5 ms·

If trades make so much money, how come no one is bitching about fatcat plumbers and roofers? Why hasn't the NY Times published any articles about how "Big Plumb

If trades make so much money, how come no one is bitching about fatcat plumbers and roofers? Why hasn't the NY Times published any articles about how "Big Plumbing is soaking the middle class" etc.? For all the ways the middle class is getting hammered, I have yet to see one book about how plumbers are killing the middle class like I have with doctors, lawyers, techbros, and bankers. Until a journalist from NY Times or Bloomberg writes a book about how the decline of the American middle class is due to a plumbing conspiracy, you're just not bourgeois. Sorry.

i_am_proteus 7y ago
Because the value a roofer adds is obvious and the value an attorney adds is questionable.
throwaway100773 7y ago
The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention. Even if you own a very successful plumbing company, your ability to scale is constrained by geography, labor costs and finding people you can trust to manage your company. Not to mention, there are market forces working against the plumber trying to scale, and the plumber’s ability to affect policy is proportional to the ability to scale. Anecdotally, plumbers charge more per hour in some cases than many lawyers make. Their income, however, is limited by their ability to book many jobs and actually carry them out. The opportunity cost of one job is exactly another job. So comparing to other wage earners their income is high, but compared to a banker that can make several loans in the course of a day where the opportunity cost is only capital (which they have practically unlimited access to being that theyre a banker) changes the situation quite drastically.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention. The UK famously has a plumber worth $100 million - Charlie Mullins.
  - throwaway100773 7y ago
    Wow. I didn’t know that. Certainly an exception to my statement.
  - harrisonjackson 7y ago
    This is a great argument for starting a company in an industry where you are an expert, but this guy isn't doing house calls for hourly pay. He's taking a big cut of alllll the house calls. According to wiki he is paying his plumbers more than I'd expect, which is cool. >The company promotes itself as providing a high-quality service, employing "£80,000/year plumbers", charging £80–200/hour depending on time of day and service performed."
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Someone said a plumbing business wouldn’t scale. He scaled a plumbing business. Obviously in scaling it, this multi-millionaire is not personally doing the plumbing anymore - you are right. I don’t see how that means he hasn’t scaled it though?
      - thebean11 7y ago
        Exactly, none of the tech billionaires got where they are by coding or even designing software forever. I don't see a fundamental difference between that and managing a plumbing business.
        throwaway100773 7y ago
        The point I was trying to make was that the trades don’t scale like tech or banking do. It’s clear that this guy, who did manage to scale a trade, has a net worth of about 100mm after almost 40 years of scaling, whereas the most successful tech entrepreneurs have multiples of that in a quarter (or less) of a timeframe. This guy is an exception, but still sort of exemplifies what I’m trying to say. It’s worth noting that this guy may be the most successful plumber in the world (or at least on a short list of the most successful plumbers in the world). If we made a list of people in tech or finance, the people would be younger and richer by several orders of magnitude in some cases which is saying something when we’re talking about 100mm bucks. My argument wasn’t that the trades don’t scale at all (this would be an asinine argument as I know contractors that do scale and this guy is clearly an exception to that argument), but rather that the trades don’t scale the same way tech or finance do.
base698 7y ago
Bankers have the luxury of taking big risks with your pension fund, losing all of it and still getting their yearly bonus when market forces are unexpected. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/22/skin-in-the-game-nassim-nicholas-taleb-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/22/skin-in-the-ga... > Bankers are in the “Bob Rubin trade”, named after the former secretary of the US Treasury, who “collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any cheque – he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. I'll save the doctors, lawyers and techbros for someone else. But there are equal examples you can find.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
VLM 7y ago
Plenty of people complain in a stealthy dog whistle way WRT real estate prices and high rental payments. There's also the value proposition where I could make $15/hr at a McDonalds, so its hard to set a labor cost floor below $15/hr. I KNOW from experience that even when everything goes wrong I can replace a kitchen faucet in ten hours. Sure it starts out as an hours work but three trips to home depot later for strange wrenches and adapters and valves and next thing you know its ten hours. Thats an absolute minimum of $150 of lost income doing likely physically easier work standing at a mcdonalds cash register or whatever. Obviously I can make way more than $15/hr doing software development. On the other hand, a plumber has seen it all, has all the tools at his fingertips, and can do it in an hour for $150, and the hardest physical labor I'll have is writing a check. Maybe a fair price for replacing a kitchen faucet is the hourly price of any other sweaty dirty technical complicated highly skilled tool/capital intensive job, which across the entire labor market seems to run $30/hr to $100/hr billed. If I were a $100K+ extremely highly experienced and trained diesel engine mechanic like my cousin, it would be financially foolish to turn down work to replace his own kitchen faucet. Even if he paid me a fraction of his hourly to haul around his toolbox and lift things for him as some kind of apprentice, I'm still honestly financially better off being a diesel mechanic's assistant than trying to replace the faucet myself. Google shows union building and construction trades are ALL billing around $50/hr around here, plus or minus $10/hr related to lifestyle, I suppose. Picking a fight with the plumbers means picking a fight with the residential electricians and the ironworkers all making within a couple dollars per hour of each other. It is kinda shocking how all building trades make about the same hourly. Of course Starbucks is a better working environment if you have a liberal arts degree and a mortgage sized student loan, and only pays $11.02 nationwide average. Almost any profession on a construction site will get you five times the pay achievable with a liberal arts degree... Yes a small fraction of liberal arts degree holders will get six figure sinecures, but then again a small, yet larger, fraction of plumbers will be multimillionaire business owners.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

