Why "We need more vocational training" is stupid - explained via math (small business, debt)

[PriscillaVanilla]

Originally Posted by JobHunter2018

I think you all see where this is going. When you see someone pontificating about how we need more tradesmen, guess what happens if this transpires: there is more competition for customers of tradesmen. Plus a double-whammy: now you have a bunch more tradesmen who can do their own work for themselves, doubling the downward pressure on tradesmen pay. Supply goes up, competition goes up, price wars happen, pay goes down..

There is still plenty of opportunity in many of these trades fields and don't worry, you won't see massive numbers of college kids wanting to pursue these jobs.

there is still a stigma associated with blue collar jobs and it won't go away for a long time. (sadly).

[lieqiang]

Originally Posted by Igor Blevin

All I can say is, the harder the job, the less competition, the higher the pay. That goes for both college and labor.

This depends on how you classify "hard" here.

Someone spending all day in the sun pulling cabbage out of the ground for $10/hour might claim their job is a lot harder than the dude driving a backhoe making $30/hour. Hard can be more than just education and skills, it can be hard physically.

[TexasLawyer2000]

Originally Posted by JobHunter2018

A lot of ignorant people are ranting about how our colleges need to be restructured to provide more vocational training - aka the trades - plumbing, electricians, and so on.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that colleges be restructured. People are suggesting vocational training as an alternative to college.

[jertheber]

Whenever the conversation turns to "the skilled trades," you can bet there will be plenty of offhand speculation, not to mention the dredging up of old high wage mythology from the good old days of unionized tradesmen. "Good jobs" in the skilled labor pool are those that have a big demand and few workers to satisfy that demand--period. Back in the days of milk and honey, unions offered apprenticeships to those wanting to take the path to a journey level craftsman, those entry level positions were offered on a basis of calculating the impact of having too many people and not enough work.

The contractors, not being supportive of union views, wanted just the opposite of the union policy on apprentices, more workers make for more worker to worker competition, and voila-- the bosses dream situation came true. They did so by creating the state vocational institutions, and now the entry level candidates numbers grew to levels that greatly diluted the demand, and consequently, the compensation rates. Workers now had to pay for their job skill education, and the taxpayers built the institutions needed to accomplish that bit of offloading of the apprentice programs.

I'm only attempting to point out that when we speak about "jobs" we should be knowledgeable about the fact that labor does not occur in a vacuum, there are political forces which seek to cut the cost of labor, tactics which facilitate that cost cutting are often heralded in local news outlets as a kind of saintliness on the part of companies that actively support the community college vocational programs, but those schools are integral to the employers policy of wanting too many workers as opposed to a more costly situation of few workers amid a lot of demand for the work they do.

Many Voc. schools have little interest in providing high value training, they are far more interested in their own concerns as educators, their salaries, their pensions, health care etc, they know all too well that they are growing a huge number of potential workers for what they know is a diminishing labor market. Unions, not skill, made the trades seem like a great career choice, without the union strength those jobs are just one more lower paying hard job, one that helps create a downward pressure on the whole of US living standards.

[lieqiang]

Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133

After doing some research, turns out what controls the number of licensed doctors is the amount of residency programs at hospital.

Ahh I always wondered why anyone would choose to become a proctologist. Maybe there just aren't enough good openings? No pun.

[NJ Brazen_3133]

Originally Posted by athena53

While your post is wordy, I get your basic concern that we'll have a glut of plumbers, roofers, electricians, etc. and thus the prices for their work will go down and it will be harder for them to make a decent living. I doubt this- many of these jobs are strenuous, require work in harsh physical conditions (working in sweltering attics, outdoors in bad weather, dealing with effluents). They're not suited to everyone.

As I stated in another thread regarding electrician pay in San Diego, most of the labor intensive, back breaking work is done by handymen. They have no official schooling. They learn on the job. The "skilled" worker is just there to oversee, and sign off, and grab permits. And they are the face of company and do the sales pitches.

We have a plethora of handymen. If you go to a none union construction, or renovation site, you will many illegal immigrants doing all the work. We can just assume that labor pool is infinite. They are all underpaid below minimum wage even. The "skilled" worker owns the company, makes the pitch and just pockets the fee for service

Originally Posted by MidValleyDad

You think getting an appointment a week out is too far out? In our area you would be lucky to get one a month out and that is if you are only an established patient with the practice. A new patient will probably be 3 months out. When I see a specialist I schedule my followup 3 months out. If I need to change it it has to get pushed out another 3-6 weeks.


And I'm not 'way out in the boonies' I'm in a suburb within commuting distance Washington DC.

Primary care physicians dont have this wait time. How come? Even some ENT doctors I can get in right away. The dentist too.

Originally Posted by vision33r

We don't have enough technical, vocational, and skilled workers to help us modernize our country. If anyone ever visits China, it will change everything. They have made tremendous leaps because they have skilled and low-skilled workers in every area and don't have the large amounts of office managers we do. They don't have huge pay gaps between a manager and a worker like we do. The only big pay gap is between a business owner and a worker.

