Also, construction is a job that's notoriously hard on your body. You can't count on being able to do it into your 60s like office work, and one bad accident can end your career in construction (or just flat out end you). And the work itself is hard. Pay needs to be higher than other jobs to compensate for this. I know I'd rather be, say, a Starbucks barista than a construction worker, even if the latter paid a little bit more.
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Labore...
Even "Construction Worker" doesn't bring it up much ($14.75), which means there's nothing in that career directly.
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Worker...
The next step in that career is to be a manager or foreman. The Foreman only gets $22.36. ($38k/yr)
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Forema...
What does a college grad make? $50k/yr.
http://time.com/money/collection-post/3829776/heres-what-the...
Carpenter, handyman and general contractor do better than construction.
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Home_Renovatio...
So yeah, I'm not surprised that people aren't excited about a career in construction.
> A crane operator in New York City earns $82.15 an hour in base pay and benefits, according to the Engineer News-Record, a trade publication. That's well's above the $66 an hour he would earn in Chicago or the $39 an hour in Washington, D.C.
> But the real reason New York crane operators and other operating engineers earn such big salaries is overtime and benefits. A relief crane operator working 56 hours of overtime per week for 52 weeks will earn $332,667 in overtime and $159,053 in overtime benefits at the World Trade Center. As a worker's salaries go up, so do the amounts employers must kick in for annuities and pensions.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303936704576399...
Plenty of opportunity to learn a proper skill, like drywall finishing, electrical work, plumbing, or carpentry/cabinetry, and command better than $15/hr in the USA.
[1] Construction Equipment Operators ($22/hour median)
[2] Carpenters ($22/hour median)
[3] Construction Laborers and Helpers ($16/hour median)
[4] Food and Beverage Serving ($10/hour median)
The longevity argument ignores the fact that many careers today are focusing on younger and younger workers as a means of effecting cheap labor. Easy to measure labor costs, not so easy to measure labor skill. How would you put the prospects of a 60 year old software developer looking for work?
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[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construc...
[2] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpente...
[3] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/construc...
If you want people to make those trade offs you have to pay more.
This kind of rhetoric from companies drives me nuts. They push to remove regulations, but when the free market says they have to pay more for labor, suddenly it's not the free market driving up wages, it's a worker shortage. Now we need the government to step in and fix it. You see it most obviously with tech companies pushing for STEM in public schools and the push for more H-1Bs.
I edited "most people" to "many people" because I really don't have the numbers.
From anecdotal experience from friends and family, I'd think most people won't make it through 40 years of hard manual labor without injury. For every 60 year old you see on a job site, we don't know how many of their peers have stopped working construction.
Residential SFHs is different to low-rise buildings, which I assume is different again to building high-rise buildings.
It also depends on what skill you have. General labourers are likely going to be lifting heavy things a lot but I don't think that's universally true. Bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, tilers, etc all have different profiles.
I actually think that for a lot of these kinds of jobs that you could be doing them well into your 50s just fine. Being active makes it easier to stay active.
Also, if you do pursue a trade you will likely have apprentices eventually. Part of what they're for is doing the heavy lifting.
Experience in construction will eventually open up avenues such as being a general contractor, property inspection, construction management and so on.
I wasn't talking about skilled trades. Every electrician or plumber I've ever met, even the ones who only do new work, wouldn't call themselves a "construction worker", or say they worked in construction. I was assuming the article was talking about what the BLS calls "construction laborers", but maybe it was talking about all possible trades involved in construction? I only read the article summary.
>I actually think that for a lot of these kinds of jobs that you could be doing them well into your 50s just fine.
That's likely true for some trades and some people, but from some googling it does look there the risk to your body from working construction is pretty significant. I was able to find a German study of 14k construction workers that said for construction industry as a whole, workers were 1.5x more likely than other blue collar workers to receive a disability pension for musculoskeletal problems, and 1.8 times more likely for accidental injuries. They were over 2x more likely to be disabled from musculoskeletal problems as the general working population.
https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/portfolio/
https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/featured-home/sylvan-knoll-1/
Going from an old house built in 1890 to one built in 1980 with 2x6 walls and modern insulation has been nice. I'd like to go the next step, and homes like the one above combine a nice interior with great efficiency.
Going from a 30yr old furnace and standard 10yr water heater to a highly efficient single tankless system was a great step up, both from the energy efficiency and creature comfort perspectives.
After a few years they tended to have specialized into something, so they'd get a more regular job or go into business for themselves.
If there was decent workplace safety (my hometown is infamous for it's poor safety standards), and a good pension program where you're expected to want to quit and do something else after 10 years or so, before your body is ruined, then I'd be all about it.
You won't lose fingers or lose your hearing if you take proper care. You won't destroy your back if you stay in shape. There are pressures to do the wrong thing. People can resist them. There are risks; this is why people wear hardhats and steel-toed boots on worksites. But the risks can be managed.
The pay remains .. a challenge.
