The trades: make the numbers work
Apr. 30th, 2025 07:57 am![[personal profile]](/%20https://www.npmjs.com/package/ocr-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
methylethylEverybody's pushing the trades lately. I'm onboard with that: I WANT the trades to be a viable career path, a good way to support a family, etc. We homeschool our kids, and our parents failed at the whole career-counselling thing. The only thing they knew was: go to college----> get a good job. We were the first generation through the ed. pipeline, for whom that failed. I never quite finished the degree (just as well: I quit when I realized I'd need to borrow money to finish-- at least we don't have debt!), and my husband has a very beautiful BA-with-honors, that is worth less than nothing.
When I say less than nothing, I mean: there are NO jobs you can get with a 4yr liberal-arts degree (for all I know this is true of the science degrees also). None. If you get a 4yr degree and you do not put in another 3yrs racking up debt for a master's degree, your degree counts against you. The only job it qualifies you for is substitute teaching. We discovered this early-ish in our marriage: applying for jobs that do not require a degree (because degree jobs are all for postsecondary degrees now), we experimented with listing the degree on his resume, and leaving it off. The only way to get callbacks was to leave it off. Now we know.
We think the implication of this might be: if you list the degree for a job that doesn't need it, you're signaling that you'll be a lousy employee: entitled, lazy, and overqualified. You don't want this job, you'd just be settling for it, because you fail at life and wasted four years studying literature, but then didn't go for the postgrad. Or maybe you lack relevant job experience compared to HS grads who have already spent four years working fulltime.
For us, the viable career path was: forget the degree, go back to the local 2yr college, get a 2yr professional certification in a medical specialty, and now yay, we have an almost-median income.
So we'd never advise our kids to go get a liberal arts degree. Not happening. College is strictly for if you are laser-focused on a specific career path, such as engineering, that you can't get into without an advanced degree AND that career pays at least twice median income. Otherwise you're wasting seven years of your life in order to be a permanent rent serf and struggle to support a family.
So. That was far too long an intro to say: what about the trades?
I dig Mike Rowe out there pushing skilled trades, I respect all the guys I grew up with whose skill in construction, plumbing, electrical, repair, hvac, etc. literally keep our lives running... and those jobs still look like a raw deal and I can't see advising my kids to do any of that, except as a way to pay for college. These guys are crippled from work-related injuries and toxic exposures well before retirement age. What do they get in return? A median US income, maybe a little under.
I want the numbers to be wrong. I seriously hope they are wrong. I keep looking-- I pull up the local trade schools, I scope out the highest-paying specialties they train in (plumbing, electrician, hvac), and... the starting wages are around $56k, and max out around $80k if you've got years of experience. If you want to know something scary: airframe mechanics (you know, the guys who do all the completely essential maintenance on the giant flying machines) make, on average, well under the median income. The guys who keep airplanes running and are subject to all kinds of toxic exposures and will probably die of cancer from it before they get anywhere near average old age... yeah, we don't pay them enough to afford dental care for their kids.* If you have to fly, I recommend you pray a lot, and ask whatever deity you worship to bless and protect the guys who maintain the aircraft.
Once you already work in the trades, there are certainly ways to get additional training at the company's expense, and lever your way up a little... but the ceiling's lower than you'd think, and the terms are infernal. I know a few guys who've beat the average here, and here's what that looks like: you fly all over the country for weeks or months at a time, to attend intensive training programs and rack up special certifications, so that you can work on specialized machines-- stuff like MRI units in hospitals, industrial manufacturing equipment, giant heavy-duty stuff like excavators, cranes and train engines. If you're very very lucky, you can get this training out of the way while you are young, single, and OK with being away from home for long stretches. If you're *extremely* lucky, you can then land a job that's compatible with having a home life. But if you're most guys on this track, you can typically sign on with a company like Caterpillar (which pays OK and has good benefits) and then spend like the first five years of your career working nights and swing shift. So if like most working class families your wife works too... you had better have some live-in grandparents to watch the kids, or just not have a family until you've reached mid-career at least. It's not much better than working oil rigs and being away six months at a time.
