Why America has so few carpenters
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
I miss using tools, but I don't miss the way you had to rush to make money. I always did a good job, but it was constant pressure.
The article mentions that the longer time on the job reduces what can be paid vs a plumber. This is true, but also true is being able to supply materials. I would rarely supply construction timber, because either the main contractor or even the client could buy it themselves for the same price. Whereas a plumber would always supply a boiler, a tank, a bathroom...all with tasty discounts that were not available to the public.
The other big change I saw was the nailgun and chopsaw revolution. All of a sudden some ex-labourer was touting a nailgun and was now a carpenter. Nobody seemed to care that they didn't know what they were doing. We started to find we would be called in to do the roof and then some clown who was 'cheaper' was called in to do the rest.
My apprenticship was 3 years with day release to technical college. That day was a complete joke, the college was disorganised, and underfunded.
I have constant pain in my hands, back and knees for my 10 years. Everywhere I go I see bad carpentry, and nobody cares but me.
AMA
Edit: I'm in the UK
My father and grandfather were both in the trade. 50 years ago there were some safety concerns, especially around scaffolding (asbestos too, but that's its own story). However they all lamented about how much easier it was to feed your family then.
I’m old enough that one of my earliest memories of advice being given on house buying (not to me, I was still to young for that) was of people advising against buying anything from around the time you were praising (which at the time of the advice, wasn't brand new but still newish), making exactly the same comparison of that time to the time a few decades before (though I thing then it was usually 20-30 and not 50 years before held up as a model) as you make of now to then.
At the same time there is nowhere to put any insulation on external walls meaning that during the winter were leaking huge amounts of heat and during the summer we live in an oven. Compare that to my friends modern new build in the same city (Edinburgh) their internal temperature is mostly stable.
There's also things like "you can't run any extra cabling"- adding ethernet to my existing cabling isn't happening without replastering my entire home. And lets not start with modern 5GHz WiFi not passing through my internal walls.
Needs have changed, materials are more consistent and easier to get, efficiency standards have changed. All of these things have had a huge impact on materials and costs. It's unfair to just say that buildings are built worse without considering anything else.
I think this is very much subjective in the end though. Also because current building techniques still make use of stone, bricks and concrete which all have the same downsides. But as you said they can be an overkill for some people who don’t mind the walls being quite soft for instance.
I don't think that's a fair takeaway - drywall lets you do things like insulate, run cabling, provide moisture barriers, easily change room layouts. These are all things that people want to do in their homes today that are straightforward (mostly) with drywall, and borderline impossible for a DIY'er in an older building.
From 100 years ago most of the houses that you see are either stone/brick houses, or timber-framed houses (thick post and beam, not what people in the UK call timber framing today). Those houses are always impressive compared to todays 2”x4” frames
My in laws just built a new home with an average builder. I got to watch the house go up - know what’s in the walls, etc. Their house is higher quality than mine. New construction seems to be better than buying old homes on average, and prices reflect that - new costs more and you get less.
This lead me to a somewhat startling revelation: houses do not appreciate in value. The house looses value but is offset by the dollar losing buying power in the housing market.
Edit: My memory was wobbly the title was simply"Money". This (carte blanche for lousy work) created the next housing crisis that's created the currently forty years old UK housing crisis. My father ran the largest mortgage book of that era so saw the disaster up close and filthy.
In the USA and several other places the way from unskilled to skilled was via carpenter as you could enter the field unskilled.
My father went from truck driver to carpenter after a truck driver strike.
And due to that there was always money loosing cycles occurring when it was easy to get in and an over supply of those wanting to get in.
What some did was step up to furniture finishing such as kitchen cabinets, bars, etc.
- 30-60 minute consultations, I need to charge $600/hour minimum to make ends meet
- 1-2 week gigs, I need to charge $300/hour minimum to make ends meet
- 6-36 month gigs, I need to charge $100/hour minimum to make ends meet
Making ends meet means covering mortgage, health care, etc., not having a decent lifestyle. There is overhead to:
- Finding clients
- Billing
- Cancellations
- Marketing
- Commuting
- Networking
- Contracts / legal
Etc. All of that overhead goes down with longer jobs. I don't feel that "longer jobs" are the root culprit here. If I were to guess, the root problem is that anyone can do carpentry (poorly). That sets low expectations on prices. That keeps better tradespeople out, since you can make so much more in any of the other trades.
Random recruiters are fine too. If someone's calling you up to recruit, you can let them know you're not open to employment, but glad to consult. Many companies will be open to both. Indeed, consultants are cheaper on taxes and benefits, and easier to let go, so there are a lot of wins for the company. .
The bigger question is whether you should consult.
