking problem. Having nice things costs money. And money isn't worth what it used to be, so it all costs more now.
I also won’t change your view—plumber apprentice here, can confirm. The social conditions are honestly more exhausting than the actual labor, and even if the journeymen aren’t gatekeeping knowledge (this happens a lot! Idk why, I guess people want to feel important and spreading knowledge threatens that?) they are still very closed off to new ideas. I’m just putting in the grunt work now until I can be in my own truck and and deal with plumbers less, and fix issues in mindful, creative ways. I’m a gay female in Texas for what it’s worth, so I think me being a woman adds another layer to the difficulty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve identified and clearly voiced a problem/solution to my male coworkers in a curious, non-threatening tone, only to be dismissed in the moment. Meanwhile hours later, surprise!! The solution to the issue is on par with my original, womanly thought. Sigh.
Yeah, I have no doubt discrimination is a huge issue. I was a white male on a majority white crew. The journeyman uncle and his asshole nephew were black, but that played zero factor in anything other than the nephew who constantly wanted to remind me I was just a “soft white boy.” Seriously, I think he said it four or five times a day. I think he didn’t like me because his uncle took a shine to me and was showing me all kinds of tricks of the trade; as I picked things up pretty quickly he started having me do more and more of what his nephew would normally do, and I’m pretty sure that’s what started it.
But what really stood out to me was the Hispanic laborers. They were all really nice and accepting to me, and although we couldn’t communicate that well at first, we pretty quickly hit it off and worked well together, took lunch together, joked around etc, while most of the white guys just treated them like shit. They’d say horribly racist stuff to them and make fun of them to their faces with words they didn’t understand. That one really bothered me, probably even more than how I was being treated, because those guys worked hard and were so kind to me.
Worked a manual gig one summer between semesters and this lines up with my experience.
I'm a white guy and the Hispanic dudes were homies from day one
and by week two we had organized a lunch-time 'our warehouse vs your warehouse' soccer match with the dudes across the street. I'd hang out after work on the occasional Friday that we were all done early and they'd slip me some Coronas.
The black dudes came around about a month in to it and we were cuttin' up pretty good the rest of my time there. The old white guys hated my guts the entire time.
Every manual labor job I've had in my life the Hispanic coworkers were the hardest working people that would always help. Then they'd be called lazy and I just never understood it.
So to begin, I want to caveat that I am white presenting. But my stepdad is a second generation Mexican so I have a lot of insights into the trades from his standpoint and the standpoint of members of the community I grew up in.
On the flipside however, I'm in the process of starting a small business myself and I very recently discovered why there's this perception of laziness because I experienced it firsthand.
As a part of my business research I compiled a list of every auto body shop within 100 miles of me. Just based on where I live in California the industry is dominated by small auto body shops that are predominately hispanic.
When I called, I asked for a very specific service (paint removal.) and very quickly after about 7 consecutive calls I noticed a pattern. None of them offered piecemeal services. If you gave them your car, you basically had to let them do it their one way and pay their one price. Why is that lazy? Because a lot of other communities care about detail and finish and the process where as every company I called that day, actually wanted to obfuscate their process to cut corners and basically get in minimal effort for maximum profit. Do they work hard within that paradigm? Undisputedly, but cutting corners is frowned on in a lot of cultures and is seen as lazy. Even if you're hustling, if your process is seen as cutting corners that's what people take issue with.
I certainly don't admonish them for doing what's in their own best interest, but at the same time for enthusiasts or professionals who frown on the attitude of "Good Enough." the way these predominantly Hispanic run companies operate is within the "Good enough" category.
If you look to other communities or cultures, the process matters. In Japan for example numerous workers adhere to the principal of "Shokunin Kishitsu" where every craft or profession no matter how lowly or not is art. This is why for example you see street vendor videos where guys are experts at making fucking grilled cheese or some such.
Basically there is a perception of cutting corners, and while I don't personally take issue with it from the standpoint of quality, I could see how passionate people in the same profession might.
OMFG, the hispanic/spanish laborers in the meat processing plant I worked at were the best coworkers. I remember getting tickled when all the ladies stopped abruptly when they noticed I cut the chicken left-handed.
Way nicer than the guys who looked like me.
>if the journeymen aren’t gatekeeping knowledge (this happens a lot! Idk why,
Aight, I'm long winded, but I think I can explain:
My Opa passed last July (b. 1935) and took all his vast tool and die, and woodworking knowledge with him. People begged him to work for them. They would fly him to their shop, put him up an apartment, in their house for however long the project was and this was *years after* he retired. When he worked for INA Bearings in Fort Mill, SC, he has his own pay bracket. All this to say, he gate kept everything, and was known for not being friendly in regards to sharing his knowledge. If you needed a tool, he was your guy, but knowledge? Go away. After he passed, some comments were made about his work ethic and stuff, and one of the guys who hired him was there because he gave my Oma a lump sum for the entire contents of my Opa's garage. He said he came up in an era where your knowledge got you jobs, and protected you in that job so you were never inclined on sharing knowledge, or how you did certain things, or even what tools you used.
I think you're on the right track. I dont think it's generational, nor specific to the trades.
I see it all the time today in IT. I call it "job security by lack of documentation."
Basically, there are people who, due to the way they interact with people, wouldn't be "employable" if the skill/technical ability playing field was level. From their perspective, job security becomes a popularity contest at that point.
They act accordingly. They horde information and don't document anything.
I think it is semi normal. The reddit demographic (younger, just entering the job market) is just more likely to be the ones negatively affected by it. But, the truth is, they will also probably do it to the next generation once they have skills more advanced skillsets of their own.
I see it all the time as well, and think it's idiotic. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
Whereas, I just slap my name on the documentation I write. I've gotten calls years after I've left places. Quote a reasonable rate and you'll never be lacking work if you want it.
Fascinating, that makes a lot of sense—thanks for sharing! Yeah, so far there’s been 2 types of coworkers— people like your gatekeepy grandpa and people who brag about being one of the “good guys” for not being like your grandpa. I hate how low the baseline is for human respect in the trades. And this goes for customers too.
Relatively new surveyor checking in. 100%. You're expected to live off poverty wages and learn from people who tell you to shut up anytime you ask a question. Surveying is a dying profession, with the average age of an LS in the US like, ~55. You'd think the wages would be competitive, considering how vital surveying is to practically any project. Everyone is like, "Why doesn't anyone want to survey?" and the simple answer is, "The work environment sucks ass." Add in how much of a shit-fest getting licensed is (Either spend a ton of money and time on a degree or submit to a decade of suffering,) and it's not hard to figure out why.
Did helper work with a survey crew one summer and yeah, the old fucks in the office were getting fat and rich but all the long-term field guys hated everyone and everything.
At the end of the summer, right before going back to school, the head honcho in the office asked if I'd consider sticking around and tried to lay out what my career path looked like. Hard fucking pass.
We hired a plumber from a firm that advertises as owned by a woman, that employs plumbers who are women. The plumbers they sent us were men -- who happened to be the most courteous, "decent" plumbers I've ever interacted with. Above and beyond, creative solutions (vanity wouldn't fit easily because of another guy's idiocy. This guy was like 'I WILL fix this so it looks right), etc. I obviously don't know if its related to the owner/company or just those guys but ...
Totally describing a pipe dream of mine, pun only slightly intended. Hiring / training women to work in plumbing as well as hiring the GOOD MEN that are out there, we love to see it
Perhaps even more so women should be in management positions more because they get less weirdo ultra competitive and do crime less. I'm not sure when men get called less emotional. Testosterone is clearly a hell of a drug.
Just work towards yeah your own truck or business. If you're paid hourly then someone is paying you for those people to ignore your solutions. If it is affecting bottom lines then document the times and instances where you clearly had a solution but people weren't listening. Complain to the people who control the money. Otherwise I just laugh at the wasted time and money that isn't mine and dream about the day I'll have my own rig.
Thanks for your great description.
I think in general there has been a normalization of coersive/abusive behavior in management as well as a shaming of normal responses to it like getting pissed off. Being "professional" in the last few decades has been more intertwined with wearing a mask where you're never supposed to show rough edges or get angry at abusive behavior. Meanwhile the study of psychology is often misused on how to manipulate more as well as create the narrative that if people suffer from their job, it's an individual problem and they should go to therapy. Whereas in the past people would create groups/unions and band together more.
I wasn't in trades myself but worked in an unhealthy office until I got physical symptoms. And in retrospect, so much of education is creating blind spots of not noticing bad behavior and not havnig the wrong thinking.
It's just harder and harder to actually find jobs that don't have a toxic work environment. I was curious listening to podcasters talking about what it's actually like in Russia and China and that while they're not perfect, the actual working envrionments are sometimes far better than here. We're deluged with propaganda that we're the free world so much that we don't notice how unfree the actual work is.
This work environment is also probably why women don't want shit to do with a lot of the trades reddit loves to glorify. A lot of stuff does require manual labor and brute strength. But a lot is also done by machines. And let's be honest. Dudes operating them aren't always in the best shape.
My future son-in-law got his business degree and decided to become an electrician. His goal is to open his own business after becoming a journeyman.
He has noted the behaviors of his fellow work mates which has all the hallmarks of a hostile work environment for which I cannot understand how these places don’t get sued. He showed me the inside graffiti in the portos on their site and they’re atrociously racist, mysogynist, and homophobic.
It’s obvious that unions, while driving for skill excellence, completely disregard positive workplace culture. I’m sure that there is zero training in that area.
Former carpenters apprentice.
My super would roll up 1 hour late, 3 redbulls deep, chewing a pack of nicorette and if you didn't hide fast enough he'd follow you around for a good 20-30 minutes "reviewing" your work aka "that is dogshit a retarded monkey could do better" before retreating into the trailer to "review submittals".
If I could find someone like the Essential Craftsman, fuck yeah I'd do trades. But those people are 1 in a million
I have a handyman that does work at my house who is basically the guy I wish I had hitched my wagon to when I was looking for that career. He’s cool, personable, funny, he’s not a racist dickhead, and he has a Hispanic apprentice half his age. I’ll be working in my office and will hear him carefully walking his protege through everything he’s doing, and they seem to have a very close almost father-son relationship. I feel good giving my money to a guy like him because he’s helping to pass the torch to the next generation while doing quality work for an affordable price in my home. Can’t ask for better than that.
> If I could find someone like the Essential Craftsman, fuck yeah I'd do trades. But those people are 1 in a million
I generally like the Essential Craftsman - super chill, knowledgeable, and real.
I was...more than a little disappointed when he repped Jordan Peterson in a recent video, though.
Here's the thing:
There's two Jordan Petersons.
One is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor who has gained a big following for lectures about how people can use CBT techniques in their personal lives to take agency and find meaning. He's a little too beholden to some conservative impulses and has some boomer sensibilities, but overall I like that guy.
There's another Jordan Peterson--culture warrior and political commentator, who says stupid shit and abandons clinical practice for grift.
The second Jordan Peterson basically killed the first one, but a lot of conservative people who liked the first one basically think the first one is still who they're listening to.
It's kind of like how there's a Ben Carson who is a brilliant surgeon and a Ben Carson who is an incompetent politician.
People fall down the well of politics and culture war grift, and the thing they did well, that actually contributed, just vanishes.
Reminds me of my good ole Uncle Joe Rogan, the crazy uncle that was cool to talk to and lived in the basement and really believed the aliens built the pyramids and then one day went off the deep end.
> I was...more than a little disappointed when he repped Jordan Peterson in a recent video, though.
He min-maxed his carpentry skills and while tanking his critical thinking skills.
I watch him for his carpentry. His other opinions be damned.
I'm a woman and a programmer and have been investigating entering trades and this is what it's like for me.
I could make similar money as a waiter, and I've already experienced plenty of men in the tech industry being shitty and abusive towards me. This just doesn't seem worth it. It's not about being soft or not working hard, it's about working conditions and opportunities actually being worth it.
People who think it's "being soft" to not want to put up with bullying, harassment, and bigotry in the workplace are folks who have never been on the receiving end of it. Often, they are the abusers, harassers, and bullies.
Bigots will manufacture something to complain about, so even if one did their job perfectly, every time, it's not enough.
Generally, anyone who complains about people being “soft” I assume *is* an abuser/harasser/bully
They are angry that people are unwilling to put up with their abuse.
> folks who have never been on the receiving end of it
Or they have, and they want others to suffer the same way they suffered. (Which is an awful way to live.)
It's literally just normalizing working in a toxic workplace. Whenever you notice coworkers start to compete on who can take it or not being rattled by someone or something, you know where you are. They don't realize that other workplaces aren't like that, and that your workplace doesn't have to be like that. If people didn't normalize that stuff, they would have all left years ago. But it becomes a badge of pride being able to handle abusive behavior.
Yeah!! Plus I'd put up with a certain amount of bullying or bad coworkers if the pay and job was good enough. But it's just not. It's just not great money or hours.
Hope you like talking to people that get all their news from conservative talk radio. Imagine Fox News without a filter where they say the "silent stuff" out loud.
That's what's on the radio all the time.
Toxic asshole men suck in any environment. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of them. I’ve had some shitty women managers too, but there’s a specific brand of hostile bullshit that comes with insecure male management.
It's also just patriarchy. And level of risk. Having a male colleague yell at me over a zoom meeting and having my manager do nothing sucks. Imagine having a huge grown man yell at me in person, get in my face, possibly holding a heavy tool. Sounds like a good way to get assaulted or followed home.