Again, I ask: does anybody actually want the life that's on offer here?
For reference, median household (not individual!) income currently runs about $78k nationally, maybe $63k locally. We live somewhere between those points, with a family of five, and unless something drastic changes** we will never be able to buy a house, help our kids with college, or retire. We depend on the generous child-credit on our tax return, for unavoidable emergencies like car repairs and medical care-- we can't afford those out of our ordinary income, which gets eaten up mostly in rent, insurance, and food. In order to stay afloat on a median income, we buy all our clothes (except underwear), dishes, sheets, towels, vehicles, bicycles, furniture and most household goods secondhand, we do our own car maintenance and minor repairs, we cook every single meal at home, we do not have a TV or any of the luxury subscription services that go with it (we don't netflix and chill). We do not have things like gym memberships. And in spite of this extraordinary level of thrift, we are unable to build savings.
That is what a median income gets you these days. And that's only because we're lucky enough to live in a relatively low-cost part of the country.
Why would I want that for my kids?
I get it, YES, the trades are absolutely a better deal than getting into debt for a four-year degree that is worse than useless: it actively sabotages your job prospects. If the choice is between a BA and a useful trade, definitely go for the useful trade. You can probably handle that without getting into debt. But it's not exactly a good career path, if the numbers are true. And I don't think the people out there advocating for the trades are being honest about that. Mike Rowe is not living on a median income. That's fine, but I think he's depressingly representative of the most prominent people out there advocating The Trades as the future: out of touch with the realities of actually living on a Trades income. Yes, the Trades are absolutely better than just a high school diploma. Yes, the trades are better than just a Bachelor's degree. Yes, they are the right choice for young men who are not heading into theoretical physics or civil engineering, or shipping logistics.
But that's not enough. We DO need more skilled labor, but we need it in a broader context where people working skilled trades are making enough money to have a family, buy a modest house, save for retirement, and buy new shoes for their kids once in a while, and have working conditions that let them have a stable family life. $70k isn't enough. $70k to work night shift and be away for weeks is punishment for crimes not committed. But that's about all you can hope for as a mechanic or plumber or electrician or HVAC specialist, unless you also have the business savvy to be the guy who owns the company. There are a lot of vocations out there that people are willing to be poor for, because those jobs are so deeply soul-rewarding: Priests, musicians, artists, carpenters, luthiers, farmers, writers, craftsmen... HVAC is not one of those jobs. In order to be worthwhile careers (and as a society, we NEED them to be), they need to pay 30-50% more now and rise in tune with inflation AND OR we need to get the dang inflation under control. The debt-and-rental economy needs to end, if we still want to have people who maintain the basic things that make a first-world American way of life possible***.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*When the revolution comes, these guys will be the first to sign up: the ones who did the responsible thing, got training in a job that was essential and couldn't be outsourced, and then still couldn't afford to move out of their parents' house, get married, and have kids. They're competent, hardworking, and they're probably just as good with guns as they are with wrenches.
**One way this could be solved, is by letting prices collapse in all the radically inflated sectors: housing, doctoring, and education, notably. Those things didn't get more expensive because they got better. They got snowed under by bureaucratic compliance requirements, metastasizing admin, and a crippling burden of middlemen (insurance, bankers, investors, professional licensing organizations). Price collapse would solve all of that, very quickly, as the industries would be forced to de-worm themselves.
