I left a job as a carpenter and joiner in 2008 when work dried up. My father stayed at it. I had done some study with the open university and used that to get into office work in Finance.
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.
> The other big change I saw was the nailgun and chopsaw revolution
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.
For my house, the general contractor I hired ran a union operation. I didn't hire individual welders and plasterers myself.
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).
I get the impression that some American unions operate exactly as a cartel that also sets standards. I'm not against unions at all but the conflation of roles in the US is probably bad for workers long term.
In some places trades are self-employed with no union. Out in the boonies, for example, there isn't a critical mass to support the union's overhead upon the business. Also personal relationships are more important so both getting business and reputation for quality is more automatic (people talk if you are good or bad with an immediate result to your business as expected/presumed)
My experience with shorter versus longer jobs, in the tech industry, consulting a few years back:
- 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.
Another experienced consultant/contractor here and this 100%. The time overhead is what kills you, spending hours to get an hour of payable work is different than spending hours to get 18 months of billable work. And spending hours of work just to not get the project is common.
It's why actors have agents, if they had to market themselves they'd have no time for acting.
This will sound flippant, but know people. You don't need to know them well. Former bosses, workers, etc. are fine. In a tight job market, many will be looking for people.
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.
disclaimer: i've only been doing this for a couple years...but it's gone pretty well. i've written this more like a story than direct advice, because i think all the twists and turns are relevant.
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 :)
I care! I never worked in trade, but perhaps I have an obsessive personality and like it when things are done properly. When I moved to the UK a few years ago, one of the first things I noticed is the appalling quality of work that the construction industry puts out in the UK. It is truly shocking. Everything is just “that’ll do”. It is very difficult to find a true craftsman these days, even if you are willing to pay for it.
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.
"I have constant pain in my hands, back and knees for my 10 years."
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".
No...50 years ago we had the NHS, and sickness benefits, same as today
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.
Also 50 years ago if you were building new housing, if your work was sub-standard you did not get paid. There would be a clerk of works checking it was up to scratch. Now it is a race to the bottom
> Also 50 years ago if you were building new housing, if your work was sub-standard you did not get paid. There would be a clerk of works checking it was up to scratch. Now it is a race to the bottom
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.
I suspect they’re both correct. House building standards seem to have been trending downwards for at least 100 years if not more. Some things have gotten better of course (fire safety, insulation, etc), but the construction itself tends to be optimised for cost over quality these days.
Remember that there's a survivorshio bias in the 100 year old buildings you see still standing today. In many cases they are impractical for modern standards too - my home has 2ft thick external sandstone walls, and all the internal walls are brick. It's massively overengineered for the use of the building.
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.
In my experience I like living with stone walls a lot more than in a cardboard.
It’s true though that doing any changes to the stone wall is a lot harder than with drywall, but it kind of proves the point that current construction techniques are optimized for cost (I like to say they optimized for the builder a lot more than for the ones living in that building).
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.
> but it kind of proves the point that current construction techniques are optimized for cost
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.
Stone is unsuitable for most climates since it is a poor insulator. You have to build walls on the inside to insulate it. In effect building another house inside the stone exterior walls
Standards have been trending up. Modern houses are much more likely yo survive a hurricane, and have much better insulation. Most people have no idea what makes a house good and so are impressed by things that don't matter. A lot of this is because the important parts are hidden inside the walls where you can't see them.
I’m starting to appreciate this more as I age. Quite by accident - I purchased a new-ish (2004) house made by an incredible builder (T. W. Lewis). Compared to friends living in houses built around the same time, maintenance on this property is lower. Things are just “built better.”
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.
As other person said it’s a survivor bias as well.
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
75 year ago in the race to rehouse the UK the government paid for new builds cost plus. My father wrote(and sold for broadcast) a eponymous radio play on the phenomenon of everyone adding five points to the BOM and labor and getting paid automatically by the Ministry of Works. It was D noted.
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.
My parents met when they were both working construction. My mom was a surveyor and a laborer at various times; she helped get my dad into the union (Philly) and he was a carpenter. My mom stopped it to raise me and my sibling; my dad did it until it entirely broke his body. (I would not be writing this as a college-educated adult if he hadn't had a union pension that kicked in on disability.)