Why do you want to get into it?
i went straight from college (dropout) into the consulting world right before COVID hit. i gave myself a year to get the consulting business going, and if that didn't work, i was planning to get a "real job."
i started off by leveraging my existing contacts in the software world: mostly a couple internships that I'd had (one before my year of college, one after). the first few months, i was only working for those two places while i tried to figure out how to expand. i started a blog [0] at this point -- it was mostly nontechnical content, but helped me demonstrate that i'm a sane person and a reasonably good communicator.
i started replying to the "Who wants to be hired?" threads here on HN and got my first couple (small) independent contracts there. then a family friend who runs a high-volume used book business needed his whole inventory/order management system redone from scratch, and i was a) cheaper and b) a known quantity, so he hired me. you can interpret this as me getting lucky, and in some sense it is, but i strongly believe that luck favors the prepared. i certainly wouldn't have gotten that gig if i hadn't been prepping for it, hard. this is when i started to raise my rates.
(you've probably seen this repeated endlessly on HN, but it bears repeating: raise your rates. raise your rates. and then raise them again. to match $XX/hr as a FTE, you need to charge at least 2*$XX/hr as a consultant. ideally a lot more.)
i spent tons of time reading HN and twitter, and responding to anyone who was doing something i found interesting. i went into these interactions with no expectation of getting work out of it -- i just wanted to meet people who were working on cool things. a few of those interactions did turn into work, and one person i met is now one of my best IRL friends. crazy.
at some point, i had to learn about a new amazon service (the Selling Partner API) for that bookstore project, and discovered just how badly documented and tested it was. after a couple months (!!) figuring out how to use it properly, i wrote a few blog posts about it, and people started hiring me from my blog (and now, my OSS SP API library [1]). between that, and a few of those people i talked about meeting via HN/twitter/etc, i've kept busy for the past 18 months. i actually just hired my first part-time employee, which is exciting :)
i think the three biggest things that have made me a modestly successful consultant are:
1. focusing on people over everything else. if you're a consultant, you're a salesperson, and in my experience just being genuinely interested in other people is the easiest and most effective form of sales. 2. writing online. it's cliched, but it works. you don't need that many people to see what you've written for it to be worth it -- i've never gotten more than 150 views in a day on my blog, and usually it's way less than that, but that's been enough to have plenty of work. 3. raising my prices ;)
i make a lot less money than i might by working for FAANG/etc, but i have total time and location freedom, i don't work a ton, and i really enjoy running my own show. ymmv, and good luck :)
[0] https://jesseevers.com [1] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api
It's why actors have agents, if they had to market themselves they'd have no time for acting.
This.
I hired a union shop to build my house, and am thankful for it. for various reasons, construction is mostly lowest quality possible, but everybody on my house had a ticket and the result is obvious (not just appearance but lower cost of maintenance).
When I worked at Terrajoule we were not a union shop but we often hired union contractors for specific jobs (particular high pressure welds) or temporary extra manpower — after a couple of terrible experiences, it was clear that union people always knew what they were doing.
Aren’t most tradespeople self-employed? How do you have a union when you’re the boss?
Or perhaps I misunderstood the question. Unions are extremely important for those that don't have a single employer. For a lot of union jobs, you'd go to the union hall to find jobs, often by the day or week for jobs like stevedores (mostly gone now of course). For my house, the contractor had a network of people he would reach out to. At Terrajoule, we just advertised in the ordinary way or more commonly asked around, and then we looked at their credentials which generally meant a union ticket for safety critical jobs (which was most of them).
If they're just setting floor prices in an open market, that's a cartel. If they're setting industrial standards, that's a trade organisation.
E.g. plumbers unions opposed waterless urinals, and then created a standard that required water pipes installing anyway - https://reason.com/2010/06/24/plumbers-unions-vs-waterless-u...
Temporary job security, but long term makes people hate the union.
I want people in trade to earn a very good wage. It is difficult labour that requires a lot of practice and experience to do well. Unfortunately, the entire industry today seems to be drowned out by construction “sweatshops”. It’s sad.
There are a bunch of industries out there where the pay is horrid and the skills required are high. EG: butcher, carpenter, chief, school teacher, most retail, auto mechanic, etc. I would want a high price for "knees".
I know precisely one person my age who's working construction and he knows he's got to get out before it does the same to him. If most of the people you know work office jobs you may not be familiar with just how routine and severe those "injuries" are that they mention. All the cultural factors are real too -- hoo BOY my mom has stories -- but you gotta look at this stuff through how physically destructive it is to the workers.