A good parallel is motorcycles. A good motorcycle rider is much less likely to experience accidents than a bad rider, but even the best rider is still more likely to experience accidents than a car driver, simply because of all the other people on the road. You only have so much control. Likewise, even the best construction worker is still more likely to wear out their body or experience accidents than the average office worker.
You used to be able to buy a house and grow a family on these wages, and eventually retire. With that no longer being the case, why would anyone with choice choose this option?
So.
No company in your industry has ever offered you anything like his union pension, because no companies in any industry (excepting maybe railroads?) offer anything like his union pension. They all stopped doing it some time between him and you.
The young people of today can't go back in time to when your dad was the same age. They have to take the jobs that are offered now. And the companies of now have worked very hard to bust the union influence of the past, so that they can offer crap pay and crap benefits, and shovel most of the risks of working the job onto the worker.
Young people are taking one look at that, and deciding to not even take one step down that career path. All this tells me is that young people are not as stupid as companies assumed them to be. The companies offering jobs that don't balance remuneration with worker risk then have to rely on workers with lower expectations, which is to say immigrants from countries with lower quality-of-life norms. They don't look at the work by judging the job in relation to other jobs in the US, but by comparing it to a similar job in their country of origin, and finding that it is X% better. Then the political scene changes, those workers start to dry up, and the companies are screwed--or, more accurately, hoist on their own petards.
Generally speaking, the old pension plans are only for those grandfathered in, new pay scales are lower, and hours to get better service time and benefits are higher.
Also, watch what companies do in terms of carving off subsidiaries with more of their retirees for intentional bankruptcy (see Patriot Coal). Those benefits will be cut in chapter 11 and then offloaded to the PBGC to be paid by the public.
He's lost his hearing, but that's genetic; nothing to do with his labor.
That doesn't seem sustainable long term. I worry that by losing goods-producing jobs like manufacturing and construction we are creating a long-term problem where people who can't produce high value services end up living an impoverished life. To some extent you could address this problem by making immigration easier which would help create more low-labor cost, goods-producing jobs, which would in-turn lead to more low-skill service jobs.
Three seconds on google suggests that they make <40k in my area, typically. That's definitely not well paid, especially for a job that's fickle and physically demanding. Hell, that's barely above minimum wage (I'm in a $15/hr area, minimum wage is $32k) - I can get an office job tomorrow paying close to the same with basically no effort.
As usual, whenever someone blames labor for labor shortages, just look at the wages. If you pay less than a waiter earns with tips while demanding more out of your workers, don't expect people to be lining up at the door. Same goes for farm labor. Same goes for teachers. Same goes for truckers. And so on.
[1] - taken from the Non-WSJ alternative in the comments below
Article: "there's a labor shortage"
'crooked-v: "So pay them more"
'rhexs: "No need," because there is plenty of cheap labor.
Something here doesn't add up.
If land were cheaper you would see rising wages.
So are prices rising or aren't they?
Over the past couple of decades the percentage of young people getting degrees has swelled, we've been encouraging everyone to get a degree. Did we expect people to remain in low paying jobs when they can do something else? Those student loans payments aren't making themselves.
In my last position, I worked across the street from where they were putting up two buildings. We'd gawk over how brave they must be to be up that high on the rafters.
I think people underestimate how bad the whole "being outside during all four seasons" aspect of these jobs is, though. Most other jobs are indoors, whether they're highly skilled (e.g. SWE) or not (e.g. fry cook).
The article mentions labor commuting from Sacramento to SF where the wages are higher, thus driving up prices in Sacramento due to lack of supply. That kind of domino effect eventually makes it so SF can't get labor because the labor has shifted to live 90' outside of Sacramento and commute there instead. At some point wages do have to go up, driving up costs further in a vicious cycle.
I don't know when but I believe another broad housing market collapse is coming.
What they said on Prairie Home Companion was correct, everyone does thing their child is exceptional and should go to college instead of trade school.
The truth is, some of those people working at Starbucks for minimum page, with huge debt, would be far better off had they gone to a trade school and be pulling down serious money as an electrician, etc.
This draws parallels to the easy credit that was extended in the last housing collapse to people that shouldn't had mortgages for houses they can't afford in the first place.
Not saying anyone who gets into construction makes millions but there definitely is a path for growth and good pay is possible. It is however not a glamorous job, you need to get your hand dirty and work with some unhealthy products you need to protect yourself from (as much as you can at least...). It's a tough job but it does pay well. I personally wouldn't do it because of the physical aspect but financially it is definitely interesting.
The CTO of Coinbase envisions that construction[0] as an industry is ripe for disruption, reaping the fruits of technology like VR controllable drones[1]. If you make construction like a video game, “young people” will flock to it.
[0] https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-bala...
Being able to see your family on a regular basis, being home, not risking your life driving everywhere, all of these have to be made up for in pay.
Welcome to a tight labor market. May it last as long as possible until public policy catches up.