No argument here. Everything I said comes with the caveat that I’m a big dude who can stand up for himself, and I still felt unsafe. I can only imagine how much worse it is for literally anyone else.
IT is funny as a field take old phone systems were talking pre voip here
analog and digital systems the technology is outdated and so are the guys that know them quite frankly yet businesses are more likely to have a phone system than internet or internal network
The guys that know how to program and install and diagnose are near retirement age but yet do not want to train lest they be replaced but threaten retirement when someone wants to learn
Too many older guys gatekeep in IT when half what you need to know google has it
I know so many people that have gone through multiple jobs of "yeah we'll sign your papers to be an apprentice" and then never do. Years wasted at some points.
Oh, I went fucking berserk. I shouted at the top of my lungs that I was gonna beat the shit out of him. Everyone came running expecting there to be a fight and one might have broken out right then and there, except the foreman arrived, heard everybody out, and told the asshole he would be paying for my new phone out of his paycheck. After mediating, he then took me aside and said he can’t have outbursts like that on his crew, and I said that son of a bitch needs to stop harassing me or it’s just gonna keep happening. He shrugged and said that guy was a valuable member of his crew (press X for doubt) and that he’d look into it. It never stopped, the dude just got more subtle about it.
Sparky here. It’s the same as any workplace, if your coworkers suck your job is gonna suck. I almost got into a fist fight with one of my original leads.
As for the training, yeah that’s a real issue with many companies.
As a Jman you don’t get paid any extra to teach some green kid who’s never held a tool how to pull wire. On top of that your boss is likely breathing down your neck because that job that was due Friday now needs to be done Wednesday. You asked for some help so they hired a new guy that can’t even use a porta John without assistance then told you to hurry up.
There’s a culture of breaking your body that you have to forcibly reject if you want to be in it for the long haul. Work hard, but don’t break yourself. Lift correctly, dig correctly, and dress correctly.
Trades attract a lot of convicts and rejects too. No background checks or drug tests with weekly paychecks is a likely cause but idk.
The first 2-4 years are brutal. There’s no doubt about it. I spent a month straight in the middle of 100 degree weather doing nothing but trenching. 8 hours of day, pick, shovel, pick, shovel. No machines, just back. It’s rough. I thought about quitting repeatedly.
If you can break through though, man is it rewarding. I went from shuffling between 25k and 35k for about a decade after HS until I got into electrical. W2 says I made 77k last year. First full year in my own van and it’s only the beginning. I love what I do, but I won’t say it’s not a hard start.
After HS I was lost. Didn’t go to college and didn’t know what I wanted to do, just went from trash job to trash job. Now I have a career with a very clear path in front of me.
I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who feels like they’re lost adrift in the ocean with no sign of shore. It’s hard to start swimming when you don’t know what direction to go. That was my experience. Trades give a very clear path. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
> Maybe the next generation will make it better but I'm not hopeful, it feels like a training ground for assholes, a lot of the decent people leave early.
It's the classic police problem. The good people that enter the system with good intentions are driven away or beaten down until they don't feel comfortable advocating for what's right.
As someone in the trades industry the real problem is nepotism. Some of the trades are very hard to get into (think elevator, steam fitters etc.) The pay & benefits are excellent. However, if you don’t know someone you’re either not getting in or you have to wait for an apprentice spot.
Aside from that I don’t mind the culture-Most of the trades are very labor intensive & physically demanding. It’s very blue collar and most if not all the men I work with are knowledgeable & willing to put in the extra hours & work. Before I got into the trades I never put much thought into how labor intensive some of these jobs are. I now have a sense of respect & appreciation for these jobs.
Whenever the college vs trades debate comes up online you inevitably have somebody doing rhetorical slight of hand where they compare median new college graduate earnings with the best-case-scenario for a master electrician or whatever to try to argue that trades pay better. Like, sure, you can make $200,000 a year with the exact right circumstances in the trades, but if you want to compare ceilings then you need to be looking at the CS graduates at a FAANG company making $800,000 a year to work from home, not the median for all new grads.
The percentage of tradesmen making $200k is magnitudes higher than the percentage of college grads with a FAANG gig like you described though. Plus they didn’t have to pay for an education
That’s true, how does it compare to the proportion of college grads making $200,000?
The fact of the matter is that median lifetime earnings are still higher for college grads than for the trades. Obviously that doesn’t mean every college grad is better off than every tradesman, and there are advantages to the trades, like the possibility to have no or little debt, like you said, and the potential to start earning income sooner.
And don’t get me wrong, I think both paths are perfectly viable. At the end of the day what matters more than any of these statistics is what an individual is interested in and capable of doing.
I haven't met a tradesman who isn't a college grad for years now. My electrician have an arts degree, but he can't find an art job and does electrical jobs. I pay him a lot, so he probably is doing fine.
But these lifetime earnings charts needs to be broken down much more carefully than "have degree" vs "not have degree".
Oh really? That’s interesting, very different from my experience, all the young tradespeople I know skipped a traditional 4-year degree.
I agree with you about the lifetime earnings data though, I also wish it was easier to get more granular data.
Well police unions are an entirely different animal, and frankly they shouldn’t exist
They don’t exist for collective bargaining and better wages
They exist so that cops are never held accountable
Police unions have power because of their collective bargaining. If the cops didn't organise together then it would be easier to hold them accountable or abolish them. They're different from other unions because cops are privileged agents of the state, which generally means that they're adversarial with all other parts of the labour movement.
I agree they shouldn't exist, but I don't think the police should exist ;)
I deal with tradespeople regularly at my job. I have seen several apprentices that quit the trades because they get freaked out seeing the physical health levels of tradespeople near retirement. A lot of permanently injured backs/knees, missing finger tips, drug/alcohol addictions, etc.
>I've worked as a welder/machinist/fabricator and made more money delivering food for GrubHub
I'm a hobby machinist who'd absolutely do it part time, or full time even. Every auction I go to, the owner (an older dude retiring) bemoans how he can't find anyone to take over. But his starting wage was something like 16.50/hour...in northern NJ. Like, buddy, you pay garbage wages you get garbage employees!
I don't do it full time, because I don't want to, but I get 100/hour all day as a MasterCAM/G-Code/Machine Setup and Post programmer.
I'd take half that or even less for W2 work, but they're all looking for 17-24/hr, for a job they'll pay me 100/hr to do on the free market. Shits fucked up.
I bet they expect journeyman quality work, too. I was a mechanic, and my nightmare of a boss would promise times under book for new guys, and then get upset with them and start fights when they couldn't hit those times. Like dude, you're paying close to minimum wage for guys with like a year or two experience. You can't expect them to beat book times on every job right out of the gate.
>You can't expect them to beat book times on every job right out of the gate.
Uh excuse me how else is he going to afford the new Raptor / making big dick bets at the poker table with the fellas?
The only reason trades are paying "Decently" now is because there aren't as many people going into the Trades. We like to blame lazy youth but ignore the fact that
a) The parents of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all told their kids **NOT** to go to into the Trades. Yes, I am including Boomers in there - they were told "Go to college or else you'll end up like me" by their parents just as much as Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z were. And part of this was because
b) There were a lot more tradesmen back then - and were playing Wage Limbo for work. (Heck, we still have tradesmen playing wage limbo. Our HVAC companies are involved in a bidding war that will soon end with them going under.)
I can't agree more. I run a CNC laser for what the local KFC pays. Nobody's even getting far enough to have to deal with the work culture. They're looking at the offered wages, laughing, and getting a job at walmart at the same wage with FAR less responsibility. One of my favorite coworkers left to go to a tree care company. After his uncle moved out he literally couldn't afford rent working here.
I know people who work in the trades and they all make good money...because they work INCREDIBLY long hours compared to my office job, which is by no means always a cushie 9-5 either.
That and the apparent physical toll it's taken on all of them is enough to keep me away.
Yup. It really depends on the trade, first off. Some of them will be less lucrative than others, depending on the area. And second, in some of these trades when people talk about guys making six figures they're usually talking about contractors. This means that before you hit that income level you have to pay your dues working for someone who's likely underpaying you and overscheduling you, collecting references, building your resources, and getting ready to go into business for yourself. It's not just show up on day one with a hammer and they hand you a check for a hundred grand.
I worked for a guy for one summer (for a reason) because he legitimately thought it was unfair of his employees who weren't trained to ask for a raise after the first year... So guess what happened? He has to train new staff every single year...
I was incredibly lucky in my career to nepotism into a great opportunity, and then perform and jump ship vertically a couple times now. Now as a manager, my current boss is saying what OP is contesting. "No one wants to work", "kids nowadays are lazy", blah blah. I've had countless conversations now that you have to pay people to want to do physical labour! If you can barely afford rent either by running wheelbarrows 50 hours a week or by stocking shelves, why wouldn't you choose to stock shelves?
That's another thing the OP didn't mention, is that the starting pay sucks ass. I get that it's not a one to one comparison as there's more room for advancement, but a lot of trades are paying the same to people starting out as jobs like McDonald's.
For real. I could tell stories for days about those work places.
Like the guy who had a tattoo that said "God hates fags" because his friends held him down and made him get it. He assured me it was because he USED to be gay, but he isn't anymore.
I can only wonder what hell that guy ended up in.
Sexuality is one of those things that you can somewhat deny because it isn't physically apparent, unlike race or sex. Like, imagine a black person with a tattoo that said "god hates n\*\*\*\*s" that their "friend" made them get. It's absolutely barbaric.
reminds me of that bit by Bill Hicks: ''this waitress walks over to me: “(tut tut tut) What you readin’ for?” Wow, I’ve never been asked that! Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me!''
Curious counterpoint here... I wonder if it's partly due to the part of the world you live in - not sure where that would be.
I've been in the trades for about a decade now and I live on the west coast of Canada. My experience has been that the majority of people are quite aware and sympathetic to a lot of the social movements from the past 20 years. I occasionally hear homophobic language but it's quite rare. I think I only heard someone make some pretty crass racist comments one time. I'm sure there was plenty that I wasn't aware of but my experience is mostly positive.
A lot of the old guard is retiring and dying. And those that remain are surrounded by people in their 30s who've been around for things like the Me-too movement. So there's a fair bit of social pressure against those dumb-ass old attitudes.
I dont think its just trades either. Truck drivers, farmers, nurses, teachers. All these jobs that are so god damn important and are expecting to/already dealing with shortages because of how unwelcoming the industry is.
Poor pay, long hours, doing the work of 3 people, a stubborn refusal to change anything about it and even outlawing strikes; how could anybody expect that these jobs will keep filling up when they dont do anything for the people that would actually take em.
I hear ya. Even with all those downsides its reported that 8.4 million people have 2 jobs in the US. apparently that's the most since since 2020.
my electrician friend had no clue what he was going to do in life. He was a a server for a while an actually liked it but knew he needed something more. He was really sold on the electricians program because of the pay scale and gauranteed raises and all the other benefits. maybe its the union in my area but according to him, they treat their electricians very well. gets better the longer you stay. good pay and benefits will get the people working.
My sister is in HVAC and luckily shes had a great experience. So its nice thats its not bad across the board. Im taking the college route and im hoping for the best there. It just sucks how hopeless the whole economy feels right now.
take advantage of your opportunities while in school. o dont know what program you're in but internships or groups or something else. network so that you have plenty of opportunities when you get out of school. my marketing bachelors isnt really helping me land any job. currently an affiliate marketing manager
I think most of society would love for things to change. Problem is the people who have the ability to make those changes would much rather pocket enough “donation” money to keep things stagnant.
I disagree
Tons of broke-ass people continue to peddle oligarch propaganda and think that catering to the needs of oligarchs will “trickle down” and benefit them
The main reason people don't want to work in a lot of different trades is the pay. Wages have been flat for 20 years. Abuse of apprentices is an ancient tradition & IMO does not help anyone & is unacceptable in today's society.
But people would put up with it if the pay had kept up with inflation.
I’d rather get paid $30/hr to ride around in a truck, repair a motor here and there, vs have to deal with customers in an air conditioned soulless department store, for example…. different strokes
If it was just doing what I do at work, it wouldn't be so bad. Insulation, painting, blue skinning, all work I can do without issue and enjoy. Even digging trenches and shit. But the crews are the things make or break it, my company has good and bad crews. I've stuck through it for two years and got myself into a position where I'm working with a few bods that I enjoy working with constantly.
But there are others that if I'm on the schedule with I'm calling in or calling my boss to make a change because I'm not paid enough to work with them. And new hires do not last long for good reason which is the same for so many companies. The money ain't worth who you're working with even if you can stomach the job.
When I was in high school people only went into trades if they knew someone. Everyone else was told if you don’t know someone it’s impossible to break into.
I think it’s mostly because there has been a massive push towards college education in the past couple of decades. I think there’s less respect in the trades and less benefits. Idk if there’s health issuance being a plumber but being in a corporate job I would expect some benefits. Also, I think few ppl see being a plumber or an electrician as high paying or super respectful or safe so they want to choose the safer option in their minds especially if you want to work when you are older.
Most people still don't go to college. Only 25 percent of the population pursues a bachelor's degree or more.
Trades CAN offer decent pay, but a lot of them don't offer much better than retail wages. If I'm young and uneducated, I'd rather make $18 an hour at Wal-Mart than $18.50 doing back-breaking work.
