I come from a family of skilled tradesmen. My dad (who gratuitously labels himself ‘artsy and crafty’) has been a self-employed sign painter his entire working life, and both of my uncles (his brothers) work in the sign business as well. One owns his own sign fabrication shop, and the other has spent 25 years working for the same sign company.
I mention this in light of the widespread discussion of political scientist Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Murray tackles what he characterizes as the unraveling American social fabric – symptoms of which are declining marriage, civic participation, religiosity, and industriousness. Though Murray discusses society as a whole, his book should be seen as a tome analyzing the issues that plague the men of this country. It doesn’t explicitly address men as does Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men” essay, but the book’s undercurrent is clearly preoccupied with what has often been labeled a men’s crisis. Part of Murray’s crusade involves reinvigorating the skilled trades, which are mostly occupied by men.
In an interview defending his book against criticism from the left and right, Murray tells the Daily Caller:
You can talk to any general contractor who tries to hire labor for construction, you can talk to just about any electrician or plumber or glazier or anybody else who wants to hire an assistant and they are willing to pay way above the minimum wage, they want to teach their craft to somebody, but they need somebody who will show up everyday on time and work hard. And you cannot find people in that position who will not tell you the same story, which is that you look at white guys — I’m not sure the story is different for black guys, but let’s stick with white guys — and you just can’t find them.
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Murray confided that he “had several journalists, both broadcast and print, say to me that when they have gone out to do stories about the recession, and their objective is to portray guys out there desperately looking for work, and they can’t find it.”
This argument has been my dad’s hobbyhorse for the past 20 years. He had high hopes that I would someday go into the trades rather than go through the college gristmill. I grew up knowing all about paints, brushes, and different grades of sign board. I could have easily carried the family torch, but, like most young people, I didn’t want to commit to something like a trade. They are hard physical labor – sore backs and calloused hands – and they require an investment in specific skills and, often, a specific geographic location. People don’t hop around from trade to trade or plumbing company to plumbing company like they do in the corporate world. To commit to a trade is to sacrifice flexibility, and tradesmen – mechanics, air conditioner repairmen, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, sign painters, house painters, concrete pourers, door hangers, tile layers, carpet layers, welders, metal workers – most often forge their craft right in the prime of youth.
My dad constantly laments the lack of “good help”. He claims he can’t find guys who even know their way around a job site. And not just sign-specific tasks like blocking out billboards or using the right amount of paint thinner. Just general work skills like hammering a nail and not bitching about the heat or not texting while on the job. Not knowing how to work is one thing, but not knowing how to learn how to work is another.
This topic doesn’t come up much in the critiques of Murray’s book. It is now out of fashion to in any way criticize or hold accountable the jobless or the skill-less or the not-1% for any of the shortfalls from which they suffer. But the question needs to be asked, how much does a person have to sacrifice? How hard does a person have to push for work before they can complain about a lack of jobs or a lack of life purpose earned through work, which is the topic on which most critics of Murray’s book are pushing back?
Murray predicts the response:
To have even the lowest most menial job gave you status in the community compared to the guys who weren’t working,” he added. “And the fact that that has changed is exactly the point I’ve been trying to make. So don’t tell me demoralization explains anything. Demoralization is another word for a loss of industriousness.
I think it’s fair to suggest that the decline in the desire for trade work serves as a proxy for the decline in industriousness. Trades are hard work to commit to, but if we observe a marked decline in the desire to work in skilled trades then we’d expect a correlation in an overall decline in the desire to work in general. This puts the arguments against a dearth of jobs into context:
A recent survey by RIDGID, a leading supplier of professional grade tools, reveals that a scant 6 percent of high school students hope to have a future career in the skilled trades – defined as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, heating, ventilation or air conditioning installers, or repair people.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2014 the U.S. will need 29 percent more HVACR and 21 percent more plumbing technicians, a total of more than 100,000 skilled workers in the job pool. Among the 500,000 plumbers in the United States alone, the demand is expected to grow 10 percent by 2016, however, due to an aging generation of skilled professionals, more than a third of all plumbers – or approximately 167,000 workers – will be exiting the workforce.
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“There is definitely a shortage of skilled plumbers,” said Brian Shields, owner of Brian Shields Plumbing Inc. “I’ve been a plumber for 20 years and there are no skilled plumbers in my area that I feel comfortable employing. I had to travel to another state to find someone who was willing to learn the trade. I’m one of a dying breed.”
Why has our industriousness down-shifted? The immediate answer is that fewer men want to do the work. But this still leaves us hanging: why do fewer men want have the desire?