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)
Here in Germany about 50% of high school graduates go into a traditional vocational program, many of which are crafts. Electrical work, the car industry, machinery, carpentry, woodwork and so forth.
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.
I've only heard the, you know, missing-finger classic table saw horror stories very indirectly, honestly. My parents both spoke of OSHA rules like they were the gospel of the earth below, and the union had the power to ruin the company's day if they weren't following them. Non-union work here is very, very different, though -- some stories aren't mine to repeat, but I'll note "Helpers, construction trades" here:
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 happened to my father - lost his two right middle fingers on a table saw. I suppose this was before OSHA rules had wider-reaching impact, because he lost them in the late 60s (while working on construction for the NYC housing authority ... so it could have been union at that time, but I don't remember what he said.)
Table saws are no joke, even in the best of circumstances! There definitely is still risk even when you're managing that risk well. (And it doesn't matter how many videos of it I watch, that SawStop stuff still feels like a miracle every time you see a hot dog spared.)
While the SawStop is definitely impressive, almost any modern table saw is safer than one from the 60's due to the standardization of riving knives. For those who don't know, it's the metal fin behind the saw blade, and it's thicker than the body of the blade but thinner than the teeth. It reduces the chances of wood binding on the saw blade (and resulting kickback) by a large amount. They're a required component by many countries and standards bodies.
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.
Thanks for sharing this: I'd never even heard of riving knives. Wild to think of how many technological improvements like that have made the world safer/better without schmucks like me having any idea.
This is quite interesting to me, because I've been into lifting and body building at times in my life and the research was clear: within limits, this is very good for the human body. So I'm quite confident to say that there's nothing inherently bad about lifting, pushing, twisting, pulling, turning, and holding heavy things. Quite the opposite. 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? Or is this about dangerous workplaces? Or is this about repetitive strain? Heavy lifting is good for the body, but maybe not 12 hours of the same heavy lifting.
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 lift weights, you can choose a weight that’s appropriate to you. When it gets too heavy, you stop. When you’re finished, you rest for a day or two. When you feel a twinge, you easy up or take a rest day.
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.
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.
>Are they just never taught to lift things correctly?
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.
Interesting. I've often heard that athletes in even non-contact high school sports need to lift weights - to protect at-risk joints by strengthening the various muscles around them.
It would be extremely nice if mandatory weight training could greatly reduce the incidence of injuries and "wear out" in blue collar workers...
> So I'm quite confident to say that there's nothing inherently bad about lifting, pushing, twisting, pulling, turning, and holding heavy things. Quite the opposite.
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?
JFYI, here (Italy, possibly all EU, but I am not sure) the max weight of a sack of cement (or similar, gypsum, plaster etc.) is since quite a few years 25 kg, but it once was 50 kg.
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:
In Germany you can still buy 40 kg sacks (but 25 kg seems the default?) but it always seemed very stupid to me. Rather move something half the weight twice than twice the weight once.
However if you are doing it professionally, why not have your underlings move twice the weight? Time is money and all that, besides, if you don’t do it, your competitors probably are so if you don’t want to go under, you’re going to have to do the same thing.
Lifting, twisting, turning, etc heavy things isn’t intrinsically bad, but it is intrinsicallyr risky. In a gym environment you have the ability to control that risk.
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.
Besides all the other things people are saying about the difference between work and lifting in the gym have you spent much time with older power lifters? Almost uniformly they’ll have joint, neck and back issues.
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.
In addition to the inherent physical nature of the work, another problem is working for small businesses that fly under the radar of OSHA and other regulations. Also, family owned businesses don't have a "normal" career advancement process unless you belong to the family.
When people come to work on my house, I've noticed that everybody who is around my age (58) is hobbling and broken.
