Watching Old People Work

Date
Canonical
2366
Archive
2366 [history]
Categories
Culture , Economics

The other day I was watching bunch of guys tear up some concrete in the courtyard of my office building. One guy was running a jackhammer, the sort that is attached to a bobcat. Others were cutting re-bar, while others moved the rubble around for no apparent reason. They were not screwing around or loafingThey were just ridiculously disorganized. It was an amusing show.

Watching it, I noticed that there was not a single immigrant on the crew. It was all white guys and one black guy. Construction has been down around here since the crash so maybe the Mexican trade guys moved on and what’s left is the old white guys who used to work in sales or something. I’m just guessing. Maybe the government cracked down on the illegals in the trades. Stop laughing.

The other thing was the age. Every one of the crew was over forty. One guy was in his sixties. He was busting his hump, outworking everyone else. The old guy was in great shape. He even smoked, which is pretty funny. I’m going to say the bulk of the crew was between 45 and 55. There was one guy that could have been under 40, but that’s it. Pretty old for manual labor.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the average age of construction workers and found this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There’s a lot of data there and it does not look like construction is an old business. Manufacturing is older. Government is really old with a median age pushing 50 for most sectors. Searching around for more granular data I found this story that claims the average age of welders is 55.

For some reason we have had a welder shortage for years now. I have a distant relative who is a career criminal and welder. He gets out of jail and goes back to welding, often being bailed out by his employer. Presumably he is very good at his trade and does not commit his crimes on the job, but it says a lot about the quality of people in that trade.

There’s not a lot of great data for the trades. Plumbers in Texas, for example, are 50 years old, on average. The median age of carpenters is supposedly 48 across the country. If you look closely at the BLS data, retail is the youngest sector and government is the oldest. Manufacturing is the next oldest and then you get into the trades. Young people seem to be in services, technology and retail.

When you start looking at the data, it is not hard to see why upper middle class whites favor open borders. They don’t work in the trades. Their kids will not even work summers in the trades. Heck, middle class kids no longer work. That’s for the poor people now. On the other hand, upper middle class people need their toilets fixed and their houses repaired.

At the same time, it is easy to see why the public is turning on immigration. Despite what the people on TV believe, America is not 30-something beautiful people living in swank urban enclaves. Most people are related to one of those guys busting up the sidewalks outside my office.

Still, demographics does not explain why the trades are getting gray. It is not easy to be a carpenter or a steamfitter. Welding is a lot more involved than working in a government office. To be a competent carpenter you need math skills, problem solving skills, in addition to physical skills. The young people with something on the ball are discouraged from going into the trades, while they are encouraged to head off to college. At some point, that has to change.

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Comments (Historical)

The comments below were originally posted to thezman.com.

7 Comments

mysterian #2032 August 12, 2014 11:23 pm 0
As a kid I worked the trades in the summers starting as a general laborer for Brown & Root and ending as an Electrician. It paid for my college… My “rich kid nephews” couldn’t make a week as a surveyor’s helper. It is quite sad.
Teri Pittman #1982 August 10, 2014 3:00 pm 0
It’s the unions. There was a time when you could get an apprenticeship and work your way into the union. My husband had one with the machinists union, when nuclear power plants were built. Now, you have to be related to someone to get in, especially with the plumbers and electricians. You probably were watching a union job. The old guys had lost their original jobs and were at the top of the hire list due to seniority. That’s why they were working.
thezman #1985 August 10, 2014 3:51 pm 0
Teri, I did not think about the union angle. This is a closed shop state so they most likely were union. I’ve done work at the ports, which have strong old school unions. The hire halls look like God’s waiting room.
james wilson #1981 August 10, 2014 2:11 pm 0
In 1831 Tocqueville identified Americans as the most educated people on earth, where almost no one was highly educated, but where the population was literate and applied it’s education to the early and continuous experience of work. This formed what Tocqueville described as a Cartesian America, rational and practical, where he often heard understandings from ordinary people which had never occurred to the the aristocrats of Europe.Now it has become illegal for young people to work, and illegal for them not to be subjected to the numbing process of “education” to where even raw potential has been sucked out of them.
thezman #1984 August 10, 2014 3:49 pm 0
Now it has become illegal for young people to work, and illegal for them not to be subjected to the numbing process of “education” to where even raw potential has been sucked out of them.When I was a young man, I was put to work at 14, as soon as the law allowed at the time. I hated it at first, but getting treated as a man (because I had a job) made a huge difference in my outlook. By the time I was 16 and driving, I enjoyed working as much as I enjoyed school, maybe more so. All of the bits of wisdom, usually the result of bad decisions, that the men would tell me, turned out to be as valuable as what I learned in school. I did not get it at the time, but looking back I consider myself very lucky. A lot of my peers missed this bit of learning.
gobsmacker #1980 August 10, 2014 2:07 pm 0
Looks like you found some great job opportunities for all those liberated feminists who think they can do everything a man can do…and do it better. Where I live, the dry wall segment of the building trades is dominated by Mexican laborers, probably most of them illegal. They do know their stuff, their prices are affordable, and they are typically willing to remove the old asbestos ceilings that used to be so common in home and office construction, while ignoring the expensive health protections that OSHA rules require for asbestos removal.
CaptDMO #1977 August 10, 2014 9:47 am 0
I do my best.I’m “that guy” that can fix “stuff”, all kinds of “stuff”. Oh sure, when the nice widow lady next door needs a new door to her basement (oh…custom made, old New England of course) I’ll just take care of it.When the young (under 40) folks cry “Will you fix it?”, I generally say “NO!, But YOU will!”, and TRY to guide them through it.SOME, are simply hopeless, with ZERO apparent mechanical or analytic skills. I start charging the THIRD time.I blame allegedly well intentioned laws, “For the safety of the children…” that have been put in place by folks interested in “educating”, and “nurturing” everyone else’s children.


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