(I'm sure there's a health care angle too, of course -- so much of my parents' compensation went to those "Cadillac" health care plans that politicians don't understand the point of. It'd be interesting to compare Canada)
My parents constantly encouraged me and were happy to see me pursue a white collar path because they didn't want me to go through the same thing when I got older. A lot of the shortages is cultural: Parents steering their kids out of said path as much as possible, sexism/racism and so forth. But then there's also the pay issue where the pay doesn't match the labor intensity nor are there many safety nets unless you're part of a union.
My family (with me being the first exception) is all blue collar and I understand that construction is uniquely taxing physically but from my parents and people younger I've never heard horror stories about lost fingers or anything like that you're used to from very old people who work in trades. It's definitely possible to do these jobs safely and with good pay nowadays and safety regulations as well as better tools have aided a lot.
A lot of it I feel has to to with culture. If you have a guild system or something comparable that values the crafts and make sure payment and standards are met it's very different from letting people work themselves into the ground.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.t05.htm
Even on following-the-rules job sites, "safely" is always kind of relative; when lifting and carrying and repetitive motion can be the causes of disabling injuries, it gets really hard to define bright lines with which you can protect yourself over decades. To some extent, taking time and being careful are the guards you have, but ... any American workplace knows that having your employees exercise wide individual discretion to set an appropriate pace -- well, that doesn't sound like Maximizing Efficiency, does it? (Sorry, I did try to tone down the bitterness here.)
Actually, there's a specific gauge on that I'd be curious to compare against, even anecdotally, for how things differ there: how common are people getting hernias at work?
It’s definitely one of the “think three times and then do it slow and safe” tools in the shop.
Add in cheap 3d-printed push blocks, push sticks, and feather guides and almost no one is losing digits these days unless they're willfully ignoring safe practices or using the wrong tool for the job. Tracked saws and 3d printed router jigs have also added options when a piece would be awkward or unsafe to table saw.
It’s the joints: bad knees, bad backs.
It’s not like back in the day where you get missing fingers. That’s really rare.
But the steady grind of lifting, carrying, lifting, carrying, again and again destroys the joints.
That’s harder to regulate away.
IMHO, all of these can be relieved through workplace reform. In other words, manual labour doesn't have to result in a broken body. Labourers can be taught how to lift correctly. They can be given a safe environment; and they can be rotated to lots of different tasks to prevent RSI.
When you’re lifting heavy things for a job, you lift whatever needs to be lifted in whatever motion it needs, with incentives to do it quickly. If you’re tired, you lift it anyway. If you feel a twinge, you probably ignore it because it’s probably nothing. Then you do it again the next day regardless of whether you feel like it.
Some of that can be mitigated by workplace rules, but it needs pretty radical overstaffing or acceptance of considerably slower work, neither of which Capital is a big fan of.
As a lifter you have full control over how many reps you do, you have all the time in the world to make sure your form is good before lifting, you don’t need to move around while carrying that weight, and you’re lifting conveniently-shaped weights.
Also, even the most well-maintained mechanical device will eventually suffer from material fatigue when put under load for significant amounts of time. Our bodies are no different.
A "sane" max limit is 30 kg for a "normal" worker in good shape, so the 25 kg makes a lot of sense.
There was a precise technique to lift the 50 kg sack and put it on your shoulder, one single, tiny mistake in the speed or in the amplitude of the movement and it was very, very likely you would strain your back.
In the old times it was rather common as an accident on building sites, and anyway even people that never made a mistake have had their backs ruined over the years.
The "main" study/manual on the matter is actually US originated, by NIOSH, dating to 1994, that has been recently updated:
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/94-110/default.html
not limited to construction only, it applies on whatever activities imply moving loads, particularly if in a repetitive manner.
Technically correct I guess? The thing is, in construction there is a lot less latitude for you to choose a) from where to lift b) where to put down c) how much you're going to lift d) how often.
> So the question then becomes: is this about technique? Are these labourers lifting with their backs, for example? Are they just never taught to lift things correctly?
rolls eyes
Mostly. In your gym lifting, do you do 300 reps a day? For five or six days per week? For 48 weeks of the year? For ten to forty years? I bet you have more rest days than that.
> is this about technique?
Technique is impossible to apply consistently in blue-collar jobs. You're not necessarily standing on a flat, stable, firm, grippy floor, lifting a stable, ideally-shaped, easily grasped, rigid, non-slippery mass straight up and down close to your torso. There are wind, rain, cold, heat, and much more to deal with.
> Labourers can be taught
This is broken thinking. For health and safety, tasks must be redesigned to fit humans, not the other way around.
Edited to add: humans get tired, get distracted, take shortcuts, hurry to get the job done, or simply make mistakes. Any task design that doesn't account for these and still keep people safe is faulty.