***Of course, another way this could play out, is we drop the idea of a first-world way of life. Everyone's living standards are going to decline as resource extraction becomes more expensive. We can fight it, and continue to immiserate everyone in the process, OR, we could embrace it, and start by making it possible to build more basic houses. It doesn't have to be shantytowns. I stayed in very comfortable, beautiful, gracious houses overseas, that cost pennies on the dollar to build, compared to every insurable house in the US. They had no insulation, no indoor plumbing, no HVAC, no carpets, no dishwashers, no fridges, no washing machines, no city water, no sewer, hardly any furniture... they were brick, faced with concrete, tiled halfway up the wall, with corrugated metal roofs seated 6 inches above the top of the walls for ventilation. A mango tree in the yard was the most sought-after climate control. And we lived there a while, and never once felt we were missing out on anything. Why do we need all this junk we have in our house, stateside? Because the architecture is climate-inappropriate (no ventilation, too much upholstery) so if you don't run the hvac, everything gets moldy. We have to have a fridge because everywhere you buy food is too far away to walk every day (not so in the developing world!). We need the junky electronic entertainment because we live too far from each other and have completely forgotten how to have a social life or religious observances. We need a vacuum because of the carpet. We need the mower because of the lawn. We need the washing machine because clothing is cheap, we have too much of it, and we aren't careful with it. We need the dishwasher because we use too many dishes, and we use too many dishes because we have a dishwasher. Nothing about this is necessary, or sensible, and nothing about it makes our lives better. So much of it is just expensive ways to cope with the fact that our family and social networks are broken, and our zoning laws prevent us living in people-friendly environments. What if we invested in *those* instead?
When I say less than nothing, I mean: there are NO jobs you can get with a 4yr liberal-arts degree (for all I know this is true of the science degrees also). None. If you get a 4yr degree and you do not put in another 3yrs racking up debt for a master's degree, your degree counts against you. The only job it qualifies you for is substitute teaching. We discovered this early-ish in our marriage: applying for jobs that do not require a degree (because degree jobs are all for postsecondary degrees now), we experimented with listing the degree on his resume, and leaving it off. The only way to get callbacks was to leave it off. Now we know.
We think the implication of this might be: if you list the degree for a job that doesn't need it, you're signaling that you'll be a lousy employee: entitled, lazy, and overqualified. You don't want this job, you'd just be settling for it, because you fail at life and wasted four years studying literature, but then didn't go for the postgrad. Or maybe you lack relevant job experience compared to HS grads who have already spent four years working fulltime.
For us, the viable career path was: forget the degree, go back to the local 2yr college, get a 2yr professional certification in a medical specialty, and now yay, we have an almost-median income.
So we'd never advise our kids to go get a liberal arts degree. Not happening. College is strictly for if you are laser-focused on a specific career path, such as engineering, that you can't get into without an advanced degree AND that career pays at least twice median income. Otherwise you're wasting seven years of your life in order to be a permanent rent serf and struggle to support a family.
So. That was far too long an intro to say: what about the trades?
I dig Mike Rowe out there pushing skilled trades, I respect all the guys I grew up with whose skill in construction, plumbing, electrical, repair, hvac, etc. literally keep our lives running... and those jobs still look like a raw deal and I can't see advising my kids to do any of that, except as a way to pay for college. These guys are crippled from work-related injuries and toxic exposures well before retirement age. What do they get in return? A median US income, maybe a little under.
I want the numbers to be wrong. I seriously hope they are wrong. I keep looking-- I pull up the local trade schools, I scope out the highest-paying specialties they train in (plumbing, electrician, hvac), and... the starting wages are around $56k, and max out around $80k if you've got years of experience. If you want to know something scary: airframe mechanics (you know, the guys who do all the completely essential maintenance on the giant flying machines) make, on average, well under the median income. The guys who keep airplanes running and are subject to all kinds of toxic exposures and will probably die of cancer from it before they get anywhere near average old age... yeah, we don't pay them enough to afford dental care for their kids.* If you have to fly, I recommend you pray a lot, and ask whatever deity you worship to bless and protect the guys who maintain the aircraft.