On the other hand the family sized ones do jobs that aren't economically viable for a large unionized one because of too much overhead. The difference between a large construction company and a small one remodeling your home can be in the five figures. I think it's not fair to say that a family one lacks career advancement, it's like saying that a small web development shop doesn't have the same career advancement opportunities as Microsoft. It doesn't mean that working for a small shop is a dead end job. In reality an experienced tradesman is always in high demand by larger firms or has the ability to be an independent contractor, regardless of where he started. In large cities a licensed plumber or electrician can make six figures and trying to get them to come out to your house can take weeks because they're so busy. The independent nature of the work makes it very resistant to national franchises, and different start ups have tried to make "uber-like" services for contracting tradesmen, Amazon has tried upselling "pro" installation services but nobody's been able to really centralize it yet.
> The difference between a large construction company and a small one remodeling your home can be in the five figures.
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.
Oof, the flaky radar of regulatory agencies... I wonder if it's the same in other comparable countries -- not just OSHA, but all DOL enforcement broadly is just such a joke in the US that it seems reasonable to expect almost any random place might be doing better.
I've been fortunate in finding a remodeling contractor that hires people who know what they are doing and pays them minimum of $30/hr and is insured/licensed. So far most of them have done excellent work. Some are purely carpenters, some are mostly painters, some have multiple skills. I talk with them and most could work for large construction companies building hotels and apartments (lots of that going on here) but prefer working 40 hr weeks working on people's homes. The carpenter (now retired) did a bunch of work in my house and was amazing to watch.
Trades were not great for me. I felt like I was just waiting to get killed by a coworker constantly. For $25/hr CAD. Not a very good deal at all.
Apart from the risk imposed by working with totally careless and disengaged people in large machines, my body felt like garbage all the time. My elbow stopped working near the end and I couldn’t do simple things like open my car door. I learned to program as fast as my brain could accommodate. It was totally unsustainable.
Huh. My neighbor growing up was an electrician. By his 40's he struck out on his own with his own company. Made way more money than my family that was doing white collar office jobs.
My parents were fishermen and have close to the same story, only without the union safety net. Which went as well as you can imagine.
My parents constantly encouraged me and were happy to see me pursue a white collar path because they didn't want me to go through the same thing when I got older. A lot of the shortages is cultural: Parents steering their kids out of said path as much as possible, sexism/racism and so forth. But then there's also the pay issue where the pay doesn't match the labor intensity nor are there many safety nets unless you're part of a union.
Like every other profession with a supposed shortage the pay and work conditions suck. And guess what shortage…
It’s like there is a shortage of people willing to pick fruit at 10$ an hour and live in terrible conditions while exposed to harsh chemicals. No shit you need to pay people a whole lot more money
Managers complaining about "not enough x" mean "I'm not willing to pay the market rate for x". Like, its a free market, up your price... or do you think basic economics don't apply to labor too? I'm surprised this article doesn't examine why companies aren't upping their pay.
they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. to pay ppl enough $ to entice them to do carpentry is not profitable, hence so few of them. I remember climbing a 4,000 ft mountain in a day in the hot sun..you could not pay me enough $ to ever want to do that again, and even if you could, it would never be profitable. That's why things are airlifted.
Yeah but carpentry has to be done and is getting done. It’s not so expensive you stop the job and wait for a lower price. My guess is you just use other unskilled labor and go for good enough. Maybe a true skilled carpenter isn’t worth the premium or the value isn’t clear to the buyer
This along with the cyclical nature of the housing industry are definite negatives for carpentry as a long-term career for citizens in the US. The fact that the article doesn’t mention the under the table nature of illegal immigrant work crews and how that puts downward pressure on wage rates is a blatant omission.
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.
Those people were around in 2020 (outside Home Depot here in Seattle) but are all gone now. I guess they are all just really busy rather than being deported or something.
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.
Housing starts are very cyclical, they absolutely can and do stop building things when it stops being economically favorable to do so. This is one of the reasons we have so few carpenters. It’s a boom and bust industry.
>they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable.
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".
The market is efficient. You raise prices and pay workers more -> Fewer people are willing to purchase at that price -> You make less profit -> You don't make enough profit to pay people more. It's a complex problem. You could make the same market argument as: if it was profitable to charge more and pay workers more, why doesn't anyone just start a company that does that and outcompete the others?
Supply and demand are always in flux, and the repeated attempts to match these is what causes market efficiency. It is frequently possible that prices are not keeping up with supply and demand, and there exists arbitrage opportunity that requires people knowledgeable about the market to act on.