There are plenty of hypotheses for this. Outsourcing, automation, and the increased presence of women in the workforce are some. But Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” and “Deadliest Catch” – two television programs which have done their part to re-glorify skilled trades and hard work – logged a YouTube video in which he essentially argued that these types of jobs are just not valued in society anymore. Hard work has become de-glorified. Rowe points out that the pop culture image of plumber is a 300 pound guy, usually with his butt crack hanging out. Such depictions have an impact on passive consumers of TV rays.
And then there is the cultural premium placed on college. Rowe points out that we call college “higher” education, as if to say that apprenticeships or vocational school isn’t admirable. College is glorified because that’s where the herd of young people moves creating the image that the trades are second-class or undesirable occupations. And in today’s society we have two forms of currency: dollars and cultural cachet. Entering the trades pushes someone out of the college social network loop. The trades are akin to still being on Myspace.
According to Rowe, such a cultural devaluation of this type of work has led to a situation where we have both high unemployment and a labor shortage. He reports a conversation he had with Department of Agriculture head Tom Vilsack who told him that one state governor had to halt construction of a nuclear plant because he couldn’t find enough welders to do the work.
So who or what has caused this? The individuals or the social milieu? It’s a multi-headed hydra, really. Individuals have lost the drive to work in these environments and to devote their lives to skilled trades – the bottom has fallen out. And from the top, people are being pulled away from these lines of work via snobbish attitudes towards hard labor. And we can hold the government somewhat accountable as it reallocated resources towards “higher” education in a way that is akin to microwaving a Thanksgiving turkey. As kids were pushed to college, the social center shifted away from other occupations. But step number one in putting it all back together again is to recognize that hard work and trades are bring dignity which can’t be measured in dollars or degrees.
—Photo Chris Yarzab/Flickr
Why not the best of both worlds? Get a job, learn a trade, and go to college at the same time! It takes longer to graduate but you can actually get a better education that way. Also, no student loan required. It can be done. I know, because I did it!
Good article and truthful, but….I graduated from a welding school. Got really good at it and REALLY enjoyed working with metals. After I graduated (its been about 10 months now) Ive been to about 15 job tests/int’s. All of them have given me the same answer: We see that you have training, but you dont have the experience were looking for. Most of these companies have people working for them that are all 40+. How do they expect their company to thrive in the future if you dont hire younger help? The other thing I get from companies is if… Read more »
In the small intermountain-West city where I live, I see a fair number of white collar woman/blue collar man couples. I can’t generalize much about them, each couple being different, but it’s clear that the combination can work. I consider myself a polymath. It might sound pretentious, but it’s a useful term and apt for a lot of modern “over-educated” (not sure if that’s even possible, but Santorum seems to think it is) Americans. Some of what I’ve learned over the years came from school, and a lot was from self-directed reading, asking for advice, and so forth. School was… Read more »
Its refreshing to read this type of piece, offering some validation for trade work. After high school I had no desire to go to college, instead doing an apprenticeship in traditional hand-crafted log homes up in the mountains of central Idaho. This led down a path of five years of intensive carpentry training, both in residential and commercial construction, and then eventually to woodworking (furniture building) as a side hobby. What I found however was that, working my way up to even a Carpenter II position in small and mid-sized companies, the pay scale was grossly inadequate for the intensive… Read more »
My dad was a tradesman and had to work long hours, travel and work in dirty and dangerous conditions. He had a number of accidents and illnesses due to the environment and industries he worked in and died young because of it.
I never saw that type of work as the best option. I still work with many industrial tradesmen. Recently, a man told me on the last day of a job that he had been away from home for 6 months and I could see in his eyes that he really missed his children and regretted it.
Some good comments. I’d like to direct the conversation back to what Mike Rowe stated as I think he’s very close to source of the problem. Mike mentions STATUS as being one main reason why so many don’t gravitate towards the trades. This is an important point. I believe we now live in a society that based upon a paradigm that is reductive to human thriving. What I mean by this is that for humans to thrive (or so its pitched to us) they must achieve. This means status (through job promotion, material wealth etc) is sought but at the… Read more »
When I was in Japan in the mid 90s, I heard many people lament that there was a major shortage of carpenters and that the average age at that time for a carpenter was 62. It was a dying art, Japan’s young students all wanted to go into computers and IT. Now one wanted to be a lowly tradesman. We have the same attitude here in America only it is being driven from the top down. Our education system is broken but no one has a real solution on how to fix it. Austerity measures did not get us out… Read more »
One thing I notice is that Americans do value tradesmen. The reason that Mike Rowe’s shows are so successful is that American men romanticize the “old days”, and they understand the value of hard work. Now, how to actualize it.