Part of it is that you find yourself having to lift in awkward positions often while you're having to carry heavy materials through obstacle courses, up on ladders and down stairs in ways that you'll inevitably have to compromise optimal form all while the wage clock is ticking so you have to hurry. In weightlifting you're afforded proper time and place to practice good form. That's coming from a Carpenter for twenty years and a weightlifter for four. Carpentry and a vehicle wreck pretty much destroyed my back but weightlifting and what I've learned from it has helped restore it somewhat.
It would be extremely nice if mandatory weight training could greatly reduce the incidence of injuries and "wear out" in blue collar workers...
The human body needs to run in a pretty thin zone of activity. Too little and you get the obesity issue, too much and if breaks. And that band is changing as you age.
If that physical activity is by choice and easily changed you can stay healthy a very long time, but that’s not how it is when it’s your job.
When people come to work on my house, I've noticed that everybody who is around my age (58) is hobbling and broken.
I work by myself, for myself, and I'm able to charge much less than most simply because I have almost no overhead and almost everything goes in my pocket. I don't need to pay for a building lease, employees, company vehicles, etc. But it'll take me a week to do what those other companies can do in a day.
Dude spent his 50's retired on some boat.
Like a programmer working for a FAANG then starting their own consultancy.
Apart from the risk imposed by working with totally careless and disengaged people in large machines, my body felt like garbage all the time. My elbow stopped working near the end and I couldn’t do simple things like open my car door. I learned to program as fast as my brain could accommodate. It was totally unsustainable.
It’s like there is a shortage of people willing to pick fruit at 10$ an hour and live in terrible conditions while exposed to harsh chemicals. No shit you need to pay people a whole lot more money
The US clamped down on Mexican border crossings. Guess what? There’s no labor. Who would have thunk it.
Now, the border is more porous than ever. There's plenty of labor -- go to any home improvement store parking lot. And that's just the illegal labor -- boost wages and you could recapture legal workers.
But for now, go to any construction site in California, and you'll hear only Spanish spoken between the carpenters, roofers, etc. and their supervision.
I wouldn’t assume all or even most labor on constructions sites are illegal immigrants just because they speak Spanish, if only because the USA has a lot of legal first-gen Hispanic immigrants.
Back here on earth, roofers are making $36/hr. My brother’s restaurant is paying $28-32/hr for line cooks and dishwashers.
They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".
there is a market for hand-made furniture but Ikea stuff dominates.
And boyyyyy is there a gap between these. I feel like I’m either paid $100 for shitty pressboard or thousands upon thousands for hardwood.
Thankfully, there are some decent pieces left from 50 or so years ago that are both solid and dirt cheap at thrift/antique shops.
The market is more efficient, on average, than other methods of price setting. It’s not perfect efficiency (or even close to it).
They do (sans outcompeting). We just call them luxury goods. It's a different market.
[1] https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/how-much-does-it-cost-...
Does it? I've read time and again that land is the largest part of the cost - in any place where cost is significant.
On the other hand, the jobs also bring in a lot of money for the islanders who perform them, and the wages are relatively high by international standards due to NZ’s high minimum wage.
We already have a cost of living crisis, and raising the price of fruit and vegetables by removing these visas for seasonal workers seems like it would hurt everyone without helping anyone in particular.
It helps local labor sellers to be in higher demand and hence negotiate higher prices who may have taken the option to pick fruit and vegetables.
This practice should be stopped, or we should reconsider the so called "free market" if the government can manipulate it to bail out the business owning class whenever they're not profitable.
There is no housing shortage, there are just people who aren't willing to pay the market rate for housing. Up your price that you are willing to pay and you will have housing. If you can't pay the market rate for housing, do not be surprised when you do not have housing.
Basic economics.
If it costs 500k to permit and inspect a house, you can absolutely complain
That said, I have spoken to builders who described city costs of several hundred thousand dollars for renovating or building single family/duplex homes. For start, SF permit costs are a % of construction with 6-9% for the basic permit. If you do the work yourself, you have to pay a % of the market cost if you were to contract it out. Then there are a plethora of additional fees and permits, and you can find some of them here {1}.
I think you are right that the single biggest cost is code conformance, minimum size, construction ect. Some of the requirements are ridiculous. For example California requires electrical outlets every 48 inches along countertops, independent of if I want them at all. This mentality extends to every part of the the permitting process.
https://sf.gov/step-by-step/get-building-permit-house-review
There are all sorts of restrictions on what type of labor is legally allowed. Age restrictions, hours, licensing, unions, plenty of other regulation. But when there is a story on this site about how employers say there is a shortage of workers, the typical answer is "there is no shortage, raise wages". That's because the typical reader of this site isn't someone trying to run a low margin business, the typical reader of this site is someone who moved to one of the most expensive areas of the world and subsequently realized that for some reason, housing is expensive there, so the government needs to make changes.