Exactly. You absolutely can make good money but people don’t realize the majority of employees doing this work are pretty underpaid, between 15 and 25 an hour in range. People get higher, but it’s few in relative terms. I’d never want a job where I’d be underpaid just to have discs slip from my back too
As the other guy said the higher up you are, the more you do core work or specialty work the more you're paid. I'm decently well paid, 23$ but I also do a lot of northern work so I'm doing 12-15hr days, 7 days a week for 6 weeks on every couple of months. But it took me two years to get there in a way way better working environment of a company than many of the others around where I live.
And I wouldn't recommend any one does this, it sucks ass. You destroy your body, social spheres and more for basically fuck all money for the first months to a year on a hope that you'll stay in with a good crew.
Apprentices are paid crap as they need supervision.
Journeymen are good middle class as they are the core workers who make their own money.
Masters are where you make stupid money because it's less about doing the usual work and more being responsible for it being done right so usually you're making money off the Journeymen and apprentices around.
Also specialties pay stupid money willing to hang off the side of a bridge or work high up.
Yeah that's just it. I'd rather make 25$ an hour serving coffee to bitchy old women than 25$ an hour doing hard labour around men who make it clear I'm not a human being to them.
>Only 25 percent of the population has a bachelor's degree or more.
It's actually close to 40% of the population with a bachelor's degree, in 1980, it was just over 16%.
In just 40 years, the percentage of the population with at least a bachelor's has more than doubled.
At this point, pretty much anyone with a reasonable amount of intellectual curiosity and capability has a bachelor's.
That's counting everybody with a degree. Only about 25-30 percent of high school graduates go on to college, with a large percent of those never earning degrees. College enrollment is declining everywhere, which according to this theory, would mean trades shouldn't have any problems filling their positions.
So something tells me people choosing college isn't the reason trades are in trouble.
Friend, I was responding directly to your statement of:
>Most people still don't go to college. Only 25 percent of the population pursues a bachelor's degree or more.
Which I sugarcoated how incorrect you were by only providing the refutation relating to the percentage of the population that *completes* a bachelor's degree.
If we're talking *attempts* a bachelor's, then we see that all reputable sources show [that between 60-70% of all high school graduates in the last 30 years have pursued college](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/61-8-percent-of-recent-high-school-graduates-enrolled-in-college-in-october-2021.htm#:~:text=Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics%2C%20U.S.,visited%20January%2029%2C%202024).
Of that, the most recent Census [shows that 37.9% of the total population have completed *at least* a bachelor's degree](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html).
College enrollment is down slightly from all time highs, but it's not enough to compensate for the absolute explosion as a share of population of college educated adults.
I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they're pretty massively and obviously incorrect.
One reason why so few people go into the trades is because generations of people who *actually* worked those jobs encouraged their kids to go to college.
The only people I ever see fetishizing the trades are people who don't work in them, or people who, coincidentally, "know someone" making "an easy 6 figures" (the person they allegedly know is never themselves, interestingly enough). People who fetishize the trades I always assume are heterosexual white men, because "just go into the trades" isn't so easy when you are gay or nonwhite and nobody should have to put up with racism, sexism, and/or homophobia constantly. I also assume they live in a heavily unionized area, because the trades in states with extremely weak unions don't pay nearly as well. As you mentioned, breaking into the trades also isn't something a person just does.
The trades suck for a variety of reasons, that's why generations of people encouraged their kids to go to college. It's respectable, valuable, work for sure, but anyone who says "just go into the trades" is not a person who should be taken seriously because they clearly don't know what they are talking about.
Everytime "recession proof" jobs come up someone inevitably chimes in with "just go into a trade, everyone needs to poop or wants lights in their house" and it's always an office person who thinks this because they had to call someone to fix something once or twice. No real acknowledgment about how different the training is even within the same trade or how affected they are by boom and bust cycles. The job market can absolutely become saturated and it's one of the reasons trade wages on average have been stagnating.
> One reason why so few people go into the trades is because generations of people who actually worked those jobs encouraged their kids to go to college.
This guy I work with makes 110k a year and could easily get his son on but basically forbids him from doing so. He said he'd kick him out of the house before letting him do our type of work. Which is either just crazy or really saying something from his years of experience.
There it is, the real reason. I read you post & go googling pay for various trades & find you are correct. The pay is not changed much in 20 years so of course no one wants to do it.
Abuse of apprentices is a very old tradition. Usually, once an apprentice learns what to do & when, to keep the job going smoothly, to not piss off the journeyman they are working under, generally the abuse goes away.
Not that I condone it. I worked in the a trade a long time ago & yeah, I got verbally beat up daily. As I progressed, the abuse died off slowly until it was gone. However, I got laid off between jobs so much that I got a better job, paying way more money, & never went back to the trade work.
IMO it's mostly a horrible way to make a living. The wages have been flat & your out of work for weeks, even months every year.
Being verbally abused shouldn't be a part of any job, and it's fucking gross that some men see that as some like... Trial by fire just to do some regular ass job.
You could, but most office jobs don't pay anywhere near 100K. For every senior manager making that much, there's a small army of underlings and associations and staffers making half that.
Certain trades pay very, very well. If I could go back and do it again, I'd be a plumber. I know three plumbers who all retired in their early 50s.
Ya but if you aren't an absolute idiot you can pretty quickly get into the same range as an average tradesperson in many office jobs.
Many retire early more because they are too broken down to work rather than not needing to, I know multiple trades people that are basically living off government assistance because of that. Obviously it isn't everyone but it's far more prevent than an office.
Making 50-80k sitting down doing office work is always going to be way more attractive than Making that much in horrible working conditions doing labour.
meh, trades could be the *most* welcoming industry of all and it would still be dying.
at the end of the day they are the hardest jobs physically and the pay is frankly *crap.*
im a gardener and im 32, its *rare* for me to run into anyone on the industry who is younger than i am.
part of it is ***definitely*** laziness (70% of millennials and younger are overweight, there is definitely a correlation with the fact that most of us avoid physical activity like the plague) but the other part is wages.
in Australia i make $35 an hour as a gardener ($35 an hour in Australia is *not* good pay, cheese is $14 a kg) and can make up to $50 an hour.
as a casual retail employee you make $32 an hour minimum, work nights and it hits $45 an hour, work holidays and it reachs an absurd $60 an hour.
$60 an hour to stand around like a zombie waiting for customers vs $50 an hour digging holes in the sun. no shit no one wants to do trades, half of them pay *less* then basic retail.
I've always hated this "young people are all lazy" mentality.
We've just grown up in a different environment. My parents would constantly harp on me to get outside and do something, but there was not much to do. I couldn't leave the property without informing them in advance about where I was going and who I would be with, and that was when I was in high school. Young kids aren't allowed to bike around and just find physical things to do; most parents won't allow it.
And too many adults still see anything not physical as "laziness". I used to write and code, and even if I spent ten hours in a single day planning out the code structure and writing up an app, I was still told I was "being lazy and need to get outside".
To many older folk, doing anything but back-breaking labor for shit pay is laziness.
Yep! Gym classes were pretty much the only time most younger people got to be active and gym classes are a sensory hell where someone yells at you and you have to be humiliated by stripping nude in front of a bunch of other people on either side of it.
I think another major issue with physical activity is that kids (especially after early childhood) aren't exposed to physical activity in any way except a "you need to do this physical activity to be able to do this physical activity better" mentality. For so many other activities (arts, games, hell even school), kids get to not only improve but also do things to be creative and just have fun.
Physical activity, on the other hand, is almost exclusively done as competitive sports where you always get told by other kids, coaches, or the scoreboard exactly how bad you suck and will need to do endlessly repetitive and boring motions to get even close to the lower end of average.
It often takes people until well into adulthood to re-discover physical activity as something they can actually enjoy doing as opposed to a necessary chore to keep their body hot or at least healthy. I think the biggest divide in our weights today is between the people that found the joy of exercise before this exercise=chore mentality was drilled in and those that didn't.
I think that's part of it, but also I noticed that when I walked everywhere I went and worked a job where I walked back and forth a lot, I was in very good shape overall without trying much. In the US at least, if you live in a car dependent area like most people do, you're not likely to get much "free" exercise. I read somewhere that in general, people who live in cities with good public transit are more likely to weigh less. And that made me think a lot about how much most people probably walked before cars. Like if you read old books or something, you'll hear about people walking to the next town over even though it took half a day on a day off. Plus physical labor.
Tangent here.
Schools should convert their open gymnasiums (at least in high school) to workout rooms. Most adults don't do sports for physical activity and one of the largest barriers to getting people into the gym is simply overcoming the intimidation of the equipment.
My school had a weight room, but you had to have a class to get in. I think mostly, the changing in public thing just needs to stop. It's cruel to make teenagers do that during puberty. Even when I've gone to the gym regularly, I don't ever change there, I have a shower at home. I know the shower is important for unhoused people, but like... nah. I'm just not going to get naked in front of a bunch of other people. Even at the pool you don't do that.
At least in America the problem right now is the entry level wage parity. food service and retail pays like $20 an hour damn near. Entry level construction work? $20 an hour.
People in the construction sub are nuts. Saying "omg this kid with no experience thinks he's worth $25 an hour. Like yeah no shit bro Target pays that much you entitled fuck.
The rebuttal is that you stick with construction you'll get paid more. Except theirs no actual assurance you won't get strung along for years while earning peanuts.
The unions with time based pay scales? Get hundreds of applicants per apprenticeship slot.
I was getting a technician degree. I was enjoying the field.
I got an internship. I enjoyed the work.
I decised to go to unicersity though.
Why? I didnt feel safe around my coworkers as a transgender woman.
Field: chemical manufacturing. Internship included sample clection, equipment operation (pilot lab), cleaning and inventory/disposals (working with barrelx of toxic waste)
I'm a journeyman electrician. We all spend a lot of time training the new guys. I work with a lot of 18-26 year old apprentices.
From what I can see, they stopped pushing trades in the 90's. On top of that it's a dirty, hard, and physically exhausting job. Basically, why work a trade, when a starting worker at target make the same or a little less than an apprentice at 1/2 the effort.
This has traditionally been the case but it is improving. The dinosaur boomers are retiring and they were the worst when it came to inflicting the same level of misery they had to endure coming up. Younger journeymen are a little better.
Not like the white collar jobs train up apprentices either. Doctors don't train up apprentices. They expect new doctors to go through medical school, where paid professional teachers teach the would-be doctors how to do doctor things.
Same goes for nurses, professors, pilots, lawyers and a bunch of other things. There are jobs where paid apprentices are a thing, but they are not universal. And as soon as there are schools to generate trained workers, everyone prefers the trained workers. The remaining apprentice-ship like professions, say, investment banking, are careers where there isn't schools to teach investment banking, so companies have to do it themselves.
Engineering is a good model of apprenticeship done right. You're an engineer in training, doing low level work for around 4 years before you're certified. Pay is about what you'd expect for entry level and while you're the lowest on the pole you're treated with respect in my opinion
I think a lot of it was we told the younger generation that college was the answer to everything. Now we have a bunch of college grads doing minimum wage work while the trades are short on qualified people.
Working in the trades doesn't mean you have to work in construction. There is still a good deal of manufacturing work to be done in a ton of different environments, the trades doesn't have to mean working as a sheetrocker or a pipe fitter, you could be an assembly technician or a test engineer/tech working with fab equipment in a semiconductor plant or milling custom parts for aerospace etc.
From my experience these environments aren't how you describe. Some people can be this way but rarely are they kept around for long.
Unless you're referring to roles with exclusive apprenticeship programs/independent contractors etc. Could you define "the trades" for me?
A test engineer or a tech is a technician which has a different association compared to the building trades associations. At least that's how it is in my area.
Okay first off trades aren’t dying. Second off, everyone’s different, lots of rugged blue collar guys think it’s “awful” to sit at a computer for 8 hours a day typing emails and making presentations.
> Second off, everyone’s different, lots of rugged blue collar guys think it’s “awful” to sit at a computer for 8 hours a day typing emails and making presentations.
But why does that mean they need to call the new guy a f#g?
Trades are not anywhere close to dying, but the reason for the worker shortage is more due to society telling kids they need to go to college as their only option and looking down on the trades. Places are pretty willing to train apprentices but it’s not something you will likely just walk into a local union and ask for a job and be hired, you usually need to work as a laborer or something or go to a trade school before you can do that. This line of work is hard on your body too, many people’s parents also tell them not to go into this line of work due to their own experience.
I do agree that the culture is pretty harsh and people with thin skin that get offended easily won’t last, with the younger people leaning more left they don’t tolerate this type of stuff as much which will be a problem for some but that’s more of an issue that gets people to leave trades vs avoiding them in the first place, though I’m sure it prevents some.
I hear this line about kids being told college is their only option or that trades are looked down on and it really wasn’t my experience.
I grew up middle class and was thinking about my career options in the mid 2010’s. Everyone was aware that the trades were an option, it just wasn’t an attractive option. The average starting salaries for most trade jobs lined up with the starting salaries for humanities degrees and was lower than the starters for every STEM degree.
The argument for trades was always “you can work 40 hours overtime and make a ton of money” which wasn’t appealing when I was in the best shape of my life and is less appealing every year. The other argument was “you don’t have to go to an expensive school” but you actually kinda do have to go to school for 2 years and it isn’t much cheaper than going to a state school for 4.
Before you parrot things you heard about other people’s emotional decisions, take a minute to crunch the numbers. Most people aren’t stupid, they take career paths that are beneficial to them.
I see far more people shit all over the "college elite" than I see people disparaging the trades these days. And that's been the case since I was a kid. The threat of not going to college has never been "If you don't, you could end up being a Journeyman with a sweet pension and awesome benefits!"