And you mention Japan which is interesting to me because I’ve read a few things suggesting that Japan seems to have foreshadowed American culture in a lot of ways. The “herbivore” men there who aren’t interested in sex or relationships with women as well as the stagnant technology-immersed economy.
I went to college got my four year degree in 1976 and then realized that it meant nothing in the real world. Try as I might, I could not find any jobs that related to my area of study. Because I had a wife and two children, I could not do a low/no pay internship or apprentice program. My father was a tradesman, a saw filer for 45 years (keeping everything sharp in a large sawmill), but he was also a good carpenter. I puttered around with him in his shop and learned a lot. I seemed to have a… Read more »
Great piece. For reference, you don’t need to go to college to be in the technology business either. Hell, I didn’t even graduate from high school and I’m earning just as much as the rest of the web nerds…With no student loans. I simply show up every day prepared to work, try hard and treat others with respect. Everything I’ve needed to know about computer programming, interaction design, business analysis, digital strategy, project management, customer experience and production has been picked up along the way with a little help from key mentors and a TON of reading on the side.
The way college has been pushed at my generation (Gen Y) is like a double-edged sword – except it’s all “damned if you don’t.” College sell their product with the promise that it will unlock the door to the life you want; businesses start listing specific degrees as requirements to get the job, and some will not even consider candidates without that special piece of paper. Meanwhile, my generation also grew up with the message (from parents, schools, society at large) that blue-collar trades are all long hours of hard work and low pay, that people who live that way… Read more »
In my view, this article overlooks a huge factor in the problem, namely the combined effects of a couple of other cultural trends, about which some well-known articles have been written: Despite women advancing tremendously in the social and economic realms, as a group they still want to marry “up,” to find a husband who has higher social standing, is better educated and earns more money than they do. In addition, women are putting off relationships and marriage more and more. If they can’t find the husband they want, they’ll go without. Since the trades have little social cachet in… Read more »
Jonathan, I do agree with the gist of your point but didn’t want to go too far off track in the piece. At the end of the article I do point out that college has caused the breakdown that you’re describing. As college becomes the low bar, the men who don’t reach that bar are less desired as mates. College becomes a rite of passage for young people, and to be considered “in the loop” in this society a person is supposed to go to college and develop all of the typical social networks. If you don’t, you’re an outsider.… Read more »
Chuck, You betcha, I didn’t really intend my comments as criticism, because I understand that in a short-form article, you have to pick a few topics and stick to ’em to stay cogent. I wanted to comment to use comments for what comments are best at: discussion. 😉 It’s interesting to hear about the evolution of the ‘college requirement’ because I wasn’t there for it. By the time I came along, it was never really an option, but the expected fourth phase of education. I don’t remember at any point in public schools that the trades and trade-school were ever… Read more »
Richard, as a working journalist, I am forever clarifying, thinking hard about my word choice, making sure I am not lumped into some awful stew of misconceptions and partisan rancor. It goes with the turf unless you want to be marginalized as a bomb thrower, and I don’t get paid enough for that. Like the other day when you guys were talking about that intellectually challenged judge who sent out the (at the very least) racially insensitive email. Believe me, I understand the fine point about political correctness run rampant, and often decry it. Maybe upon analysis, and it’s arguable,… Read more »
Mark. Interesting that you felt you had to apologize for referring to a fact.
why is it interesting? I didn’t read it as an apology but a clarification.
I find it interesting that you felt the need to point it out as interesting. (This could go on like mirrors into infinity 😉
Some excellent points here, especially in light of Rick Santorum’s statement about “not everyone needs to go to college.” I once got a call from a real estate agent who was helping a client move to Oregon from New York City, a man who needed his new home painted before he arrived.. When I finally got on the phone with the client, he expressed surprise that I did not speak with some kind of accent, indeed, that I was a white guy. When I started out as a painter, we were all white guys, but this goes back to the… Read more »
Had some A/C trouble a few years ago. Turns out a box elder bug had gotten into the contacts. Needed a pro to tell me. While I was sitting on my back porch watching him build a box-elder bug protection thingy, he allowed as how he and his daughter rode both western and dressage. I know you need different tack, and different clothes, but I forgot to ask if you need different horses. Not a cheap hobby. Worked as a glazier summers when I was younger. That was usually interesting, as was watching my boss–entrepreneur–work his little company. Got to… Read more »