Yes, and figuring out how to get orders of magnitude more housing production at dramatically lower prices is one of the most socially and morally important problems in the world today.
Not really. Most of the cost of housing is land anywhere it’s expensive. We have the technology to stack dwellings vertically. Where that’s illegal and there’s lots of demand housing is expensive. Otherwise not.
Apparently labour is ~35% of the cost of a house [1] though I imagine this varies a lot depending on the house being built, type of construction, location etc. Still, seems safe to assume labour is a large part of the cost.
Haha, very good timing, I just climbed a 4k mountain today in a Virginia heatwave. It was almost 100F real feel in the valley, and if I wasn't doing it for my own satisfaction I'd definitely want a good amount of money for it!
New Zealand does exactly this, and I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, it seems easy to say that if you don’t have enough workers, you’ve got to raise your price - it’s a free market, right? Except it’s not. NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP) and this means that being un- or under-employed is a viable option.
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.
> 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.
I understand that argument, but the very high minimum wage and availability of state support means that in practice there is no market-clearing price for this labour. New Zealanders simply don’t want to do these jobs.
The is a price but regulators cap it off. It may not be a good business but a lot of things aren’t a good business if you actually have to pay market wages.
I would bet quite a bit of money that if you start paying $100/hour, start selling fruit at luxury prices, and ban all cheaper imported fruit, the market will clear very quickly. Then again the government may lose the next election because of that.
That’s exactly right. There’s no market-clearing price because of regulatory distortion. You’re free to like or dislike that as a policy, but it is clear that it removes the information value of the price signal.
Sweden also. Berries and mushroom are picked almost exclusively by foreign workers. The government even had to open an exception to COVID restrictions to allow those workers to come in and to their job, as otherwise a whole harvest season could've been lost as there's no way swedes would do the job themselves.
I kind of dislike these industries that depend on imports of cheap labor from poor countries and the governments pandering to them because the locals won't do that kind work, since in that case, the government (read, the taxpayers) is subsidizing unprofitable business that cannot survive in free market conditions by manipulating the labor market in the favor of business owners through the import of cheap labor below local market rates.
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.
Sweden and most of Northern Europe would have no farms anymore if it were not for plenty of government subsidies and protectionism. It's a lot cheaper to farm where the weather is not just barely above freezing and there's plenty of sun.
I'm confused by this part: <<NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP)>> Did you mean to say "GDP per capita"? To me: The generosity of a social safety net is about two things: (1) culture (do you care about non-family) and (2) GDP per capita (can you afford it).
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.
I would argue that there is a housing shortage in many American cities insofar as there is demand for far more housing than currently exists. The housing would be built y the market if it were legally allowed, or not otherwise strongly disincentivized. As such prices are rising faster than inflation. This tells us that demand outstrips supply.
When demand outstrips supply, one thing that can happen is that prices rise until demand matches supply. That's what is happening now. That's not a shortage.
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.
> people who aren't willing to pay the market rate
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.
Poster here, 500k was not intended as literal or typical, just and example of how regulatory costs can add to market price.
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.
Local zoning means that the supply of housing is artificially constrained far below what would be an efficient use of land. Are you suggesting that labor has similar constraints in carpentry, or just being glib?
How much will you pay for that fruit? Because that will limit how much the farmer can pay the fruit pickers.
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).
If your job is replaced by a robot you can now have time to look after your kids. The problem is the person profiting from the robot is not the same person who needs the money to raise their kid.
That really isn’t how rising productivity works. Your job isn’t replaced by a robot, you can do more, but childcare will never be able to reap the same productivity gains, and hence, people will migrate out of child care into other areas of high productivity where they can simply be paid more. It costs rise so high that it makes sense for one parent to take over childcare duties and not worn anymore.
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).
The last 50 years of American prosperity was built primarily on the exploitation of labor as unions declined and Capital starting consuming an outsized amount of Labor’s productivity (with a fair amount of help from globalization efforts). Until the scales tip (and there are signs we’re headed there) and labor has more power with stronger unions, people should not expect workers to take garbage jobs (even in trades when they’re non union) because of manufactured shortages or crises. There is no labor shortage, only a shortage of workers willing to take undesirable work for unreasonable compensation. Luckily (?), as labor force participation continues to decline (10k Boomers retire each day) and there isn’t an appetite to ramp immigration, labor supply constraints will continue to push up wages (but is not a long term solution for broad scale productivity equity participation versus labor organization).