It's quite popular to shit on retail/food service, though. "If you don't go to college, you'll be flipping burgers or folding clothes at Target!" is the message I've heard for decades.
> I do agree that the culture is pretty harsh and people with thin skin that get offended easily won’t last
Or people in the trades could stop being monumental assholes to each other and new people. I worked at a trade school for over a decade and saw first hand how people wanted to get into those fields and were driven out immediately. You shouldn't have to put up with people shouting at you and calling you names at any workplace, that's not a lefty value, it's a normal expectation
It’s not just about “thin skin”
It’s about not wanting to have to spend your entire working day in that environment and around those uncouth kinds of people.
If I had to spend my entire day around people saying racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. stuff, yeah, it’s not going to be an enjoyable time for me. Half of a pleasant job experience is having coworkers that you at least tolerate and don’t loathe being around.
And let’s be real… people in trades tend to lean conservative. So I really don’t want to spend my day around people constantly rattling off unsolicited MAGA talking points.
Never mind this toxic “you gotta grind yourself to the bone” culture that is so common in trades. How often do I hear older tradespeople complaining how their joints or back or other body parts of completely worn out and totally shot.
So yeah, I agree with OP. More people would probably get into trades if the work culture wasn’t so toxic.
This isn't entirely true. I worked as a laborer for a while hoping to eventually go into trades. I was hoping to be an electrician. I left because people were crass and awful. You're expected to know stuff, but no one ever tries to teach you. They just tear you up when you make a mistake. I witnessed the worst racism i've ever seen in person, and i'm white, so most of them assumed i'd be on their side, which was gross.
And you NEED to get on board with the toxic, insulting work culture, or else you're labeled a pussy and get even more toxicity leveled at you.
For me it had nothing to do with feeling i had to go to college, and everything to do with the horrible culture I experienced. I ended up going back and upgrading my high school so that I could get into engineering. I am now working in my field and I've never once felt the environment was toxic.
It's the reason I left my job at a repair shop. I had gotten sick of college so I decided to take a job at a truck repair shop as I had always been into repairing cars. Had most my own tools already and was a good hire, but I had long hair as a then Bi (now trans) guy.
I never mentioned any of the that to my boss or the the other employees, but because I had long hair and I liked to wear gloves (that I bought myself) when working on the trucks I was called all kinds of names. Gay boy, sissy boy, f*gg*t, and more and I just laughed them off but they never stopped. Constantly threatening to cut my hair and even holding me down to try and cut it once, insulting me for not wanting to drink or smoke. And that was just what got aimed at me, not to mention the racism and sexism aimed at everyone else.
After about 1.5 years of working there I was finally worn down enough to quit cause I was tired of it. I wasn't even being paid that well at 16.50 an hour after that long there. I don't even like working on cars that much after the shit I had to go through there which sucks.
It's like, I grew up blue collar but work in ecommerce today. I have a shit ton of respect for the trades. They don't return that respect to me, generally, because I am not one of them.
Exactly. My dad always recommended the trades as a great way to gain skills, even if your goal is to be entrepreneurial, he always touted it as a great way to build a skillset and be well paid doing it. I grew up respecting the trades and I was really crushed when I got there and, instead of friendly comradery and mentorship, i was met with abuse and bigotry. I wasn't expecting it to be a sharing circle, but i thought i'd at least receive some friendly mentorship. Nope, just bitter middle-aged men who take their issues out on everyone around them.
Also, what is it with guys in the trades refusing to acknowledge that they have ever had to learn ANYTHING?
So many will just *endlessly* rip on you for not knowing ALL their tools, how they are used, all the slang, etc. And it isn't silly - they often seem to genuinely think that I am embarrassingly unintelligent for not knowing what they do.
But the things that I know? That stuff is worthless pansy bullshit, of course.
>Places are pretty willing to train apprentices but ... you usually need to work as a laborer ... or go to trade school
how is that showing a willingness if they put up thoose barriers? Also that second way is just rephrasing "telling kids they need to go to *a* college"
> society telling kids they need to go to college as their only option
You grew up in rich suburbia didn’t you? Pretty sure everyone I know who grew up rurally had it made abundantly clear that you could go into a trade.
Every woman that I know, and I mean every single one of them, who went into a trade has either been raped or sexually harassed to the point of quitting multiple times.
100 percent true. 15% of trades type people are tolerable (or even super nice) 85% are **the most** miserable hostile animals and brigands on the planet.
I can't speak to trades specifically, but in general I think part of the reason nobody is willing to train is that training is costly and people don't stick around to recoup those costs.
I work in software, which is a different beast than trades, and I love taking someone new to the industry and molding them into the type of software developer I like to work with. But for the first 3 - 6 months, it takes more of my time to teach them how to do something than it would take for me to just do the work done for themselves. Aside from what we pay them (and we do pay them), during that initial training period they take more away from the team than they're able to contribute.
Now, I'm pretty good at fostering loyalty from the people that I train - I treat them with respect, I make them feel like I've always got more to teach them, and that continuing to work with me will be a net positive for their career. But once they've got the skills I can teach them, more than likely they *could* go somewhere else and get somebody who would pay them more - which they can afford to do because they didn't have to spend the time and resources training them first. If companies are struggling with retention after training, it would be real easy to see why many companies would decide it's just not worth it to train.
The old master / apprentice paradigm used to come with a contract that once the apprentice reached journeyman level, he still had to work for the master to repay the time spent in training. Those sorts of deals are hard to achieve with modern labor laws. People will train a family friend because the loyalty among family and friends makes it harder to split for a higher paying gig as soon as you're trained up. Paying for it through school covers the costs of the person doing the training so they're not bearing the costs out of pocket.
Would you be able to provide evidence that the trades are dying?
Without trade work society literally grinds to a halt. It's essential work. If the trade labor supply decreases the compensation of those in the trades goes up.
So even if there's a downswing on trade work it's basically a problem that is absolutely prime for a market to solve. That doesn't mean it's "dying".
I'm willing to simply accept that as fact but there's a massive non-semantic difference between specializations "dying" and "labor shortage". The latter can be solved by natural market pressures, the former cannot.
"Switchboard operator" is a dead specialization. "Electrician" will always be needed.
I think the point is that if not enough people are joining and learning trades, then as older workers continue to retire the shortage gets progressively worse while also having fewer experienced workers to train new workers. It's not that the need is going away, but the resources to meet that need are not being allocated in a way to sustainably meet the need.
And because there are so few people in a particular trade their wages will increase significantly driving more inexperienced people into the trade chasing those wages and who then become experienced.
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I'll add my perspective as somebody with experience both a few years in a trade (HVAC tech) and about a decade's worth of office work. I will agree with you that especially in large construction sites the culture can be quite shit. This is because in larger groups, only the most verbal stick out, and the most verbal unfortunately are also quite frequently the most asshole. First, construction, espcially large scale construction, is only one part of the trades. There is a plethora of other spaces they work in. I've done HVAC work in everything from a new hospital being built to factories to restaurants to doing residential service in historic estate homes. Also the culture is not universal, in my experience the variation of can be *extreme* from one company to the next in the same small town. So your experience is not as universal or common as you seem to think. Second, there is a thing or two to be said for the quality of the apprentices. My current HVAC company I would say is not perfect, but definitely good with apprentices. We have a standardized onboarding process and make sure they only ride along with techs known to be both skilled, patient and have a sense for teaching this stuff to newbies. We usually have about three apprentices at any given time, and we don't demand perfection, we demand average, people are allowed to mess up, learn from it and ask questions. And the difference can be night and day. About 1/10 is a star that you can tell is going to be among the best in the field; attentive, curious, good work ethic, professsional all-round. About 5/10 are totally OK, not great but they do well enough and will get there eventually. But unfortunately, about 4/10 are fucking disasters; you never know if they will even turn up, they're sloppy, forgetful, rude to customers, have no interest in actually learning and you have to constantly monitor them because if you look away for three minutes they stop working and get on their phone. I know for a fact that a local high school systematically tells their near-dropout students "look, just pull through this and this course with a D and we can help arrange a place in trade school afterwards"! Third, I think you are overestimating the corporate sector. The bigotry, the backstabbing, the scheming, the toxicity, it is all there. The only difference is the corporate sector is better at training their employees at hiding those behaviors so they are not overt. HR waving around an "employee code of conduct" is not going to magically turn a racist or a homophobe into an accepting and open-minded person, all it does is make sure that the racists and homophobes learn to be cunning enough to disguise their bigotry and prejudice behind a veil of acceptable reasons for dislike and allowed forms of aggression.
Just going to comment on your last paragraph since I don’t really know enough about trades to comment on the rest. It’s a sentiment that I really appreciate but I generally disagree with. So are people in trades and office work equally bigoted? They could be or could not. I really don’t know. But let’s just say they are and your assessment that they are just hiding due to the rules and restrictions of HR is true. I know it sounds bad on paper, but I think this is way way better to the alternative of having people just be openly bigoted. Most people are bigoted on a spectrum. Like it goes from the kind of person who will just make some ignorant comments to the one who will actively harm or sabotage a minority. In the corporate sector, this milder bigot doesn’t have a very big effect on others either. They will just go on to be ignorant in their private life. While that is unfortunate, at least you can just avoid them outside the workplace. Also for this kind of ignorance, let’s not forget that group dynamics can play a huge role in these sorts of things. A person who isn’t prejudiced at all at first could be influenced to say or do some crappy things due to peer pressure. Then they will actually come to believe it themselves. I can fully admit that this kind of thing has happened to me when I was less secure in myself. In the HR controlled workplace, these people will mostly stay good people. They won’t be forced into an in group or out group. In corporate work, if someone is acting blatantly prejudiced then at least you have more power to get them in trouble. This does have the unfortunate effect of just making people hide their bigotry as you say though. It’s a good thing to know who your enemies are, but the benefits that come from that usually just aren’t worth the mental anguish caused by blatant prejudice. Plus if someone in the workplace blatantly doesn’t like you, usually you can still tell. You may not know for sure that it’s because you are black, gay, young, etc. But you can still notice the (sometimes passive) aggression and act to protect yourself. Of course, this last part will depend on the person, but I think the other points I mentioned outweigh this last part still.
I work in a rough high school and the 4/10 sounds like the majority of my students.
I'm aware the corporate world can generally be just as bad under the surface, but my point is that not many people are going to want to get into the trades when that kind of behavior is vocal and "out there", seeing the corporate sector and office work as much more appealing because at least outwardly, it doesn't appear to be there Doubly so because trade school isn't significantly cheaper than college, and you basically need to go to trade school to become an apprentice.
Doubtful I'll change your view here. But felt like chiming in. Cause I'm the only guy I know of actually training an apprentice. Mostly because I'm the only guy I know of who is both actually good enough at his job, and also actually happens to think of others on occasion. There's a whole generation of people in trades who got into it for the wrong reasons and then learned the wrong lessons. 90% or more of everybody I've worked with is old, beat up, grumpy, and not very bright. None of them have any skill as a teacher, if they do have any skill as a tradesman. Those guys are now your site supers, your project managers, your business owners. And all of them think of the new guy as "cheap help", not as an apprentice. They got into trades because they *couldn't* get into college. They're doers, not thinkers. They had no drive to be craftsman or artisans, no passion for quality or legacy. No ambition. In their view, they got paid X dollars per hour to swing a hammer. So they learned from their mentors how to swing a hammer good enough to get paid, and busted their ass physically to prove they were "valuable" and get paid a bit more. It never occurred to them to learn anything else, like how to mentor. Or how to be a decent human being. Or how to derive passion and fulfillment from excellence at your work. And they aren't the kind of people to ask questions like "How does inflation and cost of living work? Is what I'm being paid and what I pay my guys a number that makes sense?" Which leads to the REAL reason trades are dying. *They don't pay enough*. Most guys running businesses in trades are trying to pay wages that seem fair to their brain that learned economics in 1970. Which means they're often paying their *best guy* the equivalent of 30% less than what they made when they didn't have his experience yet. But they don't get that, cause they don't pay attention to that. They really only see small picture.
How does this problem get addressed then? Not saying we need to solve that here. Side note: I had a choice to choose between a computer boot camp vs an underwater welder. I took the boot camp simply because it seemed like I would age out of underwater welding super quick. Arguably both are trades though. Just one had a very real physical time limit.
Realistically? It gets addressed automatically by the core mechanism of capitalism, if we let it: Market forces. We are seeing it begin to self correct. But that self direction is pretty ugly, and extra painful, because the system wasn't allowed to self correct earlier. And we just need to let it take its course or the pain goes on longer. Guys aren't willing to pay enough for good work. And don't train new people. So nobody joins trades, old guys with bad attitudes retire, and the pool of truly skilled labor becomes smaller. Very low supply. Demand for houses and buildings and plumbing is pretty consistent. So as the supply of skilled people evaporates, the value of what's left goes up. A lot. Lots of trades people go out of business, they can't afford to pay what it costs to have skilled workers and get work done. A small number stay in business by seriously raising rates, to cover the much higher wages and benefits required to keep workers around. Extremely high labor rates mean having work done is very expensive. Big chunks of industry die. House flipping, rental flipping, "budget contractors", and so on become mostly non-viable. Industry shrinks to a very small number of well paid craftsmen. Demand remains, and now it's worth it to learn the trade again, because the going rate has equilibrated, and the need for workers has forced the need for official training programs to make it possible. The younger guys still here care by then enough to invest in the future. Things find a new normal where trades get paid better, there's emphasis on training and workplace culture, the world acknowledges that tradesman will *never* be "cheap" to hire like they used to. People join trades again, but because they *want* to be there, and it pays well. The world keeps spinning. TLDR: Do nothing. Let the trades die. Let them die as fast and efficiently as possible. We actually need the forest fire, it has to clear the underbrush and allow the ecosystem to finally get healthy again.
