5 ms·

There's plenty of money to fix roads and bridges, but not enough workers

31 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

nerdchum 4y ago
Teacher shortage, construction worker shortage.... Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers. This article acts like it's a giant mystery as to why this is the case.
- Arrath 4y ago
  The disdain of the working class is a hell of a drug. Not to say classism is solely or even largely responsible, but it must surely play a part.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    I really don't see that around here. It's all about the pay (and benefits).
    - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
      What you get paid determines your class
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kevviiinn 4y ago
        More like how you get paid If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class and if you get paid through your investments alone such as owning stock or a company then you are a member of the capital owning class. Retirement funds and investment funds are there so workers feel like there's less of a distinction between themselves and the class they are beholden to even though that truly isn't the case
        dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        >If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class A PM for a tech company, most FAANG ICs, a doctor who doesn't have an ownership stake in the practice they work for, an enterprise salesman, a wall street trader all work for someone else and NONE of them are working class for the purposes of this discussion.
        kevviiinn 4y ago
        They definitely are working class. Splitting up the working class is exactly what capital owners want, it keeps workers pointing fingers at each other instead of paying attention to the ones who are actually exploiting and profiting from their labor
        dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        As much as I disagree with Marx your comment and the one I initially replied to fit really well in the context of "the petite bourgeoisie cozying up to the lower class in order to use their muscle to get themselves installed in place of the upper class" concept he wrote about. There are huge social and cultural gulfs between the top, middle and bottom and they each have their own distinct cultures and there is natural conflict that stems from that (I would go so far as to say "most" does). Obviously some people manage to straddle the lines but the gulfs are very much there.
        kevviiinn 4y ago
        There may be cultural differences but that doesn't necessarily divide the working class. The capital owning class, however, definitely takes advantage of it to create rifts and move focus away from improving the material conditions of all workers. You can see it in the way that media discusses so many issues, especially in the context of union issues like the recent rail strikes in the UK
        bawolff 4y ago
        I think its silly to divide people into only 2 classes as if its a binary.
- lockhouse 4y ago
  Medical has been short on workers since at least COVID.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    At least partially thanks to cost cutting measures by hospitals et al
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  A primary cause of unfilled jobs: Folks can't afford to live where the job is, on what the job pays. The article tosses unemployment stats. However (like every article that does that), it doesn't mention that BLS's official unemployment figure is ~20 percentage points lower than the actual number of unemployed[1]. This means there are many more millions who could benefit from those jobs but have no realistic access to them. > Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers. The folks flocking to well-paying jobs are typically folks who have have paid-for college - and enough cash on hand to get established where the job is. Without both of those things, the odds of high-paying tech/finance/medical employment is fairly low. [1] If you take the total number of 16-64 working ft & pt and subtract it from the total number of 16-64, you are left with a 20% difference. Officially, this 20% is neither employed nor unemployed. note: BLS counts people who are self-employed and people who work w/o wages (eg: cargiving) as employed. ref: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
  - notch898a 4y ago
    Almost 10% of 16-64 are college students. A significant portion of the remainder 20% are stay at home mom/dad with no desire for a full time job.
  - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
    > Folks can't afford to live where the job is, on what the job pays We could make some fairly simple formula like "The minimum annual pay must be at least 10% of the median house price" - the percentage can be whatever but then it automatically changes each year based on the housing market, and would help ensure that people can live near there job, which also has a side benefit of saving a bunch of time/energy on commuting
rdtsc 4y ago
> "Who's gonna go teach a high school class for $50,000 a year when they can make $85 to $100,000 a year... in the trades?" Support for woodshop and metal classes offered in high school disappeared in the early 2000s to make way for computer labs, Ray said. We don’t pay enough and then complain there is a labor shortage. Same for teachers. At the same time I was watching as a local office building was built. On Sunday they would roll in a bus full of what looked like immigrant workers, with a few supervisors. Then in the evening they’d gather them all and drive them away. I hope I am wrong, but it seemed shady and abusive. Can’t imagine they were all compensated properly and had good health insurance.
- notch898a 4y ago