> The last 50 years of American prosperity was built primarily on the exploitation of labor as unions declined and Capital starting consuming an outsized amount of Labor’s productivity
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.
They did start making less money too. Factories moved away from union dominated places to lower waged non-union states. Even the unions ended up selling out and lowered wages for new members to protect their own pay.
Why do you think all the "foreign" automakers set up factories in the South? So they could avoid the cost of union-workers, or force the unions to lower their costs.
What would carpentry work have to pay before the demand is satisfied? It is my view that many people don't want to do trades at any reasonable rate. I would imagine most people my age would rather make $60k a year answering emails and doing zoom meetings than $120k going to a jobsite early every morning in any weather all year long.
The answer might end up being prefab housing etc. effectively replacing tradies with robots, not completely but to the point where the ones that are there get paid well.
That's a good point - maybe we really do not need all those carpenters?
I live in an aparment in a building made from prefabs. All my furniture is made by machines in Ikea factories. I literally never had any need for carpenter.
So then offer improved job conditions. Shorter hours, better safety, extra pay for shitty weather days, etc.
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.
Ha. I joined the Navy in the 90s and when I got out I tried to get into auto mechanic school. They wanted me to sign up for an apprenticeship at a car dealership and were happy to take my tuition money. But no one would allow me (female) to apprentice. They would say "sure...wait a bit for a start date" then I would call to ask when to come in and they would always have given the spot to a male student.
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).
Huh. That is an interesting point about carpentry not being as easy to self-teach. I don't think it's entirely impossible to do so, the Youtuber Mr. Chickadee being a counter-example: he's mentioned in interviews learning techniques from books, such as Japanese joinery.
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.
You'll pass their "do you already know carpentry" test by being able to demonstrate basic safety knowledge and knowing which tool is which. You can definitely teach yourself carpentry, and they are likely selective because they have people coming in who have already self-taught a fair amount. So if you come in not knowing what a screwdriver or a drill bit is, they don't want you.
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.
> But no one would allow me (female) to apprentice.
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 think framing this question as either "in the union" or "a rat" is pretty counterproductive. There are good reasons a person might want to learn something without pursuing it as a career.
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.
I seriously doubt that. The number of people willing to throw money at anything is vanishingly small.
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.
I know it's probably not the same, but my ex (a woman of color) has been self-learning woodworking by going to a shared community studio. They also have free courses geared towards women and minorities. Perhaps there's something like that in your area.
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
My great-grandfather and uncle (retired) were carpenters. While carpentry is a great hobby they definitely preferred/liked my professional direction -- at some point lungs, legs, hands, and wood do not like each other.
Well considering the culture on most job sites includes ridiculing people for wearing safety glasses and dust masks, there’s definitely room for improvement.
For most modern guys, yes, but there are still a lot of other uses for a hammer. Whether it's just not worth it to break out the nailer, or light demolition, or aligning framing elements, etc. Personally, since I moved into my property a few years ago, I frame about 50 linear feet per year, which is next to nothing, and I still preemptively went out and bought an electric nailer. No clue how the old school guys did it and maintained feeling in their arm.
you realize hammers are used all the time in carpentry still. what do you do if your gun doesnt sink the nail? or the boards didnt fasten tight together after nailing. or you need to pull a nail. or wedge or lever or...
That's the story of Etsy's original founder/CEO, actually - he was a woodworker who wanted a better way to sell online. Same with me, too - I was a glassblower selling on Etsy and founded a successful startup based on their site, because I wanted a better way to manage my shop.
I would say this is not just a problem in the US. In France there is the same problem. The wages just aren't worth it for this kind of hard 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.
Similar story. My dad was a carpenter doing wood frame construction in southern California. He later got his contractor's license - better money and less physical labor but he still did some construction. I worked summers as a laborer for him when I was in high school. I never got injured but he had injuries now and then. The one that did him in was a fall due to a broken rafter that broke his heel. He could never walk normally after that.