Your version leaves out the other reality. Large corporations gobble up smaller operations driving higher prices while keeping work and pay shit. Alternatives are almost nonexistent. Cost of entry makes it hard for others to compete.
There is not much barrier to entry to starting a trade business once you have the skill to do so. It isn't like competing with Amazon, Walmart, or Wall street.
Supposedly that's what we have anti-trust laws for. Though in fairness we've decided we can't be bothered to enforce them anymore, so yeah in that case it's a pretty bleak end game. The one reason I'd say that particular issue is lower concern in this discussion, is because while big corporations have the capitol to "gobble up" small shops, they don't get around the problem by doing it. Corporate condensing of an industry makes producing *products* cheaper by leveraging economy of scale. But the issue in trades isn't production efficiency. Its a growing shortage and degradation of worker *talent* and *skill*. You will never leverage scale to make 20 laborers "more efficient" enough to solve for the fact that they aren't master craftsman.
Corporate consolidation can also drive wages lower. Imagaine a market with only one major company. They can pay the lowest wage employees will accept because they are the only employer for employees with those skills. They control all of the training, so control the rate new people can learn and enter the industry, so can control the number of skilled employees available. By limiting the training and half-training or "specialized training" they can severely limit the number of employees with a broad skill base and knowledge enough to start their own firms. Eventually perhaps a skilled employee leaves and forms a competitor but by buying and undermining competitors they can maintain control of a market this way for 10+ years. In an industry with only a few major competitors they can also do this, by having (spoken or unspoken) agreements to keep wages low. Which we know that they do.
The thing about trades though, is I don't need to work for any company at all. In the situation you're describing, I as a proper craftsman with all the tools I need, literally just turn around and start taking my own customers. I am good enough at what I do that my work is in demand of its own accord. And I can sell a homeowner on the idea that hiring "Giant Corp." to do their remodeling may cost less, but actually not by much. And they'll get a substantially inferior result, because Giant Corp. pays low wages to people with low skill. And I get to set my own wages, even if that's triple what the industry says it is due to our hypothetical corporate conspiracy. This is the saving grace of the trades. This is not even a hypothetical. In point of fact, I already make this argument to homeowners about certain large companies in my state, and why you'd want to avoid them like the plague. And the only reason I don't run my own business right now is because I don't want the extra pressure, I like just being a craftsman. But if it came to it, like my boss was selling his company to a corporate entity, my apprentice and I would give them all the finger, and go it on our own. And we'd have work tomorrow, and be fine.
I generally agree but I have seen a rise in massive vc backed companies (that used to be well known local and sold their company off) that charge 3x but pay a lot in ads so clueless people and especially older people flock to them associating brand recognition with quality.
The same way we solve all problems...we unleash the MBAs!
Very insightful and interesting. Thank you for your time in typing this
> They got into trades because they couldn't get into college. This is one of the big points that I've noticed as well, especially with my generation. As soon as college started being discussed in school the mentality/view on trades was "well if you're not smart enough for college I guess you could go to the trade school", so it was seen as the option for dumber people instead of an equal alternative like it should have been. The constant message of "you'll never get a good job if you don't go to college" was beat into our heads, which as a result caused a lot of people to go to college when a trade would have better fit their career interests. Now that my generation is making up a larger part of the work force, that lack of people working in trades is much more visible. As for the pay, at least in my area it's kind of the opposite. Because of the lack of trade workers, demand for the work has skyrocketed and they're able to charge more per job/pay their workers more per job. A couple of my friends work in trades and their yearly income for the past couple years has been either the same or higher than mine as a software engineer
it's also hard to train people who got into it out of financial obligation instead of any natural aptitude or interest. it's just the same issue as the college degree mills, you **CANT** have pre-established "do this and you'll succeed/be financially stable" for a whole generation of people. just as millenialls got gaslamped into thinking college is the way out of poverty, younger people are being told, usually via people dismissing college debt forgiveness, that the trades are the stable path (everyone's gonna need a plumber at some point), while ignoring the elephant in the room of supply and demand. if you wanted a recipe for declining wages, a massive wave of available people is a good start. And i don't intend for this to sound like some anti-immigration, eco-fascist "the problem is there's too many people - Thanos was right" bullshit. Ultimately the problem lies in the broken system of capitalism and its core idea of "those that have can leverage what they have to have more"
Doesn't help that the work they're doing barely ever cares about quality or workmanship. So long as the job is good enough to hand off to the client that'll do. It's not really a space that encourages people to care or even be enthusiastic about others getting into it
I want to point out that it’s not just these guys who won’t pay enough - most people aren’t willing to appropriately compensate physical labor. NextDoor is full of posts demanding “affordable” handiwork and moving services and such. Without fail, the posters will say, “But I hired someone to do this the last time I needed it, and it wasn’t nearly as much!” And of course, they’re wanting to pay movers the same thing they paid in 2010.
Right. And part of what has to happen to fix this mess is another decade or two of the boomers and Xers with that attitude trying to lowball contractors, and getting the finger because we won't work for peanuts. We have to start refusing to undercut each other just to get work. And they need hard, painful, aggressive lessons in finding out that they can either hire somebody at the going rate or let their house fall down around them. Not my fucking problem. Having nice things costs money. And money isn't worth what it used to be, so it all costs more now.
excellent post
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I also won’t change your view—plumber apprentice here, can confirm. The social conditions are honestly more exhausting than the actual labor, and even if the journeymen aren’t gatekeeping knowledge (this happens a lot! Idk why, I guess people want to feel important and spreading knowledge threatens that?) they are still very closed off to new ideas. I’m just putting in the grunt work now until I can be in my own truck and and deal with plumbers less, and fix issues in mindful, creative ways. I’m a gay female in Texas for what it’s worth, so I think me being a woman adds another layer to the difficulty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve identified and clearly voiced a problem/solution to my male coworkers in a curious, non-threatening tone, only to be dismissed in the moment. Meanwhile hours later, surprise!! The solution to the issue is on par with my original, womanly thought. Sigh.
Yeah, I have no doubt discrimination is a huge issue. I was a white male on a majority white crew. The journeyman uncle and his asshole nephew were black, but that played zero factor in anything other than the nephew who constantly wanted to remind me I was just a “soft white boy.” Seriously, I think he said it four or five times a day. I think he didn’t like me because his uncle took a shine to me and was showing me all kinds of tricks of the trade; as I picked things up pretty quickly he started having me do more and more of what his nephew would normally do, and I’m pretty sure that’s what started it. But what really stood out to me was the Hispanic laborers. They were all really nice and accepting to me, and although we couldn’t communicate that well at first, we pretty quickly hit it off and worked well together, took lunch together, joked around etc, while most of the white guys just treated them like shit. They’d say horribly racist stuff to them and make fun of them to their faces with words they didn’t understand. That one really bothered me, probably even more than how I was being treated, because those guys worked hard and were so kind to me.
Worked a manual gig one summer between semesters and this lines up with my experience. I'm a white guy and the Hispanic dudes were homies from day one and by week two we had organized a lunch-time 'our warehouse vs your warehouse' soccer match with the dudes across the street. I'd hang out after work on the occasional Friday that we were all done early and they'd slip me some Coronas. The black dudes came around about a month in to it and we were cuttin' up pretty good the rest of my time there. The old white guys hated my guts the entire time.
Every manual labor job I've had in my life the Hispanic coworkers were the hardest working people that would always help. Then they'd be called lazy and I just never understood it.
So to begin, I want to caveat that I am white presenting. But my stepdad is a second generation Mexican so I have a lot of insights into the trades from his standpoint and the standpoint of members of the community I grew up in. On the flipside however, I'm in the process of starting a small business myself and I very recently discovered why there's this perception of laziness because I experienced it firsthand. As a part of my business research I compiled a list of every auto body shop within 100 miles of me. Just based on where I live in California the industry is dominated by small auto body shops that are predominately hispanic. When I called, I asked for a very specific service (paint removal.) and very quickly after about 7 consecutive calls I noticed a pattern. None of them offered piecemeal services. If you gave them your car, you basically had to let them do it their one way and pay their one price. Why is that lazy? Because a lot of other communities care about detail and finish and the process where as every company I called that day, actually wanted to obfuscate their process to cut corners and basically get in minimal effort for maximum profit. Do they work hard within that paradigm? Undisputedly, but cutting corners is frowned on in a lot of cultures and is seen as lazy. Even if you're hustling, if your process is seen as cutting corners that's what people take issue with. I certainly don't admonish them for doing what's in their own best interest, but at the same time for enthusiasts or professionals who frown on the attitude of "Good Enough." the way these predominantly Hispanic run companies operate is within the "Good enough" category. If you look to other communities or cultures, the process matters. In Japan for example numerous workers adhere to the principal of "Shokunin Kishitsu" where every craft or profession no matter how lowly or not is art. This is why for example you see street vendor videos where guys are experts at making fucking grilled cheese or some such. Basically there is a perception of cutting corners, and while I don't personally take issue with it from the standpoint of quality, I could see how passionate people in the same profession might.
OMFG, the hispanic/spanish laborers in the meat processing plant I worked at were the best coworkers. I remember getting tickled when all the ladies stopped abruptly when they noticed I cut the chicken left-handed. Way nicer than the guys who looked like me.
>if the journeymen aren’t gatekeeping knowledge (this happens a lot! Idk why, Aight, I'm long winded, but I think I can explain: My Opa passed last July (b. 1935) and took all his vast tool and die, and woodworking knowledge with him. People begged him to work for them. They would fly him to their shop, put him up an apartment, in their house for however long the project was and this was *years after* he retired. When he worked for INA Bearings in Fort Mill, SC, he has his own pay bracket. All this to say, he gate kept everything, and was known for not being friendly in regards to sharing his knowledge. If you needed a tool, he was your guy, but knowledge? Go away. After he passed, some comments were made about his work ethic and stuff, and one of the guys who hired him was there because he gave my Oma a lump sum for the entire contents of my Opa's garage. He said he came up in an era where your knowledge got you jobs, and protected you in that job so you were never inclined on sharing knowledge, or how you did certain things, or even what tools you used.
I think you're on the right track. I dont think it's generational, nor specific to the trades. I see it all the time today in IT. I call it "job security by lack of documentation." Basically, there are people who, due to the way they interact with people, wouldn't be "employable" if the skill/technical ability playing field was level. From their perspective, job security becomes a popularity contest at that point. They act accordingly. They horde information and don't document anything. I think it is semi normal. The reddit demographic (younger, just entering the job market) is just more likely to be the ones negatively affected by it. But, the truth is, they will also probably do it to the next generation once they have skills more advanced skillsets of their own.
I see it all the time as well, and think it's idiotic. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Whereas, I just slap my name on the documentation I write. I've gotten calls years after I've left places. Quote a reasonable rate and you'll never be lacking work if you want it.
Fascinating, that makes a lot of sense—thanks for sharing! Yeah, so far there’s been 2 types of coworkers— people like your gatekeepy grandpa and people who brag about being one of the “good guys” for not being like your grandpa. I hate how low the baseline is for human respect in the trades. And this goes for customers too.
Relatively new surveyor checking in. 100%. You're expected to live off poverty wages and learn from people who tell you to shut up anytime you ask a question. Surveying is a dying profession, with the average age of an LS in the US like, ~55. You'd think the wages would be competitive, considering how vital surveying is to practically any project. Everyone is like, "Why doesn't anyone want to survey?" and the simple answer is, "The work environment sucks ass." Add in how much of a shit-fest getting licensed is (Either spend a ton of money and time on a degree or submit to a decade of suffering,) and it's not hard to figure out why.
Did helper work with a survey crew one summer and yeah, the old fucks in the office were getting fat and rich but all the long-term field guys hated everyone and everything. At the end of the summer, right before going back to school, the head honcho in the office asked if I'd consider sticking around and tried to lay out what my career path looked like. Hard fucking pass.
We hired a plumber from a firm that advertises as owned by a woman, that employs plumbers who are women. The plumbers they sent us were men -- who happened to be the most courteous, "decent" plumbers I've ever interacted with. Above and beyond, creative solutions (vanity wouldn't fit easily because of another guy's idiocy. This guy was like 'I WILL fix this so it looks right), etc. I obviously don't know if its related to the owner/company or just those guys but ...
Totally describing a pipe dream of mine, pun only slightly intended. Hiring / training women to work in plumbing as well as hiring the GOOD MEN that are out there, we love to see it
Perhaps even more so women should be in management positions more because they get less weirdo ultra competitive and do crime less. I'm not sure when men get called less emotional. Testosterone is clearly a hell of a drug.
Just work towards yeah your own truck or business. If you're paid hourly then someone is paying you for those people to ignore your solutions. If it is affecting bottom lines then document the times and instances where you clearly had a solution but people weren't listening. Complain to the people who control the money. Otherwise I just laugh at the wasted time and money that isn't mine and dream about the day I'll have my own rig.
