John Ringo, best-selling science fiction author, put up this post on X.com yesterday. It made me think very hard about the current shortage of skilled professional craft/trade persons, which we've discussed in these pages on previous occasions. Because some readers don't have access to X.com, I'm going to reproduce almost all of it here. If you're on X, please feel free to read the many comments following his post, and reply to John there (and leave a comment here anyway!).
One very critical thing to know/remember about 'the trades' and 'why did we get rid of votech in HS?'
I'm a late boomer and not one to automatically blame everything on boomers, but... the boomers are a big reason.
Essentially, boomers filled nearly ALL of the trade positions that the US needed, even got laid off when manufacturing got outsourced, and there were lots and lots of people born between 1946 and 1964 who were doing plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc jobs.
And they didn't retire. It used to be skilled union workers could retire after 20 years. The boomers didn't. My best friend is a NETA Level Four and has been doing ETT for 30 years. All the 'kids' who would have moved into his job couldn't... because he was doing it.
During the '90s there just WERE VERY FEW TRADE JOBS AVAILABLE in the United States. There was no reason for HS to keep votech when NOBODY COULD GET A JOB. There WEREN'T (many) plumber jobs, electrician jobs, machinists positions available for people entering the work force. They were all filled up by boomers.
(Example: Have a friend who works in the nuclear industry. Had to regularly certify this big complex part that was hand machined by one guy who had been doing it since 1976. THAT WAS WHEN CARTER WAS IN OFFICE! 'What happens when he retires?' 'We're not sure. There's nobody else on earth that has the skills.')
Now, as they are finally retiring, suddenly WE NEED VOTECH! WE NEED KIDS TO WORK IN TRADES! WE NEED KIDS TO MAN THE ASSEMBLY LINES! WHERE ARE THE WELDERS?! WHAT'S WRONG WITH KIDS THESE DAYS?! THEY'RE JUST LAZY AND WANT TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES/BE INFLUENCERS/PLAY ON THEIR PHONES ALL DAY!
The United States essentially eliminated skilled trade as a POSSIBLE job much less a STATUS VALUE job for at least one entire 25 year generation. We need x million new electricians in 2026. We needed about 5 in 1996. 'Sorry, kid, we're not hiring/training new electrician apprentices unless your dad is a master electrician. We just don't need that many.'
So, most of the training, HS votech, apprenticeships just went away.
It's gonna take time to fix that.
Food for thought indeed! Please provide your own input on the subject in Comments.
Peter
23 comments:
"There was no reason for HS to keep votech when NOBODY COULD GET A JOB."
That didn't stop universities from creating, advertising and awarding all the useless degrees. Of course, there'd all that taxpayer funding paying for it, though.
" My best friend is a NETA Level Four and has been doing ETT for 30 years. All the 'kids' who would have moved into his job couldn't... because he was doing it."
'All the kids?' How many would do that job? Exactly one. One guy is doing it and one guy doesn't get replaced by two, let alone a dozen.
GGGGRRRRR! I chewed through the first 4 paragraphs before I threw up a little. The reason....blaming the boomers for STAYING AT THEIR JOBS and not allowing the following spawn to get in the trades. Lazy, lazy, lazy thinking. I graduated high school in 1973. That ubiquitous visit to the guidance official was filled with, "if you go into a 4 year college; you will make zillions more than a trades person"
THAT is why there aren't more trades people! Talk about "nudging" a population! The effort to screw around with our society was tremendous. And very covert.
There; I said it. And if the writer of that X post thingy was working towards a different angle/ending then I apologize
I disagree. There have been openings as the economy expanded since those boomers started in the trades. There were not as many as now, but they were there.
The big push in the 70's to college for all turned people away from considering the trades for the most part, and the push for post manufacturing jobs (Finance, IT, etc) was part of it. I suspect another part was fathers feeling the effects on their body and wanting their kids to have something better and physically easier.
Don't forget that the push to require a degree for everything was a solution to the complaints that skill tests were racist in the early 1970's.
Jonathan
It's the fault of boomers for not retiring after 20 years? I don't know ANYONE who retired after 20 years, except for cops and military guys, and they all moved on to second careers.
Don in Oregon
His friend who was a NETA Level Four staying in his position for 30 years was not the cause for younger technicians moving into the field.