But that's not a shortage. Just because you can't afford something at the market clearing price doesn't mean there's a shortage. And just because you can't afford something at the market clearing price doesn't necessarily mean the government needs to make changes. You might need to make changes instead.
That's literally the definition of a shortage[1], "a condition where the quantity demanded is greater than the quantity supplied at the market price".
> But that's not a shortage. Just because you can't afford something at the market clearing price doesn't mean there's a shortage. And just because you can't afford something at the market clearing price doesn't necessarily mean the government needs to make changes. You might need to make changes instead.
In the case of housing, the government creates the condition whereby there is not enough housing in places where there is the most economic activity. It's a huge drag on the overall economy and well documented.
Or who are unable.
I have a sincere question, though. What about the (potential, I’m still mulling this over) distortion introduced by foreign players flooding the market? I can tell you firsthand that places like Seattle, Vancouver, London, Los Angeles, and New York City experience heretofore unheard-of amounts of money coming in from prosperous but less stable economies like China.
Automation is the key to getting out of this trap: just build robots to pick the fruit and problem solved. I expect that is the only other way out of all our labor problems except for maybe the child care crisis (licensing boards are adamant about staffing requirements per kid even if that isn’t affordable).
It is a huge problem and we are seeing the effects in real time. At least education is mostly socialized so the problem reduces after 5 or so (but before and after school care is becoming impossible).
2) They couldn't anyway even if they wanted to since they don't have a tax ID.
3) Since their employer is already breaking the law by hiring them paying taxes doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
It's antithetical. Claiming a shortage means there is not a shortage.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/labor-day-chart-union-mem...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_...
https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-unions-help-worki...
The problem is that it takes awhile to train for the job so the labor market won’t be able to react very quickly. By the time we’re adjusting the job offering it’ll be too late.
Maybe the $60k to do zoom is too much, and the $120k to work in the early morning in the cold and rain should be $200k.
I guess we will find out soon enough.
This is a really lazy analysis that ignores all of the productivity gains that came from automation and information technology. People who put together cars didn’t start making less money, they got replaced by robots.
Carpentry is by comparison easy to get maimed.
And I hate printers.
http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
Even after getting into the IT field, I tried to learn carpentry. I went to local shops that had the tools. No one was receptive to me for some reason. They were either closed during the times I could go after work, or defunct, or only wanted people who already knew carpentry (WTF).
Anyway, I entered software development because it was the only field that would hire me entry level. Aaaaaandd the only field I could actually self-teach. I am grateful for that fact...that you can teach yourself through books (back then no StackOverflow haha) nor Youtube, nor Udemy, etc. Just plain push yourself through the text books available. I spent a LOT of time at Borders books and Barnes and Noble, trying to figure things out.
You can't really do that with carpentry. Maybe you can self-teach auto repair. But as a woman, not even my family members would spend time to teach me (I had a cousin that was embarrassed to have me help out at his auto shop).
I got away with self-teaching IT as a black woman because it is not nearly as sexist or racist as other fields, with Indian and other immigrants showing the way to enlightenment to a great degree (in my personal experience).
But then if you watch channels like Essential Craftsman it's clear there's a great deal of know-how that has to be passed on by someone who knows the trade. Stuff about how to work efficiently and tricks you wouldn't think of. Even if it were in a book or videos exist, you don't necessarily know to go looking for it.
It is definitely possible to self-teach auto repair. I did, out of necessity. Things you try either work or they don't, but there's logical reasons for it that can be derived from first principles.
However the computer is in a class of its own when it comes to self-teaching. Instant feedback and infinite capacity for experimentation. Carpentry doesn't have a built-in objective critic like that. Auto-repair is somewhere in between.
It would be unreasonable if they expected something like experience with specialty MDF blades and full panel saws. I doubt that is really what they wanted.
Wow. That's really shitty.
IBEW (electrical workers union) seemed to be pretty decent about apprenticing in Southern California.
My situation was the reverse: I wanted to get some training in electrical code, but didn't want to apprentice. That completely discombobulated everybody at the union--it was like they were seeing a space alien. They had no ability to accomodate my request even if I gave them money.
I'd feel pretty impoverished if I was only allowed to know the skills required to do my job because learning the skills required to do someone else's job was forbidden by some cloak of secrecy by those who knew the skills.
I'm an electrical engineer and several of the testing systems we design run on various levels of industrial three phase. It would be nice to wire them up according to standard so when we hand them off to the union guys actually installing them on the factory floor we're all on the same page.