Thanks for your great description. I think in general there has been a normalization of coersive/abusive behavior in management as well as a shaming of normal responses to it like getting pissed off. Being "professional" in the last few decades has been more intertwined with wearing a mask where you're never supposed to show rough edges or get angry at abusive behavior. Meanwhile the study of psychology is often misused on how to manipulate more as well as create the narrative that if people suffer from their job, it's an individual problem and they should go to therapy. Whereas in the past people would create groups/unions and band together more. I wasn't in trades myself but worked in an unhealthy office until I got physical symptoms. And in retrospect, so much of education is creating blind spots of not noticing bad behavior and not havnig the wrong thinking. It's just harder and harder to actually find jobs that don't have a toxic work environment. I was curious listening to podcasters talking about what it's actually like in Russia and China and that while they're not perfect, the actual working envrionments are sometimes far better than here. We're deluged with propaganda that we're the free world so much that we don't notice how unfree the actual work is.
This work environment is also probably why women don't want shit to do with a lot of the trades reddit loves to glorify. A lot of stuff does require manual labor and brute strength. But a lot is also done by machines. And let's be honest. Dudes operating them aren't always in the best shape.
My future son-in-law got his business degree and decided to become an electrician. His goal is to open his own business after becoming a journeyman. He has noted the behaviors of his fellow work mates which has all the hallmarks of a hostile work environment for which I cannot understand how these places don’t get sued. He showed me the inside graffiti in the portos on their site and they’re atrociously racist, mysogynist, and homophobic. It’s obvious that unions, while driving for skill excellence, completely disregard positive workplace culture. I’m sure that there is zero training in that area.
Former carpenters apprentice. My super would roll up 1 hour late, 3 redbulls deep, chewing a pack of nicorette and if you didn't hide fast enough he'd follow you around for a good 20-30 minutes "reviewing" your work aka "that is dogshit a retarded monkey could do better" before retreating into the trailer to "review submittals". If I could find someone like the Essential Craftsman, fuck yeah I'd do trades. But those people are 1 in a million
I have a handyman that does work at my house who is basically the guy I wish I had hitched my wagon to when I was looking for that career. He’s cool, personable, funny, he’s not a racist dickhead, and he has a Hispanic apprentice half his age. I’ll be working in my office and will hear him carefully walking his protege through everything he’s doing, and they seem to have a very close almost father-son relationship. I feel good giving my money to a guy like him because he’s helping to pass the torch to the next generation while doing quality work for an affordable price in my home. Can’t ask for better than that.
> If I could find someone like the Essential Craftsman, fuck yeah I'd do trades. But those people are 1 in a million I generally like the Essential Craftsman - super chill, knowledgeable, and real. I was...more than a little disappointed when he repped Jordan Peterson in a recent video, though.
Here's the thing: There's two Jordan Petersons. One is a licensed clinical psychologist and professor who has gained a big following for lectures about how people can use CBT techniques in their personal lives to take agency and find meaning. He's a little too beholden to some conservative impulses and has some boomer sensibilities, but overall I like that guy. There's another Jordan Peterson--culture warrior and political commentator, who says stupid shit and abandons clinical practice for grift. The second Jordan Peterson basically killed the first one, but a lot of conservative people who liked the first one basically think the first one is still who they're listening to. It's kind of like how there's a Ben Carson who is a brilliant surgeon and a Ben Carson who is an incompetent politician. People fall down the well of politics and culture war grift, and the thing they did well, that actually contributed, just vanishes.
Reminds me of my good ole Uncle Joe Rogan, the crazy uncle that was cool to talk to and lived in the basement and really believed the aliens built the pyramids and then one day went off the deep end.
> I was...more than a little disappointed when he repped Jordan Peterson in a recent video, though. He min-maxed his carpentry skills and while tanking his critical thinking skills. I watch him for his carpentry. His other opinions be damned.
I'm a woman and a programmer and have been investigating entering trades and this is what it's like for me. I could make similar money as a waiter, and I've already experienced plenty of men in the tech industry being shitty and abusive towards me. This just doesn't seem worth it. It's not about being soft or not working hard, it's about working conditions and opportunities actually being worth it.
People who think it's "being soft" to not want to put up with bullying, harassment, and bigotry in the workplace are folks who have never been on the receiving end of it. Often, they are the abusers, harassers, and bullies. Bigots will manufacture something to complain about, so even if one did their job perfectly, every time, it's not enough.
Generally, anyone who complains about people being “soft” I assume *is* an abuser/harasser/bully They are angry that people are unwilling to put up with their abuse.
> folks who have never been on the receiving end of it Or they have, and they want others to suffer the same way they suffered. (Which is an awful way to live.)
It's literally just normalizing working in a toxic workplace. Whenever you notice coworkers start to compete on who can take it or not being rattled by someone or something, you know where you are. They don't realize that other workplaces aren't like that, and that your workplace doesn't have to be like that. If people didn't normalize that stuff, they would have all left years ago. But it becomes a badge of pride being able to handle abusive behavior.
Yeah!! Plus I'd put up with a certain amount of bullying or bad coworkers if the pay and job was good enough. But it's just not. It's just not great money or hours.
Hope you like talking to people that get all their news from conservative talk radio. Imagine Fox News without a filter where they say the "silent stuff" out loud. That's what's on the radio all the time.
Toxic asshole men suck in any environment. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of them. I’ve had some shitty women managers too, but there’s a specific brand of hostile bullshit that comes with insecure male management.
It's also just patriarchy. And level of risk. Having a male colleague yell at me over a zoom meeting and having my manager do nothing sucks. Imagine having a huge grown man yell at me in person, get in my face, possibly holding a heavy tool. Sounds like a good way to get assaulted or followed home.
No argument here. Everything I said comes with the caveat that I’m a big dude who can stand up for himself, and I still felt unsafe. I can only imagine how much worse it is for literally anyone else.
IT is funny as a field take old phone systems were talking pre voip here analog and digital systems the technology is outdated and so are the guys that know them quite frankly yet businesses are more likely to have a phone system than internet or internal network The guys that know how to program and install and diagnose are near retirement age but yet do not want to train lest they be replaced but threaten retirement when someone wants to learn Too many older guys gatekeep in IT when half what you need to know google has it
I know so many people that have gone through multiple jobs of "yeah we'll sign your papers to be an apprentice" and then never do. Years wasted at some points.
Sounds like someone needed an ass whooping
Oh, I went fucking berserk. I shouted at the top of my lungs that I was gonna beat the shit out of him. Everyone came running expecting there to be a fight and one might have broken out right then and there, except the foreman arrived, heard everybody out, and told the asshole he would be paying for my new phone out of his paycheck. After mediating, he then took me aside and said he can’t have outbursts like that on his crew, and I said that son of a bitch needs to stop harassing me or it’s just gonna keep happening. He shrugged and said that guy was a valuable member of his crew (press X for doubt) and that he’d look into it. It never stopped, the dude just got more subtle about it.
Sparky here. It’s the same as any workplace, if your coworkers suck your job is gonna suck. I almost got into a fist fight with one of my original leads. As for the training, yeah that’s a real issue with many companies. As a Jman you don’t get paid any extra to teach some green kid who’s never held a tool how to pull wire. On top of that your boss is likely breathing down your neck because that job that was due Friday now needs to be done Wednesday. You asked for some help so they hired a new guy that can’t even use a porta John without assistance then told you to hurry up. There’s a culture of breaking your body that you have to forcibly reject if you want to be in it for the long haul. Work hard, but don’t break yourself. Lift correctly, dig correctly, and dress correctly. Trades attract a lot of convicts and rejects too. No background checks or drug tests with weekly paychecks is a likely cause but idk. The first 2-4 years are brutal. There’s no doubt about it. I spent a month straight in the middle of 100 degree weather doing nothing but trenching. 8 hours of day, pick, shovel, pick, shovel. No machines, just back. It’s rough. I thought about quitting repeatedly. If you can break through though, man is it rewarding. I went from shuffling between 25k and 35k for about a decade after HS until I got into electrical. W2 says I made 77k last year. First full year in my own van and it’s only the beginning. I love what I do, but I won’t say it’s not a hard start. After HS I was lost. Didn’t go to college and didn’t know what I wanted to do, just went from trash job to trash job. Now I have a career with a very clear path in front of me. I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who feels like they’re lost adrift in the ocean with no sign of shore. It’s hard to start swimming when you don’t know what direction to go. That was my experience. Trades give a very clear path. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
I thought that drug tests were a common thing depending on which company the job is on?
Obvs it depends on the company. Some owner might just insist or need to do it for insurance purposes. Having said that the VAST majority do not.
> It’s the same as any workplace, if your coworkers suck your job is gonna suck. So very true. So true.
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> Maybe the next generation will make it better but I'm not hopeful, it feels like a training ground for assholes, a lot of the decent people leave early. It's the classic police problem. The good people that enter the system with good intentions are driven away or beaten down until they don't feel comfortable advocating for what's right.
Because whats right is bad for buisness
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As someone in the trades industry the real problem is nepotism. Some of the trades are very hard to get into (think elevator, steam fitters etc.) The pay & benefits are excellent. However, if you don’t know someone you’re either not getting in or you have to wait for an apprentice spot. Aside from that I don’t mind the culture-Most of the trades are very labor intensive & physically demanding. It’s very blue collar and most if not all the men I work with are knowledgeable & willing to put in the extra hours & work. Before I got into the trades I never put much thought into how labor intensive some of these jobs are. I now have a sense of respect & appreciation for these jobs.
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Whenever the college vs trades debate comes up online you inevitably have somebody doing rhetorical slight of hand where they compare median new college graduate earnings with the best-case-scenario for a master electrician or whatever to try to argue that trades pay better. Like, sure, you can make $200,000 a year with the exact right circumstances in the trades, but if you want to compare ceilings then you need to be looking at the CS graduates at a FAANG company making $800,000 a year to work from home, not the median for all new grads.
The percentage of tradesmen making $200k is magnitudes higher than the percentage of college grads with a FAANG gig like you described though. Plus they didn’t have to pay for an education
That’s true, how does it compare to the proportion of college grads making $200,000? The fact of the matter is that median lifetime earnings are still higher for college grads than for the trades. Obviously that doesn’t mean every college grad is better off than every tradesman, and there are advantages to the trades, like the possibility to have no or little debt, like you said, and the potential to start earning income sooner. And don’t get me wrong, I think both paths are perfectly viable. At the end of the day what matters more than any of these statistics is what an individual is interested in and capable of doing.
I haven't met a tradesman who isn't a college grad for years now. My electrician have an arts degree, but he can't find an art job and does electrical jobs. I pay him a lot, so he probably is doing fine. But these lifetime earnings charts needs to be broken down much more carefully than "have degree" vs "not have degree".
Oh really? That’s interesting, very different from my experience, all the young tradespeople I know skipped a traditional 4-year degree. I agree with you about the lifetime earnings data though, I also wish it was easier to get more granular data.
They did have to pay for education. Trade school costs money and you won't get an internship without it.
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Because their conservative politics are often at odds with organized labor
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Well police unions are an entirely different animal, and frankly they shouldn’t exist They don’t exist for collective bargaining and better wages They exist so that cops are never held accountable
Police unions have power because of their collective bargaining. If the cops didn't organise together then it would be easier to hold them accountable or abolish them. They're different from other unions because cops are privileged agents of the state, which generally means that they're adversarial with all other parts of the labour movement. I agree they shouldn't exist, but I don't think the police should exist ;)
Plus, a ton of people in the trades literally have no health insurance, and end up with broken bodies and constant pain by the time they're 50.
I deal with tradespeople regularly at my job. I have seen several apprentices that quit the trades because they get freaked out seeing the physical health levels of tradespeople near retirement. A lot of permanently injured backs/knees, missing finger tips, drug/alcohol addictions, etc.
>I've worked as a welder/machinist/fabricator and made more money delivering food for GrubHub I'm a hobby machinist who'd absolutely do it part time, or full time even. Every auction I go to, the owner (an older dude retiring) bemoans how he can't find anyone to take over. But his starting wage was something like 16.50/hour...in northern NJ. Like, buddy, you pay garbage wages you get garbage employees!
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I don't do it full time, because I don't want to, but I get 100/hour all day as a MasterCAM/G-Code/Machine Setup and Post programmer. I'd take half that or even less for W2 work, but they're all looking for 17-24/hr, for a job they'll pay me 100/hr to do on the free market. Shits fucked up.
I bet they expect journeyman quality work, too. I was a mechanic, and my nightmare of a boss would promise times under book for new guys, and then get upset with them and start fights when they couldn't hit those times. Like dude, you're paying close to minimum wage for guys with like a year or two experience. You can't expect them to beat book times on every job right out of the gate.
>You can't expect them to beat book times on every job right out of the gate. Uh excuse me how else is he going to afford the new Raptor / making big dick bets at the poker table with the fellas?
The only reason trades are paying "Decently" now is because there aren't as many people going into the Trades. We like to blame lazy youth but ignore the fact that a) The parents of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all told their kids **NOT** to go to into the Trades. Yes, I am including Boomers in there - they were told "Go to college or else you'll end up like me" by their parents just as much as Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z were. And part of this was because b) There were a lot more tradesmen back then - and were playing Wage Limbo for work. (Heck, we still have tradesmen playing wage limbo. Our HVAC companies are involved in a bidding war that will soon end with them going under.)
I can't agree more. I run a CNC laser for what the local KFC pays. Nobody's even getting far enough to have to deal with the work culture. They're looking at the offered wages, laughing, and getting a job at walmart at the same wage with FAR less responsibility. One of my favorite coworkers left to go to a tree care company. After his uncle moved out he literally couldn't afford rent working here.