As a Nuclear Worker for 43 years (Senior Test Engineer, Instrumentation & Controls), I saw this problem up close.
The lack of positions to fill was because they quit building nuclear plants.
Thus the only available positions were opened through attrition, either advancement or retirement.
You can't blame the guy who stayed in his position for 30 years.
Why should he quit to provide a position for someone he would have to train?
Also, some of us loved what we did and were satisfied by it.
Vogtle 3&4 were the only nuclear startups going.
We had a hard time staffing with qualified personnel, had a hard time retaining personnel because of the lack of prior nuclear experience.
Nuclear technical work is proceduralized and standardized for consistency and safety, many entry positions were continually rolling over personnel because they couldn't deal with the bureaucracy.
Have a Good Day
Even if this whining has some truth to it, why do you suppose people stayed working longer?
Maybe because retirement accounts went from defined benefit to defined contribution plans? No more pensions. You get what you put away in your own 401K plans and IRAs. In other words, your retirement depends on the casino we call the stock market.
Defined benefit plans promise a specific monthly benefit at retirement based on a formula that considers factors like salary and years of service, while defined contribution plans do not guarantee a specific amount at retirement; instead, they depend on contributions and investment performance.
The concept of lean manufacturing is also to blame. For the last 30-40 years, industry has been working aggressively to improve efficiency at any cost.
Unfortunately, a lot of resilience was also eliminated as inefficiency. Just-in-time inventory reduced costs by offloading the warehousing costs onto an upstream supplier. It also made the company far more vulnerable to supply and shipping disruptions (as we saw in 2020).
Another victim of this efficiency was the concept of apprenticeships or understudy positions. I think this is the specific issue being identified here. A prudent business with one mission-critical machinist would bring on a younger machinist to be mentored and trained by the expert.
Unfortunately, there was a generational perception that an understudy was dangerous, because the company could just let the expensive person (the expert) go. The behaviour of many companies only served to reinforce this perception.
As a result, we find ourselves where we are today ...
So in spite of all of the new construction, there were no jobs for plumbers or electricians because all the boomers already had them? Seriously?
It is definitely one piece to the puzzle. As he noted, not the only piece. Auto dealerships are begging for mechanics. What they do not admit is how they've been screwing over their mechanics for decades. The 'up to' salaries look nice, the reality is less than half that.
You are paid a flat rate for piece work regardless of any issues. If no one comes in, you don't make money that day. The mechanic still gets charged a daily rental fee if they don't have their own tools. Some wrench turners went to private shops or started their own, many left the business. Has this changed? I don't know, but even if it has, that reputation will keep many from signing up.
The reason the boomer kept working was to provide for his family. What an A-hole!
Did the number of jobs increase for trades? Yes in the south, no in the north east. The trade schools here get young grads hired because this is where the jobs are. Always have except when the economy takes a dump. It still recovers quicker than the Rust Belt
Illegals have been doing the home construction for decades now. They don't have formal training, they will take shortcuts and deliver slipshod work, but they work cheap.
States solve the problem in different ways. Mass. Has voc-tech High Schools - students spend a week in shop, then a week in academics. Me. Has vocational schools with several surrounding towns HS busing in students for a few days per week, so a student may get 16 hours instruction, out of a 40 hour week, but the transport schedule becomes complex. Either way, we are still getting welders, carpenters, beauticians, nursing assistants, etc.
There'
s. always some luck involved in getting your foot in the door of somebody who will give you a job in trades.
There's no real difference between generations. Masters have exploited their apprentices and slowpedaled their advancement for longer than there were people to write about it. And the apprentices counted themselves lucky to have a prosperous future. But they bitched anyway. They still do.
I spent 45 years doing electrical work. There's always someone in your way if you're trying to better yourself when you're coming up in the trades. Better to use them as a springboard than a punching bag.
Rick m
I was the last of my cohort to have access to a full range of shop/trades classes. We were strongly urged away from vo-tech toward college because "even for a basic welding job you have to have at least two years of college. Four years is better." This was the mid-1980s. To teach vo-tech? You also had to have a BA or higher, with at least 10 hours of education classes. That was more important than being a master welder or carpenter. My high school lost two fantastic metal-shop instructors because they couldn't pass the state teacher exam (nor did they have college degrees).
Then it became a vicious cycle. No instructors so no students so no point in hiring instructors. Contractors hired non-citizens because they had some of the skills and worked for cheap. So there were no jobs in the trades for locals. Grrrrrrr.
TXRed
Hmm. I graduated in 1980, was a red seal JM B ticket inside 4 years, second ticket 2 years after that. Worked in 7 trades BTW. My best years were the 1990's. In trade school they were running 3 classes of each level of apprentices. ALL YEAR LONG. For an entire decade there was never enough tradesmen. Companies were hiring unticketed tradesmen (hork spit) to free up the skilled trades people. I finished working the tools at 44 years old and started my own company. I get offended when some blames boomers for their plight. Work for what you want like I did. Save, work the crap jobs, live within your means, pay cash for your toys. Don't hold a $1500 up to my face and tell me you can't afford to live. I saved for my fist computer, then taught my self how to use it. I challenge you to go find a kid to paint your fence. I tried, they all want to be tick tok dancers or some such crap.
Every company in the USA and Europe outsourced everything to China. I was in Germany back in 1993 or so and there was 5,000 Chinese men taking a 1930s steel mill apart and putting into shipping boxes, next to the refinery that I was working at. They finished in about 18 months, just about the time the government noticed that 5,000 Chinese men were in the country. All of the Germans that I was talking with were like, so what? It was a freaking complete steel mill that they bought for a penny on the Deutschemark.
There's lots of obstacles to a talented individual entering the trades. Unions, restrictive licensing standards. Offshoring of factories, lack of social respect, there's a lot of blame to go around. But supply and demand still work. Unfortunately, colleges still have their thumb on the scale so they can extract their pound of flesh. But the longer the shortage goes on the deeper the hole gets and the more people will find a way around the gatekeepers. If you know a trade, teach it to your children and grandchildren. Keep the skills alive.
My perception is that schools got rid of shop classes because they could not offer shop teachers more money than the teacher who taught French. The teacher who taught French MIGHT be able to command $35k/year outside of education while the teacher could earn $90k/year (with overtime). It is very hard to keep a shop teacher when he is getting paid $55k just like the Fwench teacher.
You can pack 35 kids into a classroom and the teacher can teach five hours. 5 x 35 =175. Due to safety issues and floor-space, a shop teacher maxes at about 20 students and set-up and clean-up really make 90 classes optimal, not 55 minute ones.
Finally, there is the safety and litigation burdens of letting kids use powertools. Maybe not the ones with their wits about them, but the academic advisors "tracked" the stoners and the mentally slow into the shop classes.
Boomers: You youngsters are all a bunch of lazy slobs.
Also Boomers: How dare anyone even imply that we aren't God's gift to humanity!
Seriously. So many of you seem utterly incapable of taking any form of criticism. Not that I'm shocked.
Correct about the illegals, but I don't think that many of them are boomers.
Retired trade school teacher here... Can't comment on the US situation, but here in AU it was a number of events combining to a perfect storm.
#1 throughout the 70's, we high school students were pushed towards university. Teachers (who mostly had gone straight from school into Uni, and back to school) talked down trades. Much the same when my kids went thru school 15-20 years ago.
#2 before the outsourcing rush of the 1980s to today, a huge percentage of tradies were trained by government departments. At the end of the Contracts of Training, only a few were offered ongoing govt work. The rest went private. When govts stopped training, industry (mostly) didn't fill the gap. It costs $$$ to train a tradie. Industry only wanted trained workers. So they hired offshore to fill the gaps.
#3 the mining boom... select the most remote inhospitable bits of AU - that's where the mines are, and they pay waaaaaay better than small firms in capital cities.
#4 population density per home - culture shift away from sharing space towards protective of space. So lots of vacant bedrooms which, in my youth, would have been sub-let: the income offsetting the lost personal space.
Insurance is killing a lot of things, especially in small business and education. About 12 years ago ai took an evening small engine repair class at a VoTech in Central NJ. The teacher taught auto mechanics during the day. There were two things I learned in that class.that were mandated by insurance. First, an ambitious young man was turned away because he was not an adult yet. Second, the school could not get damaged things from junkyards for demonstration or practice. Everything had to come from a place that supplied schools. I hate to think about the prices they charged for what could be cheaper.
Post a Comment