Once you already work in the trades, there are certainly ways to get additional training at the company's expense, and lever your way up a little... but the ceiling's lower than you'd think, and the terms are infernal. I know a few guys who've beat the average here, and here's what that looks like: you fly all over the country for weeks or months at a time, to attend intensive training programs and rack up special certifications, so that you can work on specialized machines-- stuff like MRI units in hospitals, industrial manufacturing equipment, giant heavy-duty stuff like excavators, cranes and train engines. If you're very very lucky, you can get this training out of the way while you are young, single, and OK with being away from home for long stretches. If you're *extremely* lucky, you can then land a job that's compatible with having a home life. But if you're most guys on this track, you can typically sign on with a company like Caterpillar (which pays OK and has good benefits) and then spend like the first five years of your career working nights and swing shift. So if like most working class families your wife works too... you had better have some live-in grandparents to watch the kids, or just not have a family until you've reached mid-career at least. It's not much better than working oil rigs and being away six months at a time.
Again, I ask: does anybody actually want the life that's on offer here?
For reference, median household (not individual!) income currently runs about $78k nationally, maybe $63k locally. We live somewhere between those points, with a family of five, and unless something drastic changes** we will never be able to buy a house, help our kids with college, or retire. We depend on the generous child-credit on our tax return, for unavoidable emergencies like car repairs and medical care-- we can't afford those out of our ordinary income, which gets eaten up mostly in rent, insurance, and food. In order to stay afloat on a median income, we buy all our clothes (except underwear), dishes, sheets, towels, vehicles, bicycles, furniture and most household goods secondhand, we do our own car maintenance and minor repairs, we cook every single meal at home, we do not have a TV or any of the luxury subscription services that go with it (we don't netflix and chill). We do not have things like gym memberships. And in spite of this extraordinary level of thrift, we are unable to build savings.
That is what a median income gets you these days. And that's only because we're lucky enough to live in a relatively low-cost part of the country.
Why would I want that for my kids?
I get it, YES, the trades are absolutely a better deal than getting into debt for a four-year degree that is worse than useless: it actively sabotages your job prospects. If the choice is between a BA and a useful trade, definitely go for the useful trade. You can probably handle that without getting into debt. But it's not exactly a good career path, if the numbers are true. And I don't think the people out there advocating for the trades are being honest about that. Mike Rowe is not living on a median income. That's fine, but I think he's depressingly representative of the most prominent people out there advocating The Trades as the future: out of touch with the realities of actually living on a Trades income. Yes, the Trades are absolutely better than just a high school diploma. Yes, the trades are better than just a Bachelor's degree. Yes, they are the right choice for young men who are not heading into theoretical physics or civil engineering, or shipping logistics.
But that's not enough. We DO need more skilled labor, but we need it in a broader context where people working skilled trades are making enough money to have a family, buy a modest house, save for retirement, and buy new shoes for their kids once in a while, and have working conditions that let them have a stable family life. $70k isn't enough. $70k to work night shift and be away for weeks is punishment for crimes not committed. But that's about all you can hope for as a mechanic or plumber or electrician or HVAC specialist, unless you also have the business savvy to be the guy who owns the company. There are a lot of vocations out there that people are willing to be poor for, because those jobs are so deeply soul-rewarding: Priests, musicians, artists, carpenters, luthiers, farmers, writers, craftsmen... HVAC is not one of those jobs. In order to be worthwhile careers (and as a society, we NEED them to be), they need to pay 30-50% more now and rise in tune with inflation AND OR we need to get the dang inflation under control. The debt-and-rental economy needs to end, if we still want to have people who maintain the basic things that make a first-world American way of life possible***.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*When the revolution comes, these guys will be the first to sign up: the ones who did the responsible thing, got training in a job that was essential and couldn't be outsourced, and then still couldn't afford to move out of their parents' house, get married, and have kids. They're competent, hardworking, and they're probably just as good with guns as they are with wrenches.
**One way this could be solved, is by letting prices collapse in all the radically inflated sectors: housing, doctoring, and education, notably. Those things didn't get more expensive because they got better. They got snowed under by bureaucratic compliance requirements, metastasizing admin, and a crippling burden of middlemen (insurance, bankers, investors, professional licensing organizations). Price collapse would solve all of that, very quickly, as the industries would be forced to de-worm themselves.