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.
Thank you to share these experiences. Real question: You wrote: <<Drinking on the job is also well tolerated.>> Is this "having fun" drinking or "reduce the pain" drinking? Either way, I can see how alcohol could increase risk on a construction site.
By drinking on the job, I mean drinking a bottle of red wine at lunch time for example. Also having a few beers around 3 pm. Then going back to the pub around 5 pm with your coworkers. Arriving on a job site hungover from the night before was a regular occurrence.
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...
Because the pay is too low for the required labor. Court dismissed, bring in the dancing lobsters.
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.
You think everyone can be an electrical engineer? Or even wants to be an electrical engineer?
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.
> You think everyone can be an electrical engineer? Or even wants to be an electrical engineer?
No, that's why I said:
> There will be some small handful, but the incentives push strongly towards one over the other.
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> 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 agree, someone who wants to be an engineer won't pick the trades. Someone who deeply wants to work the trades won't become an engineer.
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.
Your first paragraph seems to be at odds with your last paragraph.
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.
I'd argue the exact opposite, the number of people who have a strong preference for one or the other is dwarf'd by the number who mostly care about which pays better, has better benefits, and leads to a better work-life balance.
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.
My father was a independent carpenter and it took a toll on him. He had to do it if he was going to be able to get by while young and still living with his parents (my grandfather was also a carpenter.) It was a life of toil: plenty of injuries, probably maybe preventable if he managed safety a bit, lost fingers in an table saw accident (while working in construction during the late 60s on new NYC housing project development.) He never wanted me to do the work he did nor ever take on the lifestyle he did, unlike what was forced on him and loved to see that I had a strong interest in computer programming, thinking I would be a millionaire by the time I was 30 (didn't happen :) ) My brother went into a trade, but not into carpentry.
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.
I like that you mention patience. Carpentry takes patience, you need to pace yourself, and you need to adopt safety behaviors, that will get you through the day. If I watch my family work, they all do things slowly and paced. “Measure twice, cut once.”
My father would say something like that too. He insisted also to finish one contract at a time and to not take on more work than he can. Since he also planned out the work ahead of time, his mind was completely in one job.
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 :) )
If this is a real labor shortage, it's possible to do a lot more pre-cutting and just assemble on site. 120 years ago, Sears sold entire pre-cut house kits. Good ones. Some are still in use.[1] There are kit homes today from many sources.
All these professionals from vocational fields are horribly expensive in America. And then there are articles like these claiming they don't make money. BS. America has no public/private vocational school/training culture. People don't even teach each other unless you are born into the family of craftsman.
Yeah in the north east, carpenters with good reputations (they reliably show up, work to code, can think) make 6-figures easily. There’s no end to the work and they can pick and choose.
The price to do a renovation or build out here has gone through the roof with labor and materials becoming expensive.
Which is weird. Germany is full of vocational schools where everyone who wants to, young and old can learn various trades for cheap/free and yet labor is still expensive.
A few other things that weren't mentioned in the article:
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
You can make a living as a carpenter, and the work is often glorious, but like lots of industries wealth is often built on the exploitation of labor. Unions have been gutted over the last 100 years, so if you want to run an honest business and earn a good income you need to do high-end work.
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.
I remember watching a presentation on a high-end woodworker who just happened to be the son of a celebrity. He was working quite a bit with vacuum formed pieces that would sell for several thousand dollars in the 90s, with enough capital outlay from his father's money that he could build a dozen or so items at a time. It was then that I realized that the ability to make a living from crafting high-quality, modern furniture was probably a pipe dream for me simply because it would take me decades to gather the resources that this guy got for free, and by that time I'd be decades behind in relevant experience.
I'm a furniture maker. I come to the field with a lot of privilege having worked software for some years previously (but not earning FAANG retire early money), and having a spouse whose job provides considerable stability and health insurance.
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.
I understand, but at the time I was extremely interested in those sorts of vac-formed items. In the same way, I was fascinated with the free-form houses that consisted of metal mesh being covered with concrete. I was simply a kid who wanted to live in a future I designed.
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.
This is the stuff that "hurts" the most. The realization that not everyone starts from the same place and most of us are way back from starting line. And no matter how hard you work there isn't a way to recover that "lost distance".
Another part of it is the social programming. If you're an uneducated poor white male, it's easy to see a path into construction. If you're an uneducated poor black male, going into construction might as well be becoming an astronaut. Or to flip that around, imagine being an uneducated poor white male in Cleveland, Ohio and suddenly believing you could easily be a successful rapper. If your family, friends, neighborhood, media, etc don't show a clear path towards that role, you're not gonna seek it out, even without all the other barriers.
Cities/specialization is a luxury. The trade off is relationship to reality. People who build tangible things with their hands are relatively more grounded in reality.
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.
Btw, the article quotes this man (Ethan James, from the "Honest Carpenter" YouTube channel). I was going to link the same video, because I watched that last year as well.
I don’t know who did the research on this, or maybe I just live in an insanely expensive area, but the 2021 hourly rate for plumbers and electrician’s is laughable. The chart shows roughly $30 an hour. I can’t find one for under $100 in my are to save my life, most charge $150-$200 per man hour.
For people thinking "pre-fab"/automation is "the answer" to this shortage, I recommend reviewing Brian Potter's blog, Construction Physics.[1]
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)
According to this, it seems the skilled trades have a similar problem to medicine, where there is/was apparently a shortage of primary care doctors: people enter specialties that pay more.
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.).
I started as a helper in the summers for a small HVAC company. I stayed in the business for 7ish years, eventually getting my state of Texas HVAC contractor's license. After graduating college, I got out of HVAC and moved into controls which wound up taking me across the world. I got tired of the field and moved into product management.
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.
I'm a little surprised it cites carpenters make more than real estate agents. I'd assume a full time agent (not your neighbor who just happened to have a license) could make more than 50k a year.
If I recall, average home price now sells at 300k. A realtor keeping 2% after fees...buy/sell 10 houses and that's 60k.
Right - which is why I put a 2% take home instead of a 3% which the seller would pay per agent.
"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."
"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.
hmm...I recall my dad being a union plumber in 1982 and making $40k..in san antonio texas...granted there was overtime pay, I assume...but it seems that the wages have not really grown much...
I live in San Antonio, Texas and I chatted with my plumber about this when I had to have a gas pipe moved for a kitchen renovation. According to him, if you get your master's license most folks run crews, because you can bill out master rate and supervise and certify journeyman work and the city requires a master's license to pull permits, which is a big chunk of what you pay for as the buyer.
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.
Electricians and plumbers also have commercial and industrial markets, which are probably a large share of demand, but how many non residential structures are built from wood nowadays?
What I get from the comments so far: the pay is too low and construction wrecks your body. This implies that our towns and cities are built on the wrecked bodies of the underpaid folks who build them. It's not a pleasant thought. Does it have to be this way?
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.
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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
I am White, did some construction (in Alaska) years ago and I can assure you a Black faces an uphill battle in that scenario. Nothing political about it.
It’s talking about hiring discrimination, so that information seems relevant to me. I’d bet that a number of groups would face hiring discrimination in the trades in the US, here in Australia, etc.
A majority of construction workers in San Jose, CA are Hispanic, as are the construction companies.
Maybe they discriminate against Blacks. Maybe they also discriminate against folks whose ancestors came from a diferent country. (Do Mexicans tend to like Columbians?)
That said, if there's discrimination in construction in San Jose, it isn't by whites.
Why would that discount its relevance? It just says that he faced discrimination. And why would a majority of Hispanic-dominant companies mean that the remainder wouldn’t discriminate? Presumably it’s something he raised as a challenge when interviewed.
Did he say that he faced discrimination by whites?
As to your assumption that Hispanics don't discriminate, you haven't spent much time with them. (They aren't as racist as Indians or Chinese, but that's a low bar.)
Where did I assume that Hispanics don’t discriminate?! I think every group would have a tendency to. I’m just saying that I don’t see where it’s relevant which group did, just that he faced discrimination and that it would be a relevant part of the “challenges” backstory.
I know a few carpenters who left. They were driven out of the business (US).
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.
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