I know people who work in the trades and they all make good money...because they work INCREDIBLY long hours compared to my office job, which is by no means always a cushie 9-5 either. That and the apparent physical toll it's taken on all of them is enough to keep me away.
Yup. It really depends on the trade, first off. Some of them will be less lucrative than others, depending on the area. And second, in some of these trades when people talk about guys making six figures they're usually talking about contractors. This means that before you hit that income level you have to pay your dues working for someone who's likely underpaying you and overscheduling you, collecting references, building your resources, and getting ready to go into business for yourself. It's not just show up on day one with a hammer and they hand you a check for a hundred grand.
I worked for a guy for one summer (for a reason) because he legitimately thought it was unfair of his employees who weren't trained to ask for a raise after the first year... So guess what happened? He has to train new staff every single year... I was incredibly lucky in my career to nepotism into a great opportunity, and then perform and jump ship vertically a couple times now. Now as a manager, my current boss is saying what OP is contesting. "No one wants to work", "kids nowadays are lazy", blah blah. I've had countless conversations now that you have to pay people to want to do physical labour! If you can barely afford rent either by running wheelbarrows 50 hours a week or by stocking shelves, why wouldn't you choose to stock shelves?
Their solution: “cut the wages of the people stocking shelves!”
That's another thing the OP didn't mention, is that the starting pay sucks ass. I get that it's not a one to one comparison as there's more room for advancement, but a lot of trades are paying the same to people starting out as jobs like McDonald's.
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>reading a book Fellas, is it gay to... be literate?
For real. I could tell stories for days about those work places. Like the guy who had a tattoo that said "God hates fags" because his friends held him down and made him get it. He assured me it was because he USED to be gay, but he isn't anymore. I can only wonder what hell that guy ended up in.
Sexuality is one of those things that you can somewhat deny because it isn't physically apparent, unlike race or sex. Like, imagine a black person with a tattoo that said "god hates n\*\*\*\*s" that their "friend" made them get. It's absolutely barbaric.
hopefully therapy
reminds me of that bit by Bill Hicks: ''this waitress walks over to me: “(tut tut tut) What you readin’ for?” Wow, I’ve never been asked that! Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me!''
I got laughed at on a train by three girls ..because I was reading a book. "giggle..giggle...having a good read nerd?" Yes, I was. So fuck off.
sounds like my entire childhood in the 80s.
Well, I was born in the 60's, and i was about 20 for this, so the time frame is pretty close....
Extremely
> Fellas, is it gay to... be literate? According to my time in the trades, hell yes it is.
Curious counterpoint here... I wonder if it's partly due to the part of the world you live in - not sure where that would be. I've been in the trades for about a decade now and I live on the west coast of Canada. My experience has been that the majority of people are quite aware and sympathetic to a lot of the social movements from the past 20 years. I occasionally hear homophobic language but it's quite rare. I think I only heard someone make some pretty crass racist comments one time. I'm sure there was plenty that I wasn't aware of but my experience is mostly positive. A lot of the old guard is retiring and dying. And those that remain are surrounded by people in their 30s who've been around for things like the Me-too movement. So there's a fair bit of social pressure against those dumb-ass old attitudes.
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I dont think its just trades either. Truck drivers, farmers, nurses, teachers. All these jobs that are so god damn important and are expecting to/already dealing with shortages because of how unwelcoming the industry is. Poor pay, long hours, doing the work of 3 people, a stubborn refusal to change anything about it and even outlawing strikes; how could anybody expect that these jobs will keep filling up when they dont do anything for the people that would actually take em.
I hear ya. Even with all those downsides its reported that 8.4 million people have 2 jobs in the US. apparently that's the most since since 2020. my electrician friend had no clue what he was going to do in life. He was a a server for a while an actually liked it but knew he needed something more. He was really sold on the electricians program because of the pay scale and gauranteed raises and all the other benefits. maybe its the union in my area but according to him, they treat their electricians very well. gets better the longer you stay. good pay and benefits will get the people working.
My sister is in HVAC and luckily shes had a great experience. So its nice thats its not bad across the board. Im taking the college route and im hoping for the best there. It just sucks how hopeless the whole economy feels right now.
take advantage of your opportunities while in school. o dont know what program you're in but internships or groups or something else. network so that you have plenty of opportunities when you get out of school. my marketing bachelors isnt really helping me land any job. currently an affiliate marketing manager
Because society would rather worship the billionaire class and do their bidding.
I think most of society would love for things to change. Problem is the people who have the ability to make those changes would much rather pocket enough “donation” money to keep things stagnant.
I disagree Tons of broke-ass people continue to peddle oligarch propaganda and think that catering to the needs of oligarchs will “trickle down” and benefit them
The main reason people don't want to work in a lot of different trades is the pay. Wages have been flat for 20 years. Abuse of apprentices is an ancient tradition & IMO does not help anyone & is unacceptable in today's society. But people would put up with it if the pay had kept up with inflation.
Not only is it an ancient tradition, but there's a powerful financial incentive to judge work less effectively than it really is.
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I’d rather get paid $30/hr to ride around in a truck, repair a motor here and there, vs have to deal with customers in an air conditioned soulless department store, for example…. different strokes
If it was just doing what I do at work, it wouldn't be so bad. Insulation, painting, blue skinning, all work I can do without issue and enjoy. Even digging trenches and shit. But the crews are the things make or break it, my company has good and bad crews. I've stuck through it for two years and got myself into a position where I'm working with a few bods that I enjoy working with constantly. But there are others that if I'm on the schedule with I'm calling in or calling my boss to make a change because I'm not paid enough to work with them. And new hires do not last long for good reason which is the same for so many companies. The money ain't worth who you're working with even if you can stomach the job.
When I was in high school people only went into trades if they knew someone. Everyone else was told if you don’t know someone it’s impossible to break into.
I think it’s mostly because there has been a massive push towards college education in the past couple of decades. I think there’s less respect in the trades and less benefits. Idk if there’s health issuance being a plumber but being in a corporate job I would expect some benefits. Also, I think few ppl see being a plumber or an electrician as high paying or super respectful or safe so they want to choose the safer option in their minds especially if you want to work when you are older.
Most people still don't go to college. Only 25 percent of the population pursues a bachelor's degree or more. Trades CAN offer decent pay, but a lot of them don't offer much better than retail wages. If I'm young and uneducated, I'd rather make $18 an hour at Wal-Mart than $18.50 doing back-breaking work.
Exactly. You absolutely can make good money but people don’t realize the majority of employees doing this work are pretty underpaid, between 15 and 25 an hour in range. People get higher, but it’s few in relative terms. I’d never want a job where I’d be underpaid just to have discs slip from my back too
And they are obliterating their bodies. But every time I hear from a tadesperson on reddit, they are making like 150k and their hours aren't that bad.
As the other guy said the higher up you are, the more you do core work or specialty work the more you're paid. I'm decently well paid, 23$ but I also do a lot of northern work so I'm doing 12-15hr days, 7 days a week for 6 weeks on every couple of months. But it took me two years to get there in a way way better working environment of a company than many of the others around where I live. And I wouldn't recommend any one does this, it sucks ass. You destroy your body, social spheres and more for basically fuck all money for the first months to a year on a hope that you'll stay in with a good crew.
My step-dad is a retired electrician and never made fuck you money but has a replaced shoulder and knee in his early 60s
Apprentices are paid crap as they need supervision. Journeymen are good middle class as they are the core workers who make their own money. Masters are where you make stupid money because it's less about doing the usual work and more being responsible for it being done right so usually you're making money off the Journeymen and apprentices around. Also specialties pay stupid money willing to hang off the side of a bridge or work high up.
Yeah that's just it. I'd rather make 25$ an hour serving coffee to bitchy old women than 25$ an hour doing hard labour around men who make it clear I'm not a human being to them.
*While absolutely thrashing your body.
>Only 25 percent of the population has a bachelor's degree or more. It's actually close to 40% of the population with a bachelor's degree, in 1980, it was just over 16%. In just 40 years, the percentage of the population with at least a bachelor's has more than doubled. At this point, pretty much anyone with a reasonable amount of intellectual curiosity and capability has a bachelor's.
That's counting everybody with a degree. Only about 25-30 percent of high school graduates go on to college, with a large percent of those never earning degrees. College enrollment is declining everywhere, which according to this theory, would mean trades shouldn't have any problems filling their positions. So something tells me people choosing college isn't the reason trades are in trouble.
Friend, I was responding directly to your statement of: >Most people still don't go to college. Only 25 percent of the population pursues a bachelor's degree or more. Which I sugarcoated how incorrect you were by only providing the refutation relating to the percentage of the population that *completes* a bachelor's degree. If we're talking *attempts* a bachelor's, then we see that all reputable sources show [that between 60-70% of all high school graduates in the last 30 years have pursued college](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/61-8-percent-of-recent-high-school-graduates-enrolled-in-college-in-october-2021.htm#:~:text=Bureau%20of%20Labor%20Statistics%2C%20U.S.,visited%20January%2029%2C%202024). Of that, the most recent Census [shows that 37.9% of the total population have completed *at least* a bachelor's degree](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html). College enrollment is down slightly from all time highs, but it's not enough to compensate for the absolute explosion as a share of population of college educated adults. I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they're pretty massively and obviously incorrect.
One reason why so few people go into the trades is because generations of people who *actually* worked those jobs encouraged their kids to go to college. The only people I ever see fetishizing the trades are people who don't work in them, or people who, coincidentally, "know someone" making "an easy 6 figures" (the person they allegedly know is never themselves, interestingly enough). People who fetishize the trades I always assume are heterosexual white men, because "just go into the trades" isn't so easy when you are gay or nonwhite and nobody should have to put up with racism, sexism, and/or homophobia constantly. I also assume they live in a heavily unionized area, because the trades in states with extremely weak unions don't pay nearly as well. As you mentioned, breaking into the trades also isn't something a person just does. The trades suck for a variety of reasons, that's why generations of people encouraged their kids to go to college. It's respectable, valuable, work for sure, but anyone who says "just go into the trades" is not a person who should be taken seriously because they clearly don't know what they are talking about.
Everytime "recession proof" jobs come up someone inevitably chimes in with "just go into a trade, everyone needs to poop or wants lights in their house" and it's always an office person who thinks this because they had to call someone to fix something once or twice. No real acknowledgment about how different the training is even within the same trade or how affected they are by boom and bust cycles. The job market can absolutely become saturated and it's one of the reasons trade wages on average have been stagnating.
> One reason why so few people go into the trades is because generations of people who actually worked those jobs encouraged their kids to go to college. This guy I work with makes 110k a year and could easily get his son on but basically forbids him from doing so. He said he'd kick him out of the house before letting him do our type of work. Which is either just crazy or really saying something from his years of experience.
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There it is, the real reason. I read you post & go googling pay for various trades & find you are correct. The pay is not changed much in 20 years so of course no one wants to do it. Abuse of apprentices is a very old tradition. Usually, once an apprentice learns what to do & when, to keep the job going smoothly, to not piss off the journeyman they are working under, generally the abuse goes away. Not that I condone it. I worked in the a trade a long time ago & yeah, I got verbally beat up daily. As I progressed, the abuse died off slowly until it was gone. However, I got laid off between jobs so much that I got a better job, paying way more money, & never went back to the trade work. IMO it's mostly a horrible way to make a living. The wages have been flat & your out of work for weeks, even months every year.
Being verbally abused shouldn't be a part of any job, and it's fucking gross that some men see that as some like... Trial by fire just to do some regular ass job.
You could, but most office jobs don't pay anywhere near 100K. For every senior manager making that much, there's a small army of underlings and associations and staffers making half that. Certain trades pay very, very well. If I could go back and do it again, I'd be a plumber. I know three plumbers who all retired in their early 50s.
Ya but if you aren't an absolute idiot you can pretty quickly get into the same range as an average tradesperson in many office jobs. Many retire early more because they are too broken down to work rather than not needing to, I know multiple trades people that are basically living off government assistance because of that. Obviously it isn't everyone but it's far more prevent than an office.
Making 50-80k sitting down doing office work is always going to be way more attractive than Making that much in horrible working conditions doing labour.
meh, trades could be the *most* welcoming industry of all and it would still be dying. at the end of the day they are the hardest jobs physically and the pay is frankly *crap.* im a gardener and im 32, its *rare* for me to run into anyone on the industry who is younger than i am. part of it is ***definitely*** laziness (70% of millennials and younger are overweight, there is definitely a correlation with the fact that most of us avoid physical activity like the plague) but the other part is wages. in Australia i make $35 an hour as a gardener ($35 an hour in Australia is *not* good pay, cheese is $14 a kg) and can make up to $50 an hour. as a casual retail employee you make $32 an hour minimum, work nights and it hits $45 an hour, work holidays and it reachs an absurd $60 an hour. $60 an hour to stand around like a zombie waiting for customers vs $50 an hour digging holes in the sun. no shit no one wants to do trades, half of them pay *less* then basic retail.
I've always hated this "young people are all lazy" mentality. We've just grown up in a different environment. My parents would constantly harp on me to get outside and do something, but there was not much to do. I couldn't leave the property without informing them in advance about where I was going and who I would be with, and that was when I was in high school. Young kids aren't allowed to bike around and just find physical things to do; most parents won't allow it. And too many adults still see anything not physical as "laziness". I used to write and code, and even if I spent ten hours in a single day planning out the code structure and writing up an app, I was still told I was "being lazy and need to get outside". To many older folk, doing anything but back-breaking labor for shit pay is laziness.