  >>> "Who's gonna go teach a high school class for $50,000 a year when they can make $85 to $100,000 a year... in the trades?" I don't have the last 10 year data, but from ~2000-2014 the pupil-teacher ratio was flat and at all time recorded lows. This works against the thesis there is a shortage relative to post WW-II history. It appears whatever teachers is paid, the feeling they get from helping kids vs building cogs for evilCo must be enough additional incentive to keep us near record low pupil-teacher ratio. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.a...
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    That's the thing though. Working for some highly bureaucratic and political organization (i.e. any given school district) where you're micromanaged by management but thrown under the bus by them when convenient, where you see waste all around you, you see bad teachers who play the game well rewarded, where you see all sorts of dumb stuff going on that is counterproductive to the mission of actually educating children feels a hell of a lot like working at evilCo. And if you're gonna work for evil, you had better get compensated accordingly. You either pay them in dollars or you pay them in intangibles (i.e. a job that's so good people will do it for cheap). School districts are incapable of providing the latter and the demoralizing work environment creates the kind of demoralized, jaded and poorly performing employees that taxpayers will not agree to pay more to creating a self-reinforcing local minimum.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Hm. We had some flooding in Iowa a few years ago. The annual budget for roads was $200,000,000, half for repairs and half for new roads. But the repair bill was going to be more than $200,000,000. So they put the entire sum toward repair, gave up on new roads for years. Still it took years to get all the roads and bridges open. So there's that. Weather doesn't always cooperate.
mindslight 4y ago
The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates and business schools teaching that the people who do the real work should be treated as expendable cogs. Given the choice between doing back-breaking construction work at the crack of dawn, or sitting on your ass processing TPS report type A into TPS report type B while listening to corporate kool-aid sermons for higher pay, which would you choose? My aunt recently hired a plumber, who decided that ~12 feet of drain pipe needed to be replaced (exposed in basement, not the main stack). The bill, with "senior discount", came to something like $1200! I stopped by to look over his shoulder and inspect. Looking at the guy and how he worked, I knew he wasn't taking home much of that at all. It's the entire management structure cancer that's sitting above him, skimming the majority of his pay, while treating the person doing the skilled job as some mere implementation detail. FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. It's taken us a few decades to get into this mess, so it will probably take a few more decades to get out. Assuming LLMs can lay bare the unnecessary complexity that is TPS reports, and continued political will for the existence of interest rates.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror. It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy. The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour. >FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.
throwaway22032 4y ago
I really wish that journalists would just sit down, look at the numbers and the costs. Not relative salaries, not arbitrary "this has six numbers so it's a lot". Pay a salary that allows a grown man or woman along with his or her partner to buy a house with a garden, own a car, and raise children. If you don't have that, there is no "not enough". There are tons of people doing bullshit jobs that would love to have a real job but don't because they will just lose slightly less rather than actually winning.
- zamnos 4y ago
  Only if you don't put a value on work happiness. And that might be fine. A spouse that doesn't have to work, kids, decent car that isn't always breaking down, vacation one or twice a year. We should all be so happy. But if your job is shit, your boss is shit, your coworkers are shit. Is it all really worth it? That's a personal question, with a personal answer, but some have done the calculus and chosen differently.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    Well at some point it doesn't matter if it's worth it. Going from lots of money to not much is a recipe for divorce. Of course if you're divorced for any reason, the judge will impute your income at what he thinks you can make. So you'll be paying child support and alimony based on the "job is shit" high rate job and utterly fucked if you don't work it. You better be damned sure you're willing to work the "job is shit" job forever once you take it; the judge will make sure of that.
    - hkatx 4y ago
      According to my state AG website, after Loss of employment/change in job income the paying spouse can request for review of spousal support. (I don't have the stats for how often it is granted)
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Sure, but can't any job be bad or good along those lines? Everyone would prefer to work for a good manager/boss, have decent coworkers, etc. - I don't think the likelihood of that is worse in construction than software dev? To me the obvious difference is that work in the trades is physically hard on you - that's doable in your 20s and 30s, but later on, not so much...
red-iron-pine 4y ago
The problem is that there isn't enough long term demand in these areas to keep people. Eventually they leave or re-train for more consistent fields. Yeah you'll pay $90k, but that job will last 1.3 years and after that where do I go? How do I buy a house? Case in point: my uncle was a welder and moved to the hyper-dangerous underwater welding field just because there was a steady, stable stream of work. He had jobs lined up a year out or more, and didn't have to move or travel too much. Made good money but man does that stuff sound spooky. Same deal for a neighbor who did paving, esp. the rubber paving you see at playgrounds, etc. Tons, like TONS, of demand, but it was all Western Canada, and could be in towns with only 2 motels and no vacancies; weeks of sleeping in the back of his truck but paying rent on a big city apartment. All of the driving, travel, shipping, and moving of tools and materials was very expensive. He gave it up because he could make more money selling trucks for Chevy; better pay, cheaper mechanical work on his truck, and slept in his own bed in his apartment every night.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  “How do we make construction/teaching sexy?” is a ridiculous question. Like you mentioned, it’s “how can we ensure people entering X can afford a home and have some semblance of stability?” Nobody needs “sexy” which seems to indicate a propaganda campaign to convince people “it’s a cool job.” Pay people more and give them stability.
- bsder 4y ago
  That fine. You just need to pay more when they are working. This isn't hard. The problem for the "passive income class" is that Covid made the labouring class figure out that they can make do with a lot less. Consequently, you can't move the labouring class anymore without putting up real money.
krembo 4y ago
I wish the world would put time to invest a better asphalt concrete.
efields 4y ago
There’s a guy on the other side of this wall doing an excellent job on our kitchen renovation. Everything from demo to tile, he did it all. His hourly rate basically comes out to my white collar salary because he’s a real craftsperson. In an ideal world, he’d have apprentices under him, and they’d level up and expand the flock and so on. Have half a dozen jobs going. grow and build a nice sized business. Slowly just become the person who finds the jobs and manages the operation. He’s almost 40, in excellent shape and is incredibly intelligent, but he wants to get out and into home inspection and such to diversify and have less bodily wear. Meanwhile I want to stop being at a computer so much and do things with my hands, and I’m almost 40 too. America has a weird relationship with physical labor, who should be doing it and what they should get paid, _unless your labor can be easily vacuumed up by a corporation_ (like knowledge workers). It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work…
- rapjr9 4y ago
  >It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work… Close, it is more like the country was founded with the idea that money can buy labor in any quantity at any time. This just is not true because there are many factors involved such as training, location, family, and whether people even want the jobs to start with. I think few people want construction jobs any more because as the article says it destroys peoples bodies. There needs to be an awareness that construction should only be a temporary job, maybe 10 years at the most, and probably the heavy work should also be intermittent to prevent peoples bodies being destroyed, and hence the number of people in training needs to be huge. Either that or find a way to automate the work. Maybe exoskeletons can help. We're going to need more workers for not only building roads and buildings but for other infrastructure like electric grids. If workers are hard to find now they are going to much harder to find soon as we try to convert the nation to clean energy sources over the next few decades.
  - efields 4y ago
    All I think about when I see articles about these “now” problems related to people is how much bigger of a “later” problem it is. Exoskeletons is a far future solution that I don’t think will address the needs of the mid-21st century. We already have a great model of temporary service with paths to go longer. Just flip the army from a force of destruction to a force of construction.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
Comparing "plenty" to "not enough" is what went wrong here. Clearly there's "not enough" money if there's "not enough" workers. A labor shortage is what someone calls a compensation shortage when they're the ones providing the compensation. If I'm being generous, the "shortage" is referring to supply and demand: if there were more laborers, they'd be cheaper to hire. In reality, a person only has so much time to offer for someone else. This is where the idea of a minimum wage comes from. An individual's time is always worth "at least this much". This is plainly a case of not enough money.
crmd 4y ago
I am deeply connected to the trades in the nyc metro area - my father in law is a bridge-building ironworker foreman, I have ~a dozen friends who own carpentry and plumbing companies, and I myself worked in sales for a while at a family electrical contractor business. What I can tell you is that these small business owners are fabulously wealthy. The income from running a shop with even a few field crews is absolutely insane. And the entire business model is predicated on paying slave wages with zero benefits to workers. For every multi-millionaire owner there are one or two sales/account managers and foreman making a middle class salary, and a small army of young guys and undocumented people doing the actual work making McDonald’s hourly wages. I could have inherited one of these businesses but I left because I couldn’t stomach the wealth disparity. If there are “not enough” workers then the employers are not offering a market-clearing wage.

31 points by isaacfrond 4y ago

Teacher shortage, construction worker shortage.... Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers. This article acts like it's a giant mystery as to why this is the case.

Arrath 4y ago
The disdain of the working class is a hell of a drug. Not to say classism is solely or even largely responsible, but it must surely play a part.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  I really don't see that around here. It's all about the pay (and benefits).
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    What you get paid determines your class
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      More like how you get paid If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class and if you get paid through your investments alone such as owning stock or a company then you are a member of the capital owning class. Retirement funds and investment funds are there so workers feel like there's less of a distinction between themselves and the class they are beholden to even though that truly isn't the case
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        >If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class A PM for a tech company, most FAANG ICs, a doctor who doesn't have an ownership stake in the practice they work for, an enterprise salesman, a wall street trader all work for someone else and NONE of them are working class for the purposes of this discussion.
        kevviiinn 4y ago
        They definitely are working class. Splitting up the working class is exactly what capital owners want, it keeps workers pointing fingers at each other instead of paying attention to the ones who are actually exploiting and profiting from their labor
        dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        As much as I disagree with Marx your comment and the one I initially replied to fit really well in the context of "the petite bourgeoisie cozying up to the lower class in order to use their muscle to get themselves installed in place of the upper class" concept he wrote about. There are huge social and cultural gulfs between the top, middle and bottom and they each have their own distinct cultures and there is natural conflict that stems from that (I would go so far as to say "most" does). Obviously some people manage to straddle the lines but the gulfs are very much there.
        kevviiinn 4y ago
        There may be cultural differences but that doesn't necessarily divide the working class. The capital owning class, however, definitely takes advantage of it to create rifts and move focus away from improving the material conditions of all workers. You can see it in the way that media discusses so many issues, especially in the context of union issues like the recent rail strikes in the UK
        bawolff 4y ago
        I think its silly to divide people into only 2 classes as if its a binary.
lockhouse 4y ago
Medical has been short on workers since at least COVID.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  At least partially thanks to cost cutting measures by hospitals et al
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
A primary cause of unfilled jobs: Folks can't afford to live where the job is, on what the job pays. The article tosses unemployment stats. However (like every article that does that), it doesn't mention that BLS's official unemployment figure is ~20 percentage points lower than the actual number of unemployed[1]. This means there are many more millions who could benefit from those jobs but have no realistic access to them. > Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers. The folks flocking to well-paying jobs are typically folks who have have paid-for college - and enough cash on hand to get established where the job is. Without both of those things, the odds of high-paying tech/finance/medical employment is fairly low. [1] If you take the total number of 16-64 working ft & pt and subtract it from the total number of 16-64, you are left with a 20% difference. Officially, this 20% is neither employed nor unemployed. note: BLS counts people who are self-employed and people who work w/o wages (eg: cargiving) as employed. ref: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
- notch898a 4y ago
  Almost 10% of 16-64 are college students. A significant portion of the remainder 20% are stay at home mom/dad with no desire for a full time job.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  > Folks can't afford to live where the job is, on what the job pays We could make some fairly simple formula like "The minimum annual pay must be at least 10% of the median house price" - the percentage can be whatever but then it automatically changes each year based on the housing market, and would help ensure that people can live near there job, which also has a side benefit of saving a bunch of time/energy on commuting

rdtsc 4y ago

> "Who's gonna go teach a high school class for $50,000 a year when they can make $85 to $100,000 a year... in the trades?" Support for woodshop and metal classes offered in high school disappeared in the early 2000s to make way for computer labs, Ray said. We don’t pay enough and then complain there is a labor shortage. Same for teachers. At the same time I was watching as a local office building was built. On Sunday they would roll in a bus full of what looked like immigrant workers, with a few supervisors. Then in the evening they’d gather them all and drive them away. I hope I am wrong, but it seemed shady and abusive. Can’t imagine they were all compensated properly and had good health insurance.

notch898a 4y ago
>>> "Who's gonna go teach a high school class for $50,000 a year when they can make $85 to $100,000 a year... in the trades?" I don't have the last 10 year data, but from ~2000-2014 the pupil-teacher ratio was flat and at all time recorded lows. This works against the thesis there is a shortage relative to post WW-II history. It appears whatever teachers is paid, the feeling they get from helping kids vs building cogs for evilCo must be enough additional incentive to keep us near record low pupil-teacher ratio. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.a...
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  That's the thing though. Working for some highly bureaucratic and political organization (i.e. any given school district) where you're micromanaged by management but thrown under the bus by them when convenient, where you see waste all around you, you see bad teachers who play the game well rewarded, where you see all sorts of dumb stuff going on that is counterproductive to the mission of actually educating children feels a hell of a lot like working at evilCo. And if you're gonna work for evil, you had better get compensated accordingly. You either pay them in dollars or you pay them in intangibles (i.e. a job that's so good people will do it for cheap). School districts are incapable of providing the latter and the demoralizing work environment creates the kind of demoralized, jaded and poorly performing employees that taxpayers will not agree to pay more to creating a self-reinforcing local minimum.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Hm. We had some flooding in Iowa a few years ago. The annual budget for roads was $200,000,000, half for repairs and half for new roads. But the repair bill was going to be more than $200,000,000. So they put the entire sum toward repair, gave up on new roads for years. Still it took years to get all the roads and bridges open. So there's that. Weather doesn't always cooperate.

mindslight 4y ago

The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates and business schools teaching that the people who do the real work should be treated as expendable cogs. Given the choice between doing back-breaking construction work at the crack of dawn, or sitting on your ass processing TPS report type A into TPS report type B while listening to corporate kool-aid sermons for higher pay, which would you choose? My aunt recently hired a plumber, who decided that ~12 feet of drain pipe needed to be replaced (exposed in basement, not the main stack). The bill, with "senior discount", came to something like $1200! I stopped by to look over his shoulder and inspect. Looking at the guy and how he worked, I knew he wasn't taking home much of that at all. It's the entire management structure cancer that's sitting above him, skimming the majority of his pay, while treating the person doing the skilled job as some mere implementation detail. FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. It's taken us a few decades to get into this mess, so it will probably take a few more decades to get out. Assuming LLMs can lay bare the unnecessary complexity that is TPS reports, and continued political will for the existence of interest rates.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates Rates are tangential, IMO. College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror. It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy. The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour. >FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose. Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.

throwaway22032 4y ago

I really wish that journalists would just sit down, look at the numbers and the costs. Not relative salaries, not arbitrary "this has six numbers so it's a lot". Pay a salary that allows a grown man or woman along with his or her partner to buy a house with a garden, own a car, and raise children. If you don't have that, there is no "not enough". There are tons of people doing bullshit jobs that would love to have a real job but don't because they will just lose slightly less rather than actually winning.

zamnos 4y ago
Only if you don't put a value on work happiness. And that might be fine. A spouse that doesn't have to work, kids, decent car that isn't always breaking down, vacation one or twice a year. We should all be so happy. But if your job is shit, your boss is shit, your coworkers are shit. Is it all really worth it? That's a personal question, with a personal answer, but some have done the calculus and chosen differently.
- notch898a 4y ago
  Well at some point it doesn't matter if it's worth it. Going from lots of money to not much is a recipe for divorce. Of course if you're divorced for any reason, the judge will impute your income at what he thinks you can make. So you'll be paying child support and alimony based on the "job is shit" high rate job and utterly fucked if you don't work it. You better be damned sure you're willing to work the "job is shit" job forever once you take it; the judge will make sure of that.
  - hkatx 4y ago
    According to my state AG website, after Loss of employment/change in job income the paying spouse can request for review of spousal support. (I don't have the stats for how often it is granted)
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Sure, but can't any job be bad or good along those lines? Everyone would prefer to work for a good manager/boss, have decent coworkers, etc. - I don't think the likelihood of that is worse in construction than software dev? To me the obvious difference is that work in the trades is physically hard on you - that's doable in your 20s and 30s, but later on, not so much...

red-iron-pine 4y ago

The problem is that there isn't enough long term demand in these areas to keep people. Eventually they leave or re-train for more consistent fields. Yeah you'll pay $90k, but that job will last 1.3 years and after that where do I go? How do I buy a house? Case in point: my uncle was a welder and moved to the hyper-dangerous underwater welding field just because there was a steady, stable stream of work. He had jobs lined up a year out or more, and didn't have to move or travel too much. Made good money but man does that stuff sound spooky. Same deal for a neighbor who did paving, esp. the rubber paving you see at playgrounds, etc. Tons, like TONS, of demand, but it was all Western Canada, and could be in towns with only 2 motels and no vacancies; weeks of sleeping in the back of his truck but paying rent on a big city apartment. All of the driving, travel, shipping, and moving of tools and materials was very expensive. He gave it up because he could make more money selling trucks for Chevy; better pay, cheaper mechanical work on his truck, and slept in his own bed in his apartment every night.

spacemadness 4y ago
“How do we make construction/teaching sexy?” is a ridiculous question. Like you mentioned, it’s “how can we ensure people entering X can afford a home and have some semblance of stability?” Nobody needs “sexy” which seems to indicate a propaganda campaign to convince people “it’s a cool job.” Pay people more and give them stability.
bsder 4y ago
That fine. You just need to pay more when they are working. This isn't hard. The problem for the "passive income class" is that Covid made the labouring class figure out that they can make do with a lot less. Consequently, you can't move the labouring class anymore without putting up real money.

krembo 4y ago

I wish the world would put time to invest a better asphalt concrete.

efields 4y ago

There’s a guy on the other side of this wall doing an excellent job on our kitchen renovation. Everything from demo to tile, he did it all. His hourly rate basically comes out to my white collar salary because he’s a real craftsperson. In an ideal world, he’d have apprentices under him, and they’d level up and expand the flock and so on. Have half a dozen jobs going. grow and build a nice sized business. Slowly just become the person who finds the jobs and manages the operation. He’s almost 40, in excellent shape and is incredibly intelligent, but he wants to get out and into home inspection and such to diversify and have less bodily wear. Meanwhile I want to stop being at a computer so much and do things with my hands, and I’m almost 40 too. America has a weird relationship with physical labor, who should be doing it and what they should get paid, _unless your labor can be easily vacuumed up by a corporation_ (like knowledge workers). It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work…

rapjr9 4y ago
>It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work… Close, it is more like the country was founded with the idea that money can buy labor in any quantity at any time. This just is not true because there are many factors involved such as training, location, family, and whether people even want the jobs to start with. I think few people want construction jobs any more because as the article says it destroys peoples bodies. There needs to be an awareness that construction should only be a temporary job, maybe 10 years at the most, and probably the heavy work should also be intermittent to prevent peoples bodies being destroyed, and hence the number of people in training needs to be huge. Either that or find a way to automate the work. Maybe exoskeletons can help. We're going to need more workers for not only building roads and buildings but for other infrastructure like electric grids. If workers are hard to find now they are going to much harder to find soon as we try to convert the nation to clean energy sources over the next few decades.
- efields 4y ago
  All I think about when I see articles about these “now” problems related to people is how much bigger of a “later” problem it is. Exoskeletons is a far future solution that I don’t think will address the needs of the mid-21st century. We already have a great model of temporary service with paths to go longer. Just flip the army from a force of destruction to a force of construction.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago

Comparing "plenty" to "not enough" is what went wrong here. Clearly there's "not enough" money if there's "not enough" workers. A labor shortage is what someone calls a compensation shortage when they're the ones providing the compensation. If I'm being generous, the "shortage" is referring to supply and demand: if there were more laborers, they'd be cheaper to hire. In reality, a person only has so much time to offer for someone else. This is where the idea of a minimum wage comes from. An individual's time is always worth "at least this much". This is plainly a case of not enough money.

crmd 4y ago

I am deeply connected to the trades in the nyc metro area - my father in law is a bridge-building ironworker foreman, I have ~a dozen friends who own carpentry and plumbing companies, and I myself worked in sales for a while at a family electrical contractor business. What I can tell you is that these small business owners are fabulously wealthy. The income from running a shop with even a few field crews is absolutely insane. And the entire business model is predicated on paying slave wages with zero benefits to workers. For every multi-millionaire owner there are one or two sales/account managers and foreman making a middle class salary, and a small army of young guys and undocumented people doing the actual work making McDonald’s hourly wages. I could have inherited one of these businesses but I left because I couldn’t stomach the wealth disparity. If there are “not enough” workers then the employers are not offering a market-clearing wage.