Food for thought :eyebrow:

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I hear plumbers are on the way up.

These days everybody wants to go to college. Good plumbers need to do a little math, but if you can do a little math these days, you get a medium SAT and President Sanders sends you to college. And why not, I mean after that you get a nice cushy office job, in an air-conditioned office, instead of going through crawlspaces figuring out someone else's screwed-up installation.

I admit I don't know, but some people say the average age of skilled tradespeople is increasing and some people figure we are in for a shortage on the order of 3 million of 'em.

The value of the job is no longer communicated through society's respect; therefore, it will now be communicated through hourly rates. Wealth and usefulness to society are not correlated... right up to the moment you need your shit to go down the drain. At that point, someone's gonna have to get paid.

And so, the marketplace of humanity: it's a terrible, cruel system, but nobody has figured out a better way.

Plumbers around here in East Bumfuck get about 60-75 an hour. Of course they don't get paid for 40 hour weeks, a lot of time they are looking at jobs, invoicing, getting supplies, going to the job, etc.

But every trade around here has no, as in 0 the empty set, young workers. The youngest guys I've seen on a jobsite are late 20s early 30s and not too many of them. All the tradesmen have gray hair. All the kids want to do IT and write software.