In addition, it would be nice to know the standards so that I can tell when it's done wrong. For example, I once took a shot of 480VAC to my right arm due to a system having been miswired, and I very much never want to do that again.
My sense from talking to them was never that they were angry--everybody seemed to genuinely want to help me even if only to observe the strange creature. It was more that simply asking to join a class without being on an apprentice/journeyman track was so far out from left field that they had absolutely no processes that could be brought to bear.
By contrast, if you want a frosty reception, out of ignorance ask a Levantine Arabic teacher to teach you Egyptian Arabic. He didn't assault me, but I think he contemplated it.
It's not the same as getting a paid job (she was doing it as a hobby), but did pick up occasional gigs and had several other offers for work
A good carpenter I knew a while back was making maybe at best 2500 euros per month with overtime after tax with more than 10 years of experience.
Despite being a team leader he still had to lift, bend and work just like his subordinates. You could tell that it was starting to take a toll on his body.
The job is tough, when its cold in winter and you stand on a ladder and its raining and your fingers are frozen, you have to keep going. In summer, you are on a roof and is 35 degrees Celsius outside and there is no shade.
One misstep and you can fall down, but you have to keep going to be productive. So sometimes you bend the rules a little. Then you hurt yourself.
There is also more and more drug and substance abuse in the trades. You take some painkillers at night because your joints hurt. You take blow because you can work faster and longer. Drinking on the job is also well tolerated.
In truth this is a young man's game.
My dad has been in the construction trade on and off for the last 30 years and his body is starting to give up. I myself was a laborer before joining the tech world. I injured my knee on the job and now every once in while I have pain so I have to be careful to not run or walk too quickly otherwise it flares up.
I think construction workers should be closely monitored for physical injuries and be told the truth about their job and the toll it will eventually take on their bodies. Some people think they are invincible.
My dad knew this guy in his twenties(20 years ago) who thought he was the toughest of all. Carrying heavy stuff day in and out, climbing on ladders with a heavy load on his back and shoulders.
The last time I saw him a few years ago(he is know in his forties), he was a broken man and wearing some sort of back support at all times because his back is in shambles. Obviously he doesn't work in the trades anymore.
Even when he was young he told me to make money with my brain not my back. He would also tell me to look around at a job site and ask my why I thought there were no old roofers (falls), or painters (paint fumes), or plumbers (solder fumes).
Some of my high school friends got started in construction via my dad. It was good money and they were not the college-bound types. A few years later I heard one of my good buddies cut off his thumb with a Skilsaw. By now most of the others are probably broken down.
When I was working with some old timers, some of them would start the day by going to the pub at 7:00 am and order a few shots of hard liquor to start the day(especially on cold days). In France, pubs/cafes open really early...
Also the way these pro-trade articles always frame college as some nebulous malignant force pulling people away from necessary, "good-paying" trades is a laugh. As if people who have the option to bring home electrical engineer wages and work in an air-conditioned office would choose to become an electrician instead. There will be some small handful, but the incentives push strongly towards one over the other.
If you look at when the trades start earning and if they are willing to go where the high pay is (just like some CS guy won’t make FAANG wages in Ohio), they can do very well.
No, that's why I said:
> There will be some small handful, but the incentives push strongly towards one over the other.
-
> If you look at when the trades start earning and if they are willing to go where the high pay is (just like some CS guy won’t make FAANG wages in Ohio), they can do very well.
Of course, and if you look at when degreed engineers start earning (not even mentioning benefits, bonuses, equity...), and if they are willing to go where the high pay is, both numbers are higher. Until that's not true, until the lifetime earnings of trades is at parity or higher than college-bound careers, the incentives will always be lined up that college is the better choice from an earnings point of view.
Money isn't everything. Not everyone will pick the options that lead to the highest lifetime earnings/earliest retirement/least risk of on the job injury, but most will if given the option. Pretending that isn't true doesn't benefit anyone.
I mean, no, someone who wants to be an engineer won’t choose the trades. But they wouldn’t do it regardless. That’s not the point.
What I'm saying is that the vast majority want to have a career that makes the most money, with the best benefits, and the best work-life balance within the body of possible options that interest and are available to them.
If you're interested in working with electricity you might be an electrician or an electrical engineer, but with the way things are lined up today if you have the opportunity and are not devoted to the trade, you pick electrical engineer every time.
I agree with the 1st. There may be some overlap, but engineers and trades are two very different careers.
What I think is the important point is for those folks who are interested in electrical/electronics, if being an engineer isn’t an option, knowing that trades are a pretty well paying choice is a good thing.
If you have the opportunity to make a choice between a trade and a engineering career in the same field, and you don't have a personal preference/calling between the two, the engineering career pays better and has better benefits. People will generally pick the thing that pays better all else being equal.