Because the value a roofer adds is obvious and the value an attorney adds is questionable.

throwaway100773 7y ago

The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention. Even if you own a very successful plumbing company, your ability to scale is constrained by geography, labor costs and finding people you can trust to manage your company. Not to mention, there are market forces working against the plumber trying to scale, and the plumber’s ability to affect policy is proportional to the ability to scale. Anecdotally, plumbers charge more per hour in some cases than many lawyers make. Their income, however, is limited by their ability to book many jobs and actually carry them out. The opportunity cost of one job is exactly another job. So comparing to other wage earners their income is high, but compared to a banker that can make several loans in the course of a day where the opportunity cost is only capital (which they have practically unlimited access to being that theyre a banker) changes the situation quite drastically.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention. The UK famously has a plumber worth $100 million - Charlie Mullins.
- throwaway100773 7y ago
  Wow. I didn’t know that. Certainly an exception to my statement.
- harrisonjackson 7y ago
  This is a great argument for starting a company in an industry where you are an expert, but this guy isn't doing house calls for hourly pay. He's taking a big cut of alllll the house calls. According to wiki he is paying his plumbers more than I'd expect, which is cool. >The company promotes itself as providing a high-quality service, employing "£80,000/year plumbers", charging £80–200/hour depending on time of day and service performed."
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Someone said a plumbing business wouldn’t scale. He scaled a plumbing business. Obviously in scaling it, this multi-millionaire is not personally doing the plumbing anymore - you are right. I don’t see how that means he hasn’t scaled it though?
    - thebean11 7y ago
      Exactly, none of the tech billionaires got where they are by coding or even designing software forever. I don't see a fundamental difference between that and managing a plumbing business.
      - throwaway100773 7y ago
        The point I was trying to make was that the trades don’t scale like tech or banking do. It’s clear that this guy, who did manage to scale a trade, has a net worth of about 100mm after almost 40 years of scaling, whereas the most successful tech entrepreneurs have multiples of that in a quarter (or less) of a timeframe. This guy is an exception, but still sort of exemplifies what I’m trying to say. It’s worth noting that this guy may be the most successful plumber in the world (or at least on a short list of the most successful plumbers in the world). If we made a list of people in tech or finance, the people would be younger and richer by several orders of magnitude in some cases which is saying something when we’re talking about 100mm bucks. My argument wasn’t that the trades don’t scale at all (this would be an asinine argument as I know contractors that do scale and this guy is clearly an exception to that argument), but rather that the trades don’t scale the same way tech or finance do.

base698 7y ago

Bankers have the luxury of taking big risks with your pension fund, losing all of it and still getting their yearly bonus when market forces are unexpected. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/22/skin-in-the-game-nassim-nicholas-taleb-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/22/skin-in-the-ga... > Bankers are in the “Bob Rubin trade”, named after the former secretary of the US Treasury, who “collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any cheque – he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. I'll save the doctors, lawyers and techbros for someone else. But there are equal examples you can find.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

VLM 7y ago

Plenty of people complain in a stealthy dog whistle way WRT real estate prices and high rental payments. There's also the value proposition where I could make $15/hr at a McDonalds, so its hard to set a labor cost floor below $15/hr. I KNOW from experience that even when everything goes wrong I can replace a kitchen faucet in ten hours. Sure it starts out as an hours work but three trips to home depot later for strange wrenches and adapters and valves and next thing you know its ten hours. Thats an absolute minimum of $150 of lost income doing likely physically easier work standing at a mcdonalds cash register or whatever. Obviously I can make way more than $15/hr doing software development. On the other hand, a plumber has seen it all, has all the tools at his fingertips, and can do it in an hour for $150, and the hardest physical labor I'll have is writing a check. Maybe a fair price for replacing a kitchen faucet is the hourly price of any other sweaty dirty technical complicated highly skilled tool/capital intensive job, which across the entire labor market seems to run $30/hr to $100/hr billed. If I were a $100K+ extremely highly experienced and trained diesel engine mechanic like my cousin, it would be financially foolish to turn down work to replace his own kitchen faucet. Even if he paid me a fraction of his hourly to haul around his toolbox and lift things for him as some kind of apprentice, I'm still honestly financially better off being a diesel mechanic's assistant than trying to replace the faucet myself. Google shows union building and construction trades are ALL billing around $50/hr around here, plus or minus $10/hr related to lifestyle, I suppose. Picking a fight with the plumbers means picking a fight with the residential electricians and the ironworkers all making within a couple dollars per hour of each other. It is kinda shocking how all building trades make about the same hourly. Of course Starbucks is a better working environment if you have a liberal arts degree and a mortgage sized student loan, and only pays $11.02 nationwide average. Almost any profession on a construction site will get you five times the pay achievable with a liberal arts degree... Yes a small fraction of liberal arts degree holders will get six figure sinecures, but then again a small, yet larger, fraction of plumbers will be multimillionaire business owners.