I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
>It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
> Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
The number of programmers I know with back issues like herniated discs is larger than those without. It's a different risk, no doubt, but it's real nevertheless.
That has more to do with lifestyle, than the job.
Most if not all programmers certainly would have the time to do stretching, gymnastic, sport - develop and maintain the right muscles and take brakes when needed. Most are just too lazy.
A guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.
There is no comparison between a programmer who chooses not to concern himself with ergonomics and a labourer who must put his health on the line daily or be fired.
The comments here are confusing risk with health consequences. Whereas working in construction or with heavy machinery poses much higher risks than sitting at a desk for 30 years the results may be just as bad in both cases.
Just like a construction worker should observe H&S to minimize accidents, the office worker should get up regularly and exercise but, again in both cases, ignorance, carelessness or a heavy handed boss are rampant.
This reminds of the scene in The Office where Micheal Scott tries really hard to show how office work was just as dangerous as working in the warehouse with heavy machinery.
Being the one driving the important people, I can tell you from my experience, is one of the most eye opening of my eclectic history up til now, in that context. After doing it for 6 years, I can't imagine really voluntarily accepting that large pill to swallow of "lacking the skill."
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Not totally sure I understand your comment, but I wouldn't say the issue with drivers was lacking driving skill...it was more about dependability and reliability.
Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.
> the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
That's power for ya. It comes with all kinds of perks.
One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
I'm not arguing either perspective but being 59 and out of money looks very different than being 80 and out of money. If you have built up capital and that's how you make your living, you become very dependent on that capital.
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
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In a logical world, computer programming would be a trade. I take the point about risk of physical injury of death, hovever.
I think one problem is thinking of the trades as a place where you put people not (good|competent|intelligent) enough to go through college. (Some people's conception of the armed forces makes the same mistake.)
Go a generation or two back and in the UK, we had a much clearer separation between working and middle class, for example one got paid weekly or hourly wages, the other got paid a monthly salary. The trades themselves were divided into skilled and unskilled. While it made a huge cultural difference which class you were from, a good skilled trade could easily make you more money than a clerk job. (Bob Cratchit was middle class!) An unskilled day labourer such as a stevedore might live from hand to mouth, an engine mechanic could usually afford to raise a family and afford a place to live (in a working-class area).
One point that most people miss is there are many different kinds of electricians who, often can't even do each other's jobs.
There is the house wirer, the panel builder, automotive electrician, HV, marine, drilling, industrial, maintenance etc etc.
Some kinds pay better, others yield work almost wherever you go, others lend themselves to starting your own business better.
It is nowhere near as homogenous as often described.
Sparky's with apprenticeships (in Australia at least) have the advantage of earning while learning while also segueing into the interstitial Hardware / Software zone.
A good many I've known have pulled cable and slogged for several years, invested in shitty old house after another (renovating and flipping), transitioned into running electrical subcontracting companies, and "retired" out of trades and into software careers (in GIS or other domains) in their mid thirties to early forties.
Neither trades nor university education are lifetime commitments or mutually exclusive.
Yes.
And the skill you learn, you can use it to build your own house and save money.
White collars usually arenāt that good at manual work, at least not to professional levels.
In my experience, datacenter industrial electricians seem to take a dim view of the skills of residential specialists as guys who just spend all their time pulling romex, but it's sometimes a lot more complicated than that... Residential has to deal with individual home owners, house flippers, renovation GCs and weird change orders in a way that people working in more technically structure and high-budget environments don't.
This is true in tech as well. Big Tech folks with figuratively infinite budgets believe they're all that, but they basically are incapable of understanding the day to day problems small organizations face, or develop the ability to jump between completely different fields of technical problems several times a day.
Larger organizations come with more specialization and greater resources, but you will never find a jack of all trades there.
This.
I became a licensed ship's electrician a decade and change after doing my MSc in RF design - turned out that in the line of work I stumbled into, doing control systems for heavy offshore equipment, it was a massive benefit to be able to work hands-on on the systems during commissioning, rather than pointing at the stuff which needed doing and trying to agree with some poor guy I more often than not did not share a language with as to what I meant.
The supervisor at the local trades office had a laugh at that when I called and asked if I could get to take the test(s) based on relevant work experience rather than by having served a conventional apprenticeship.