I genuinely don't see what's confusing about that idea. The over promotion of trades is mostly to obscure this fact, that compensation in engineering is better than in trades. The thing here is, if you only have a weak preference for trades, you might pick the trade if you think the compensation is comparable, but might pick engineering if you learn that the compensation is significantly better. I think the goal of these campaigns is to swindle these lightly preference'd types.
But the point is - that's a pretty rare situation. I'd argue most people who want to do engineering would do it even if it paid less than trades.
Most people are strongly motivated by money and benefits over personal preference. Most people, especially in manual labor, don't like their jobs, or merely put up with their jobs for the purpose of making money. Money is the incentive that matters here. Which is why accurately representing to said people what careers can be expected to earn compared to other options in the same field matters.
I don't meet many engineers, who, if the trades paid better, would swap their office job and the intellectual nature of the work for a job designing the electrical system of factories and pulling wire. Those are two very different jobs.
People make career decisions based off of a lot of things: interests, training requirements, day to day work environment. Yes pay, but plenty of people take low paying jobs when they could do something else and make more.
If people can make a baseline wage that provides a comfortable life doing a job they like, I could see them foregoing a certain amount of money. I've turned down better paying jobs before.
The only time I was required to do anything carpentry-related was during summers because he thought (rightfully) I would just sit around and do nothing. I never felt cut out for it - it was very hard work that requires patience and strong will, besides physical strength and if I think one is not careful, it will catch up to one's self, like it did with my father.
He wouldn't even ever stop for lunch. He said he wanted to do that to leave early, but I can assume it was because the time he put into 8am-3pm was his best time to concentrate. I can understand this well now - when I had to work with him, he made me always clean up, but I was slow at it, didn't fully understand the animosity that it frustrated him. But, he needed clean areas.
Needless to say, it did stick with me (but maybe the patience took a bit more time to catch up with me :) )
[1] https://searshomes.org/index.php/2012/07/10/the-columbine-th...
The price to do a renovation or build out here has gone through the roof with labor and materials becoming expensive.
As others in the comments have noted, there's no barrier to relatively unskilled people calling themselves 'carpenters', which drives down wages. This is much less of a factor with plumbing, electrical, HVAC etc.
Like all tradespeople, you ultimately need to own 5 figures worth of specialized tools, which makes the low wages even more pernicious
The construction industry is famously boom & bust/based on economic cycles, which obviously doesn't help anyone's job security
'Carpentry' is a very broad category (to my understanding on the West Coast they have a firmer delineation between frame & finish carpenters), but if you include framing and roofing, it's much more physical than plumbing or electrical work. Ultimately this is much tougher on your body over the decades
But who are you working for? The upper classes. Of course these lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. are not specifically to blame, many are kind and decent human beings. But we're all living in the same system, and to put it in HN terms, we need to wipe and reinstall the OS.
Seeing more women in the trade (seems like a lot more in the last five years) does give me some sense of a positive change. As far as I can tell contractors are still quite ethnically/racially segregated though.
You don't need high end vacuum forming equipment to make beautiful, high-end furniture. There are certainly styles for which that would be required, but through human history, people built furniture not only without that equipment, but also wholly without power tools.
You can built modern-looking work using very traditional techniques. I would go out on a limb and claim that stuff that requires truly modern equipment looks "weird", even to a modern eye because we have thousands of years of a furniture record of stuff put together using the same basic techniques.
A joined chair looks like a joined chair whether it's some frilly French thing or some staid and severe English thing. A staked chair looks like a staked chair whether it's some high-style Windsor or a milking stool. A Thonet rocking chair looks f*cking wild because it departs from thousands of years of practice of how people make chairs. It still looks wild, over 150 years after its introduction.
Even a Maloof rocker is made with fairly well-established techniques. I don't say that to take anything away from his design, but to illustrate that you can build very contemporary furniture without making a wild departure from the practice and tools that have served furniture makers for a very long time.
Edited to add: I think I could have become a very good carpenter, but I went into furniture because you find older people still working as furniture makers, and damn few working as carpenters.
My 7x great grandfather was a french master carpenter by way of Germany built the first iteration of the modern St Louis Cathedral and Ursuline Convents in New Orleans and once found pirate treasure stuffed into the wall of a man's house while attempting to remodel, lol.
When you pull the elephant's trunk, either the light comes on, or it doesn't. There is little room for delusion.
The more people who can and do use an "app for that" in their daily lives, and are hours away from whatever they need/want, the fewer tradesman there likely will be.
The pendulum swinging back in the direction of builders is when all the specialists have to bid against each other, exchanging an acceptable medium of exchange, for the tradesman's services, as they can do little themselves.