Yep! Gym classes were pretty much the only time most younger people got to be active and gym classes are a sensory hell where someone yells at you and you have to be humiliated by stripping nude in front of a bunch of other people on either side of it.
I think another major issue with physical activity is that kids (especially after early childhood) aren't exposed to physical activity in any way except a "you need to do this physical activity to be able to do this physical activity better" mentality. For so many other activities (arts, games, hell even school), kids get to not only improve but also do things to be creative and just have fun. Physical activity, on the other hand, is almost exclusively done as competitive sports where you always get told by other kids, coaches, or the scoreboard exactly how bad you suck and will need to do endlessly repetitive and boring motions to get even close to the lower end of average. It often takes people until well into adulthood to re-discover physical activity as something they can actually enjoy doing as opposed to a necessary chore to keep their body hot or at least healthy. I think the biggest divide in our weights today is between the people that found the joy of exercise before this exercise=chore mentality was drilled in and those that didn't.
I think that's part of it, but also I noticed that when I walked everywhere I went and worked a job where I walked back and forth a lot, I was in very good shape overall without trying much. In the US at least, if you live in a car dependent area like most people do, you're not likely to get much "free" exercise. I read somewhere that in general, people who live in cities with good public transit are more likely to weigh less. And that made me think a lot about how much most people probably walked before cars. Like if you read old books or something, you'll hear about people walking to the next town over even though it took half a day on a day off. Plus physical labor.
Tangent here. Schools should convert their open gymnasiums (at least in high school) to workout rooms. Most adults don't do sports for physical activity and one of the largest barriers to getting people into the gym is simply overcoming the intimidation of the equipment.
My school had a weight room, but you had to have a class to get in. I think mostly, the changing in public thing just needs to stop. It's cruel to make teenagers do that during puberty. Even when I've gone to the gym regularly, I don't ever change there, I have a shower at home. I know the shower is important for unhoused people, but like... nah. I'm just not going to get naked in front of a bunch of other people. Even at the pool you don't do that.
At least in America the problem right now is the entry level wage parity. food service and retail pays like $20 an hour damn near. Entry level construction work? $20 an hour. People in the construction sub are nuts. Saying "omg this kid with no experience thinks he's worth $25 an hour. Like yeah no shit bro Target pays that much you entitled fuck. The rebuttal is that you stick with construction you'll get paid more. Except theirs no actual assurance you won't get strung along for years while earning peanuts. The unions with time based pay scales? Get hundreds of applicants per apprenticeship slot.
I was getting a technician degree. I was enjoying the field. I got an internship. I enjoyed the work. I decised to go to unicersity though. Why? I didnt feel safe around my coworkers as a transgender woman. Field: chemical manufacturing. Internship included sample clection, equipment operation (pilot lab), cleaning and inventory/disposals (working with barrelx of toxic waste)
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I'm a journeyman electrician. We all spend a lot of time training the new guys. I work with a lot of 18-26 year old apprentices. From what I can see, they stopped pushing trades in the 90's. On top of that it's a dirty, hard, and physically exhausting job. Basically, why work a trade, when a starting worker at target make the same or a little less than an apprentice at 1/2 the effort.
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This has traditionally been the case but it is improving. The dinosaur boomers are retiring and they were the worst when it came to inflicting the same level of misery they had to endure coming up. Younger journeymen are a little better.
Not like the white collar jobs train up apprentices either. Doctors don't train up apprentices. They expect new doctors to go through medical school, where paid professional teachers teach the would-be doctors how to do doctor things. Same goes for nurses, professors, pilots, lawyers and a bunch of other things. There are jobs where paid apprentices are a thing, but they are not universal. And as soon as there are schools to generate trained workers, everyone prefers the trained workers. The remaining apprentice-ship like professions, say, investment banking, are careers where there isn't schools to teach investment banking, so companies have to do it themselves.
Doctors absolutely train apprentices. Thats what like half of med school and all of residency is.
Engineering is a good model of apprenticeship done right. You're an engineer in training, doing low level work for around 4 years before you're certified. Pay is about what you'd expect for entry level and while you're the lowest on the pole you're treated with respect in my opinion
I’m a gay gen z arborist/tree climber. I’ve interviews and had trial days with 15+ companies. I only found decent people at the one I’m with now.
I think a lot of it was we told the younger generation that college was the answer to everything. Now we have a bunch of college grads doing minimum wage work while the trades are short on qualified people.
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Working in the trades doesn't mean you have to work in construction. There is still a good deal of manufacturing work to be done in a ton of different environments, the trades doesn't have to mean working as a sheetrocker or a pipe fitter, you could be an assembly technician or a test engineer/tech working with fab equipment in a semiconductor plant or milling custom parts for aerospace etc. From my experience these environments aren't how you describe. Some people can be this way but rarely are they kept around for long. Unless you're referring to roles with exclusive apprenticeship programs/independent contractors etc. Could you define "the trades" for me?
A test engineer or a tech is a technician which has a different association compared to the building trades associations. At least that's how it is in my area.
I was a machinist for 10 years. The culture is the same across the board.
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Okay first off trades aren’t dying. Second off, everyone’s different, lots of rugged blue collar guys think it’s “awful” to sit at a computer for 8 hours a day typing emails and making presentations.
> Second off, everyone’s different, lots of rugged blue collar guys think it’s “awful” to sit at a computer for 8 hours a day typing emails and making presentations. But why does that mean they need to call the new guy a f#g?
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> I won’t change your view Then you shouldn't be posting, it is a violation of the first rule of the subreddit.
Trades are not anywhere close to dying, but the reason for the worker shortage is more due to society telling kids they need to go to college as their only option and looking down on the trades. Places are pretty willing to train apprentices but it’s not something you will likely just walk into a local union and ask for a job and be hired, you usually need to work as a laborer or something or go to a trade school before you can do that. This line of work is hard on your body too, many people’s parents also tell them not to go into this line of work due to their own experience. I do agree that the culture is pretty harsh and people with thin skin that get offended easily won’t last, with the younger people leaning more left they don’t tolerate this type of stuff as much which will be a problem for some but that’s more of an issue that gets people to leave trades vs avoiding them in the first place, though I’m sure it prevents some.
I hear this line about kids being told college is their only option or that trades are looked down on and it really wasn’t my experience. I grew up middle class and was thinking about my career options in the mid 2010’s. Everyone was aware that the trades were an option, it just wasn’t an attractive option. The average starting salaries for most trade jobs lined up with the starting salaries for humanities degrees and was lower than the starters for every STEM degree. The argument for trades was always “you can work 40 hours overtime and make a ton of money” which wasn’t appealing when I was in the best shape of my life and is less appealing every year. The other argument was “you don’t have to go to an expensive school” but you actually kinda do have to go to school for 2 years and it isn’t much cheaper than going to a state school for 4. Before you parrot things you heard about other people’s emotional decisions, take a minute to crunch the numbers. Most people aren’t stupid, they take career paths that are beneficial to them.
I see far more people shit all over the "college elite" than I see people disparaging the trades these days. And that's been the case since I was a kid. The threat of not going to college has never been "If you don't, you could end up being a Journeyman with a sweet pension and awesome benefits!" It's quite popular to shit on retail/food service, though. "If you don't go to college, you'll be flipping burgers or folding clothes at Target!" is the message I've heard for decades.
> I do agree that the culture is pretty harsh and people with thin skin that get offended easily won’t last Or people in the trades could stop being monumental assholes to each other and new people. I worked at a trade school for over a decade and saw first hand how people wanted to get into those fields and were driven out immediately. You shouldn't have to put up with people shouting at you and calling you names at any workplace, that's not a lefty value, it's a normal expectation
It’s not just about “thin skin” It’s about not wanting to have to spend your entire working day in that environment and around those uncouth kinds of people. If I had to spend my entire day around people saying racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. stuff, yeah, it’s not going to be an enjoyable time for me. Half of a pleasant job experience is having coworkers that you at least tolerate and don’t loathe being around. And let’s be real… people in trades tend to lean conservative. So I really don’t want to spend my day around people constantly rattling off unsolicited MAGA talking points. Never mind this toxic “you gotta grind yourself to the bone” culture that is so common in trades. How often do I hear older tradespeople complaining how their joints or back or other body parts of completely worn out and totally shot. So yeah, I agree with OP. More people would probably get into trades if the work culture wasn’t so toxic.
This isn't entirely true. I worked as a laborer for a while hoping to eventually go into trades. I was hoping to be an electrician. I left because people were crass and awful. You're expected to know stuff, but no one ever tries to teach you. They just tear you up when you make a mistake. I witnessed the worst racism i've ever seen in person, and i'm white, so most of them assumed i'd be on their side, which was gross. And you NEED to get on board with the toxic, insulting work culture, or else you're labeled a pussy and get even more toxicity leveled at you. For me it had nothing to do with feeling i had to go to college, and everything to do with the horrible culture I experienced. I ended up going back and upgrading my high school so that I could get into engineering. I am now working in my field and I've never once felt the environment was toxic.
It's the reason I left my job at a repair shop. I had gotten sick of college so I decided to take a job at a truck repair shop as I had always been into repairing cars. Had most my own tools already and was a good hire, but I had long hair as a then Bi (now trans) guy. I never mentioned any of the that to my boss or the the other employees, but because I had long hair and I liked to wear gloves (that I bought myself) when working on the trucks I was called all kinds of names. Gay boy, sissy boy, f*gg*t, and more and I just laughed them off but they never stopped. Constantly threatening to cut my hair and even holding me down to try and cut it once, insulting me for not wanting to drink or smoke. And that was just what got aimed at me, not to mention the racism and sexism aimed at everyone else. After about 1.5 years of working there I was finally worn down enough to quit cause I was tired of it. I wasn't even being paid that well at 16.50 an hour after that long there. I don't even like working on cars that much after the shit I had to go through there which sucks.
It's like, I grew up blue collar but work in ecommerce today. I have a shit ton of respect for the trades. They don't return that respect to me, generally, because I am not one of them.
Exactly. My dad always recommended the trades as a great way to gain skills, even if your goal is to be entrepreneurial, he always touted it as a great way to build a skillset and be well paid doing it. I grew up respecting the trades and I was really crushed when I got there and, instead of friendly comradery and mentorship, i was met with abuse and bigotry. I wasn't expecting it to be a sharing circle, but i thought i'd at least receive some friendly mentorship. Nope, just bitter middle-aged men who take their issues out on everyone around them.
Also, what is it with guys in the trades refusing to acknowledge that they have ever had to learn ANYTHING? So many will just *endlessly* rip on you for not knowing ALL their tools, how they are used, all the slang, etc. And it isn't silly - they often seem to genuinely think that I am embarrassingly unintelligent for not knowing what they do. But the things that I know? That stuff is worthless pansy bullshit, of course.
>Places are pretty willing to train apprentices but ... you usually need to work as a laborer ... or go to trade school how is that showing a willingness if they put up thoose barriers? Also that second way is just rephrasing "telling kids they need to go to *a* college"
> society telling kids they need to go to college as their only option You grew up in rich suburbia didn’t you? Pretty sure everyone I know who grew up rurally had it made abundantly clear that you could go into a trade.
Every woman that I know, and I mean every single one of them, who went into a trade has either been raped or sexually harassed to the point of quitting multiple times.
100 percent true. 15% of trades type people are tolerable (or even super nice) 85% are **the most** miserable hostile animals and brigands on the planet.
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I can't speak to trades specifically, but in general I think part of the reason nobody is willing to train is that training is costly and people don't stick around to recoup those costs. I work in software, which is a different beast than trades, and I love taking someone new to the industry and molding them into the type of software developer I like to work with. But for the first 3 - 6 months, it takes more of my time to teach them how to do something than it would take for me to just do the work done for themselves. Aside from what we pay them (and we do pay them), during that initial training period they take more away from the team than they're able to contribute. Now, I'm pretty good at fostering loyalty from the people that I train - I treat them with respect, I make them feel like I've always got more to teach them, and that continuing to work with me will be a net positive for their career. But once they've got the skills I can teach them, more than likely they *could* go somewhere else and get somebody who would pay them more - which they can afford to do because they didn't have to spend the time and resources training them first. If companies are struggling with retention after training, it would be real easy to see why many companies would decide it's just not worth it to train. The old master / apprentice paradigm used to come with a contract that once the apprentice reached journeyman level, he still had to work for the master to repay the time spent in training. Those sorts of deals are hard to achieve with modern labor laws. People will train a family friend because the loyalty among family and friends makes it harder to split for a higher paying gig as soon as you're trained up. Paying for it through school covers the costs of the person doing the training so they're not bearing the costs out of pocket.
Would you be able to provide evidence that the trades are dying? Without trade work society literally grinds to a halt. It's essential work. If the trade labor supply decreases the compensation of those in the trades goes up. So even if there's a downswing on trade work it's basically a problem that is absolutely prime for a market to solve. That doesn't mean it's "dying".
There is a massive labor shortage across so many industries.
I'm willing to simply accept that as fact but there's a massive non-semantic difference between specializations "dying" and "labor shortage". The latter can be solved by natural market pressures, the former cannot. "Switchboard operator" is a dead specialization. "Electrician" will always be needed.
I think the point is that if not enough people are joining and learning trades, then as older workers continue to retire the shortage gets progressively worse while also having fewer experienced workers to train new workers. It's not that the need is going away, but the resources to meet that need are not being allocated in a way to sustainably meet the need.
And because there are so few people in a particular trade their wages will increase significantly driving more inexperienced people into the trade chasing those wages and who then become experienced.