But they still have to copyright infringe on all things American. They appear to be incapable of innovation on their own. I hear they still cannot make their own semi-conductor or something of that sort

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...ctors-jglgice5

[lieqiang]

Originally Posted by vision33r

Everybody in America is trying to kick the can down and trying to figure out new scams to make the most money with the least amount of effort.

You can't possibly believe people in China don't do this.

Originally Posted by vision33r

The country doesn't have massive racial issues.

We've checked into hotels in China that had signs in the lobby saying they don't allow guests from Xinjiang province.

Originally Posted by vision33r

If you can work, there's always a job in China.

This just isn't true. China has a huge problem with more college graduates every year than available jobs, they have tens of millions of migrant workers because lacking jobs in rural areas.

You can also bemoan how many (or few) Americans are working, but China's labor force is estimated to be about 800 million. Do the math on that versus USA's labor force.

[ocnjgirl]

Originally Posted by PriscillaVanilla

There is still plenty of opportunity in many of these trades fields and don't worry, you won't see massive numbers of college kids wanting to pursue these jobs.

there is still a stigma associated with blue collar jobs and it won't go away for a long time. (sadly).

I don't know, I don't see the stigma too much. I guess if we hung around with college professors, but most of our friends are in trades, too (it came in very handy when we bought our house which was a foreclosure and needed lots of work). I never saw the stigma with my brother who was an auto mechanic either. Usually people are happy to meet an auto mechanic, lol. I think the stigma might be with some parents, but in our family it was never an issue.

I agree not all kids want to do this. My fiancé tried to hire 2 of my great-nephews as helpers and teach them the trade when they were teens, but both thought it was "too hard". They aren't used to physical labor. But I do agree there's lots of opportunities. Try getting a tree trimmer in our area, the wait is a month because of the way storms have been in my area, with trees coming down left and right. After the last one, I tried to get some dead branches cut that were overhanging the roof, and everyone said "we are slammed right now, it'll be at least 3 weeks until we can even come look at it". We finally found someone who lives nearby and squeezed us in among bigger jobs. But even our small job was hundreds of dollars. They are making thousands in one day at homes where large trees came down.

This would be a great job for my nephew, the gig worker. But unless you know someone, you can't get an opportunity to learn. He would have been much better off learning a trade like that in high school versus academic classes he barely passed.

[ocnjgirl]

Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133

As I stated in another thread regarding electrician pay in San Diego, most of the labor intensive, back breaking work is done by handymen. They have no official schooling. They learn on the job. The "skilled" worker is just there to oversee, and sign off, and grab permits. And they are the face of company and do the sales pitches.

We have a plethora of handymen. If you go to a none union construction, or renovation site, you will many illegal immigrants doing all the work. We can just assume that labor pool is infinite. They are all underpaid below minimum wage even. The "skilled" worker owns the company, makes the pitch and just pockets the fee for service



Primary care physicians dont have this wait time. How come? Even some ENT doctors I can get in right away. The dentist too.



But they still have to copyright infringe on all things American. They appear to be incapable of innovation on their own. I hear they still cannot make their own semi-conductor or something of that sort

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...ctors-jglgice5

The above is not at all the way it is in my fiancé's business. It is though I agree common in certain trades such as roofing. I also think at least part of the reason it became that way was due to the difficulty finding help. Say what you will, and I agree it's not a good turn of events, but those guys work 14 hours a day without complaint, they don't call out, they don't no call-no show ( can't count how many times that has happened to my fiancé, who hires Americans). He really needs skilled people though, and outside the union there's really no where to look, and his is not s union business. If he could call a local vocational school's career center and find new grads to train, he would do so in a second. It would be good for both business owners and students to have more opportunities to learn trades.

I just again don't see any good reason why we shouldn't train people in fields there are shortages in. There are a lot of people with degrees driving Uber and delivering for Instacart. All choices are going to have both positives and negatives, and that applies to both college and trades. but I never heard anyone before say it's better not to have the choices at all.

I don't know about the doctors, but one guess is that the number of primary care providers that are in an individual insurance plan's network are greater than the number of specialists. And those few of that number who have good reputation are even smaller. When I needed an orthopedic surgeon, I only had a few to choose from in my plan and in my area, and from them only one who had a really good reputation. So that guy had a long wait. If I picked a new primary care though I probably have 3 dozen to choose from within 25 miles.

[Igor Blevin]

Originally Posted by ocnjgirl

This happens with college level jobs too, in any case. In occupational therapy, they reacted to shortages (I graduated in 1996) with opening a ton more OT schools, and more significantly, luring foreign OTs (and PTs) from the Philippines. You can see this all over health care. The same things happened with pharmacy, which actually pays less now than when my bff graduated in the 80's and has many less jobs now. I don't know why OP thinks this is unique to trades.

Every illegal alien in the nation knocks wages down for the labor they replace. BOTH political parties are into that up to their necks.

I think maybe 1970 was sort of an apex for labor, because by 1980 they were already looking at any possible way to lower labor costs. Even tech is not immune with good engineers and code writers replaced with lower cost HB-1 Visa holders.

It is nothing new at all.