Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
> They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
Given that construction is THE ONLY INDUSTRY that's had significant productivity backsliding over the last 40 years, I hope we wage spiritual warfare against the current crop in the construction industry. It's currently ontologically bankrupt and needs to be cleaned out and replaced with a new crop/generation of workers who actually care about what they do.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs