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Comment by lemoncookiechip | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if people are less willing to work jobs that actively harm their long-term physical health (back-breaking jobs) or those harmful for their mental health (generally ones face to face with customers, customer support or high stress jobs), for a relatively small wage to said job's demands and lasting effects.

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> for a relatively small wage

This was found specifically to be the case for American men in a Boston Fed study last month: as the wage paid for trade-skill jobs shrinks over time relative to the wages paid to school-degree jobs, men increasingly refuse to work trade-skill jobs.

> The evidence from this study shows that the widening earnings gap between highly and less skilled workers over the last four decades is closely connected with the decreasing labor supply of prime-age men

> The decline in relative earnings is associated with a 0.49 percentage point increase in the exit rate, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in the exit rate among non-college men over the 1980–2019 period.

https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-w...

Caveats. There are almost certainly further coincident reasons for the decrease in “blue collar” trade-skills workforce, both for men and for all genders; this particularly study should not be considered an exclusive factor, merely a relevant one. Please consider the constraints documented at that link before overextrapolating; for example, “non-Hispanic” which rules out biological causes, and so on.

Where are you finding small wage plumbers or carpenters? All the trades here (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, carpentry (perhaps more on the finish side vs framing though) are extremely expensive, with hourly rates between $80-$150/hour. (source - did a lot of renovations on my house, and my BIL is an electrician).

Wages of an employee versus hourly labor rates a customer pays are vastly different things.

The laborer isn't seeing 100% of that bill.

The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.

And how many billable hours there are on average in a month? Does the rate include tools or some of the materials?

I mean, carpentry is really cheap here and not at all comparable to the other trades, and i know it's worse in the US.

Lol, the tradesman isn't taking that home.

Neither is the apprentice that probably is doing half the work.

It's insane how uninformed all the "tell your kids to get into the trades!" techies are.

I'm mostly using small companies where it's the owner and maybe his son or 1-2 employees doing the work. Likewise my BIL has his own company that's just him and his best friend. So yeah those guys are all taking 100% of the rate. Granted they have to pay taxes and insurance, and all that like I do, but they're doing well overall.

Neighbor was getting his deck painted a few months ago.

Talked to the guy doing the painting, he was getting $80/hr.

(Related: IMHO my neighbor sucks at finding affordable prices for painters!)

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

If it's such a good deal they should have no problem finding plenty of employees for those jobs. If Gen Z is opposed to those kind of working conditions for some reason, then it's just a matter of supply and demand - like how trash collectors get paid a lot for a relatively low-skilled labor job, because not many people want to deal with trash all day. Whether we share the same aversion Gen Z does for certain types of jobs is irrelevant, nobody gets to be the arbiter of what peoples preferences are

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

yeah I was thinking the same thing as I wrote it actually, but went with that example anyway as it's a typical example for a job that pays more because of a lower supply of people willing to do it. Could've used those ice-road truckers or deep sea fisherman or some other risky job as a more clear-cut example, but I think any example works to demonstrate the point

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