***Of course, another way this could play out, is we drop the idea of a first-world way of life. Everyone's living standards are going to decline as resource extraction becomes more expensive. We can fight it, and continue to immiserate everyone in the process, OR, we could embrace it, and start by making it possible to build more basic houses. It doesn't have to be shantytowns. I stayed in very comfortable, beautiful, gracious houses overseas, that cost pennies on the dollar to build, compared to every insurable house in the US. They had no insulation, no indoor plumbing, no HVAC, no carpets, no dishwashers, no fridges, no washing machines, no city water, no sewer, hardly any furniture... they were brick, faced with concrete, tiled halfway up the wall, with corrugated metal roofs seated 6 inches above the top of the walls for ventilation. A mango tree in the yard was the most sought-after climate control. And we lived there a while, and never once felt we were missing out on anything. Why do we need all this junk we have in our house, stateside? Because the architecture is climate-inappropriate (no ventilation, too much upholstery) so if you don't run the hvac, everything gets moldy. We have to have a fridge because everywhere you buy food is too far away to walk every day (not so in the developing world!). We need the junky electronic entertainment because we live too far from each other and have completely forgotten how to have a social life or religious observances. We need a vacuum because of the carpet. We need the mower because of the lawn. We need the washing machine because clothing is cheap, we have too much of it, and we aren't careful with it. We need the dishwasher because we use too many dishes, and we use too many dishes because we have a dishwasher. Nothing about this is necessary, or sensible, and nothing about it makes our lives better. So much of it is just expensive ways to cope with the fact that our family and social networks are broken, and our zoning laws prevent us living in people-friendly environments. What if we invested in *those* instead?
Yes ...
Date: 2025-04-30 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 06:43 pm (UTC)You make several great points.
The trades may be a better way to go but none of the choices are good.
I have often wondered how much of the housing being built around here will still be viable in 50 years. The population on our island is increasing as more people find they can maintain their urban-style life in a more affordable rural area. The houses are energy hogs: much too big and completely unsuitable to our environment. Gotta have HVAC. Gotta have the fridge; gotta have the dishwasher; gotta have a washer, a dryer, home entertainment centre, espresso machine . . .
no subject
Date: 2025-05-04 08:36 pm (UTC)what happens after, depends a lot on the economy and population numbers. If prosperity declines enough, I hope we will see a return to traditional methods and materials, and dropping (or ignoring) regulations that require new houses to have all the modern things, whether buyers want them-- or can afford them-- or not.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-05 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-05 02:26 am (UTC)It never made sense to build the same houses everywhere.
Anyway, I don't know about your climate, but here, everything built on a slab (and that's everything since 1960) turns into a mold box in the absence of aggressive air conditioning. It's not the tropics exactly, but in the decline, traditional Balinese houses would be 10x more appropriate. Heck, palm-thatch huts would be better. We do have a winter, but the natives lived in unheated structures back in the day. I expect wool long-clothes would make a comeback.
Someday, perhaps we'll get back to something tailored to the place. I think it'll look something like this:
https://stories.scienceinpublic.com.au/2016/coolhouses/
Or this:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/247698048242420229/
The key features are: high, ventilated roof, off-grade foundation (it's up on pillars with air circulating under the floors), wood construction (no thermal mass), and a generous roof overhang or wide porch.
Deserts, cold climates, and places with rocks all have their own appropriate specs. We have to account for: heat, humidity, frequent torrential rains, and bugs.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-06 12:38 am (UTC)Florida is sub-tropical isn't it? Certainly makes sense to look at traditional housing as a model. Architecture from the antebellum south has similar features, including skylights that open to let the heat out.