Most often, the ones asking to take that path had started working as cable pullers and helping hands at fifteen; having an MSc ask was... ...uncommon.
It was quite the experience learning HOW to do all the stuff I knew needed doing.
Anyway - I can now do all sorts of rather competent work on a ship.
I'd be utterly useless (as well as in violation of the law) if I ever attempted to do anything in a house.
The latter has been very helpful - seeing as I've been asked often whether I can help out friends and relatives with electrical installations at home, seeing as I'm an electrician and all.
Sorry. Against the law. Phew.
I met a professional electrician in college who was in charge of the electrical system in an old high-rise building. He told me that it was common for him to work on high-voltage lines that could not be shut off for service. He said that hearing the pops from the high voltage was not uncommon. He regularly put his life on the line as part of his job. Just hearing that made me want to make sure I got a college degree so I wouldn't have to get a trade job. All trade jobs will wear your body down, and you regularly have to put your health on the line. Saying that trade jobs are the future is easy to say, but there's a catch. You may sacrifice your health. The better route maybe a career where you help reduce the dangers of trade jobs.
Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the āAI-proof careerā advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then thereād be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
That could be the main point of this kind of articles: to dissuade potential competitors.
People here in these comments are largely just naive or unable to understand things outside of some nerd fantasy or something. If white collar jobs become untenable, the economy will just collapse. The idea people will suddenly go to the trades and work on "solar power" as someone said just mind-numbing nonsense. It would be a very unstable situation and "pulling wire for the county" would not be the main focus of the day.
> Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the āAI-proof careerā advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then thereād be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
The demand will also drop through the floor because the people who previously had the well-paying white collar jobs who are a large amount of the non-corporate customers for trades people will be gone, so they can no longer afford to hire you. The corporate customers will have far less need for facilities other than data centers because they won't have nearly as many meat employees to house, so the demand craters there too.
And some amount of the other people fleeing to the trades will have taken up your specific trade, and why would they pay someone to do something they can do themselves.
So you'll have massively increased labor supply as everyone flees to these "AI safe" jobs and massively decreased demand due to a flattened low-wage economy where almost everyone is trying to scrape by on a trades job.
If the AI labor disruption is big enough to cause a serious problem for all knowledge workers, I don't see how it doesn't take everything else down with it. The entire economy as we know it just spirals into chaos leading to, probably, violent revolution.
On the other hand a loooot of people will inherit badly run down homes from their parents as the boomers finally go six feet under. That means a loooooooooot of demand. And on top of that we got the shift off of fossil fuels to electric cars, heat pumps, decentralized production (solar) and storage, which means yet another serious piece of demand.
Having been an electrician turned dev, friends ask me if I miss it at times and I can honestly say I don't miss being covered in rat faeces and fibreglass. Much prefer my standing desk and clean air.
What do you think of the long term viability of the two careers?
The article talks about ātradesā in general, conflating painting walls with installing heatpumps.
Electricians and plumbers stand out in ātradesā because these jobs are fairly technical, while not particularly exhausting. A good plumber is always in high demand and can charge well for emergency interventions.
A plumber quoted me 1500 euros to install a swimming pool heat pump. I did it all myself with no prior experience and without the right tools in 8 hours. It cost me 300 euros worth of material. The guy would have made 1200 euros in a day. He was available 30 days from the time I called him, meaning he was quite busy.
Not saying that itās the right call for everybody, but yeah right now, as a plumber or electrician who works in the high end of the trade, you make a decent living without the annoyances of office politics or fear of AI.
Residential master electrician makes 5K - 10K per day. They have other electricians working for them, just need to sign off on the work. With inflation and lack of labor supply in US, this will only increase.
Everything is going to be electric. The world is only at 23% electrification. The target is 35% by 2035, which many think is wildly optimistic.
The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping. A young kid in high school can get the training in school (less gatekeeping, career help), become a professional and quite possibly become a master electrician by 30. Then make big bucks forever.
Looks like kids and parents are coming to these conclusions on their own. The Hottest High Schools in Massachusetts Are Trade Schools: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/massachusetts-trade-hi...
[1] Can the World Hit 35% Electrification by 2035? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49904154 [2]Electrification Special Report, INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY: https://www.iea.org/reports/electrification https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/1c696cc3-e251-46a9-...
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