The more densely populated the area, the more likely it will seem there are a shortage of carpenters, or other tradesman, and in the more rural, free, and independent , areas, the less the need for carpenters, as there are fewer specialists, and more capable, "Jack of all trades", types.
It ain't so simple. Building sites vary a lot, even in the same neighbourhood. Buildings are very complex, and individuated to meet customer demands. Crucially they are low value per unit mass, so transport starts costing more than on-site construction after two hundred kilometres/miles or so. There are multiple morasses of regulations and regulators.
So maybe we as a society make them stop demanding? I believe that greed has no limits if we allow people to believe that they always deserve more. Its like this famous chinese dragon that eats its own tail.
>> Crucially they are low value per unit mass, so transport starts costing more than on-site construction after two hundred kilometres/miles
So this would maybe put some pressure on people to stop building those stupid (from the point of sustainability) suburbs and rationalize city population density and organization ? (Like in some european cities with walkable neighbourhoods)
The other part of the story I think is that we fetishized the 4-year undergraduate degree and de-emphasized trade schools over the last 30 years. They touch on this in the article:
“And many former paths have closed. In Seattle, Smith notes, 17 public high schools once had wood shop classes, a number that shrunk to 3.”
Curiously enough, this change in policy occurred around the same time a de-industrialization in the US (in the wake of NAFTA, normalizing trade relations with China, etc.).
The toll that construction takes is real. I have too many scars from sheet metal cuts to count; burns; exposure to asbestos, phosgene, and benzene; heat stroke; electrocutions; falls from ladders; etc. My boss previously broke his back after falling through a ceiling. I've been on sites where people cut off multiple fingers in stupid accidents, have nearly died, or have fallen to their death. I'm in my late 30's and have been diagnosed with hearing loss which I attribute to working around heavy equipment and construction sites.
If I recall, average home price now sells at 300k. A realtor keeping 2% after fees...buy/sell 10 houses and that's 60k.
"As you become a more established real estate agent, you can often negotiate a split that leans more in your favor. For example, you may receive 70%, and your brokerage will get 30%. But, in the beginning, your brokerage is helping you get clients, so your share is often more modest."
https://www.aceableagent.com/career-center/georgia/what-is-t...
Also per the same article
"Today's Georgia real estate agent makes an average of $69,150. Even with the split, this is about 10% higher than the national average"
Not sure which is more accurate but $60k is what I'd have in my mind for average. The hustle would have a bias in making carpenters salary look high to make their point more appealing...a real estate agent website has a bias in making agent salaries look high.
Now, I know that construction trades are boom/bust because I have family in the trades too. I also know the going rate for a master plumber in San Antonio is around $120/hr and it's higher these days due to job demand / labor shortages. $120/hr if you work full time is $250k a year, so I have a hard time believing a plumber still makes $40k/yr in San Antonio, Texas. Journeyman on crews usually get paid $30/hr which is $62k/yr, and roughly the median household income in San Antonio.
The Amish come together and build each other's barns still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising I wonder if something like that could work on a larger scale? Cathedrals come to mind.
Christopher Alexander meant for his Pattern Language to be used in situ by the people who were going to be using or living in the buildings, not just to design the buildings but also to construct them themselves. He was experimenting with a kind of foam concrete that is easy to work. I don't want to go off on it here but check out e.g. https://www.domegaia.com/ for DIY "aircrete" dome homes, equipment, and classes. "Aircrete" is fireproof (you can make a fireplace out of it) and waterproof (you can build boats out of it) it's durable yet it can be cut with a hand saw and you can use nails with it. There are companies that make and build with aircrete blocks like LEGO bricks.
- - - -
Bucky Fuller wanted to build high-tech houses in factories, deliver them by helicopter to prepared sites that had a mast or pole. The houses would be lowered onto the masts, tied down, hooked up to utilities, and you're done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
We've got kit homes and pre-fab construction now. There's a 22-unit housing complex at 2711 Shattuck in Berkeley that was built in four days. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/8/6/17656118/fast-apartment-resid...
Interestingly, "... the cost of trucking [the modules] to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong." https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...
The building has a website: https://www.panoramic.com/cityspace-location/shattuck-berkel...
I think there's a lot of potential for simpler, more high-tech building systems.
I formally apologize for getting my porch door repaired and will never speak of it again!
The main cause was non-citizen, illegal workers being employed, with active encouragement by the elites through non-enforcement of the law.
As soon as some companies in an area started displacing citizen workers and reaping the financial rewards of that, it was a race to the bottom. No longer able to support a family or maintain dignity, carpenters had to find other things to do.
The quality of work has dropped precipitously. Just look at the lousy finish carpentry, and that's just the stuff you can easily see.