I'm in the Pacific Northwest: cold-temperate rainforest. High humidity especially in the cold season (rainy with occasional frost and snow) complicates things. We are fortunate to live in a small 1950's house: simple rectangle, simple roof line. Recently had a masonry heater built in the basement. Wood heat makes so much sense here. I immediately noticed the benefit to keeping the basement warm and dry.
Not much need for air conditioning although everyone here seems to think they need it. Since we started using a solar oven we've hardly even used the ceiling fan. We shift up our clothing and our bedding seasonally. Summer is the dry season so we usually have the doors and windows open. A nice summer day is anything above 72 or 73F and 80F is hot.
I'd love to see some real vernacular architecture develop but most people still want all the mod-cons.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-06 01:31 am (UTC)There's also an arrangement of rooms common to very old houses here, dogtrot is one version and shotgun shack is another, where you orient the house to face the prevailing breeze, and the layout it such that if you open all the doors and windows, the breeze blows straight through the house from one side to the other, without obstruction.
Houses in SE Asia do this ventilation trick by simply having a gap between the roof and the tops of the walls. If fancy, you get patterned bricks-with-holes at the tops of walls and doorways, like:
https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1404979958/photo/ancient-facade-with-pattern-in-color-of-time-china-house-at-chinese-town.jpg
Which is very sensible, but Americans are conditioned to waaaay more privacy than this allows (it includes interior walls of course). In Viet Nam, I encountered this even in hotels! It meant every TV set was audible in every room. I reckon we'll all get used to closer quarters one way or another. Everybody having their own room is a large historical anomaly.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-07 02:04 am (UTC)I saw some of these things in Australia: exterior kitchens in towns and the farm where I stayed there was a house complex: a collection of rooms connected by breezeways. The kitchen and bathhouse was combined but all the living spaces were separate and the composting loo was also separate. Lots of outdoor living spaces too.
I wonder sometimes how long our modern "needs" and expectations will last. I have already noticed a trend of people buying abandoned houses and renovating them and making it a job by documenting everything and putting it on a youtube channel. Fascinating to watch but most of them are still installing monster appliances and upgrading the electrical to support the added load.
Heat pumps seem to be the holy grail of green living these days. Crazy, fantasy since they don't work when it's really cold. Sky rocketing energy use too because they work as air conditioning too and once you have it you use it.
This is the left-coast but conservation and living with less are non-starters even though everyone genuflects to environmentalism. As Sharon Astyk once said "Most people would happily stuff baby seals into their gas tanks if they had to and they'd tell themselves the seals liked it."
no subject
Date: 2025-05-07 12:45 pm (UTC)https://www.vietvisiontravel.com/post/rural-houses-in-vietnam/
It's a very old house, and there were still some of those around when I was there-- you can see the ventilation brickwork above the door and window on the right, there. It's so you can still have airflow when you close the doors and shutters at night.
We've lived with a heat pump before-- they work well enough here, for heating, but... as you say using them for A/C is inefficient at best. The A/C thing frustrates me, as I grew up here in a house without A/C. It's all a matter of acclimating to the heat. There are a few weeks in August where it's really unbearable, but otherwise... you use box fans and sweat a lot. It's not fatal. But now we're stuck in slab houses and must use the A/c to dehumidify :( As house prices seem on the verge of coming down, one of the things we will be looking for is off-grade foundations, so we can avoid that in the future. Even a trailer would be better.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-07 03:40 pm (UTC)We don't really need A/C here at all most of the time. Its quite ridiculous. There might be 1 year in 5 or 6 when we get a "heat dome." We had one in 2018 I think. We covered the outside of our windows with sheets to keep the heat out and hung out in the basement and the shady side of the house. More often the smoke and haze from forest fires makes it impossible to have the windows open but we've managed that too with fans and an air purifier.
The idea of adapting your behaviour in response to extreme weather is unthinkable for most people. Around here most houses have basements, and many of them are quite livable, but no, no, gotta have a heat pump for green virtue-signal and the A/C.
Best of luck with your house hunting. I hope you find something suitable in your price range.