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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
I have had issues getting into primary care for years. I left the last practice I went to because I called for an urgent issue and was told the wait was two months. My gyn also has a fairly long wait, but she is only at that office once a week. My new PCP is better and is usually still a week or two, but there is an urgent care clinic in the same building.
All I can say is, the harder the job, the less competition, the higher the pay. That goes for both college and labor.
In college, people with STEM degrees like engineering and computer science make good solid pay. Then you have your Philosophy majors, Music, English, Anthropology, Basket Weaving, and Womyn's Studies -- not so much.
Labor is the same. If you can weld aluminum, you are getting good pay.
I agree with you that overall, a college STEM degree pays more over a lifetime than a trade. Just like having a Masters pays more and a Doctorate pays even more.
There are caveats though.
The tradesman is earning money from age 18. The college grad is lucky to start a career by 24, so he is out 5-6 years of pay. Make that 8-10 years for a Doctorate. So the tradesman gets more years of pay. It is not as if college is sitting home playing video games. It is unpaid work.
Then there is the cost of college. Whether a loan or out of pocket, somebody is out $50,000 to $150,000 right off the bat, so add that on the plus side for the tradesman.
I agree with you. A hard college degree beats a hard trade practice most of the time, unless the tradesman does a boat load of OT to make up the difference, and then he is out his free time. But a hard trade is going to beat a worthless college major most of the time. 5 years and $100,000 college to be a Starbucks barrista for the next 20 years.
There is some gray area though. Hardest labor job has to be soldiers. They dont make much. As for the contruction trades, or any other labor job, there is a ceiling as to how physically tough it can be. At some point, we will use machines to complete the task. Most non-disabled human males have the capacity to reach this ceiling easily.
As for hard STEM degrees, nothing about STEM is incomprehensible to vast majority of humans. What makes it difficult is the quality of lesson/instructor, the price perhaps, and the commitment. Those factors are artificially created by society.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EDS_
Medicare to a great degree controls the numbers of medical residencies in The US.
1). Unless you want more poorly qualified specialits....it works like this without much noise. Those who perform better in medical school - grades, research, STEP 1, 2, scores etc. are seleted into the most in demand specalties. I'll post a bit later that shows per specialty Step 1 scores......it's an eye opener.
The math of this is simple. Very few college students are qualified to get into medical school in the first place. Only a subset of that group are qualfiied to win one of the limited residency slots within any specialty.
2). Neurology per se is it's own animal. Among the specialties neuro. tends to not pay particularly well because neurologists perfrom few proceedures and until recently were not often involved in surgical teams.
3). Financially, NY/NJ are horrible locations for clinical specialists. Nominal pay lags most parts of the country, malpractice insurance is very high, the lawsuit/defensive medicine burdens are high and of course state and local tax burdens on those earning specialist money are right at the highest in the country etc.
4). Among the results of the above is a specialist shortage across much of MY, MA, NJ, CT etc. Yielding long wait times.
I can get college kids not being committed enough to go into medicine. But I cannot understand how going through the college paces can qualify or disqualify someone from being a doctor. Is just going to class, and taking classes. Passing/failing all the biology/anatomy classes is probably all that can be used from college in the weeding process.
And yeh, medicare, its like universal healthcare for just old people LOLz.
Excelling at a trade makes it an easy entree into starting your own business. It is very different than owning a McDonalds, which requires hundreds of thousands of dollars for the franchise. All you need to do as a tradesman is start an LLC and have a good reputation. Where's your link to this 'fact" that the majority of tradesmen who go into business fail?? Where is your link that says less than 1% of tradesmen own their business?
Even without owning though, tradespeople are going to make decent money, without debt. If you're in NJ, there's a 4-6 week wait for tree trimming services due to the storms, those guys are making money hand over fist, owners as well as workers.
You still haven't offered any kind of logical reason why having less choices for a career is better than more.
Guess what. I have 14 years in the construction industry, with 5 of that on the management side where we oversee projects from start to end and manage the subcontractors. What are your qualifications?
https://www.nvoicepay.com/resources/...ompanies-fail/ While roughly half of all small businesses fail within just five years, the statistics are much worse for construction companies, with only 36.4 percent ever reaching their fifth year of business. In fact, of all industries, construction has the lowest success rate, and here's why.
This is just 5 years in. After 10 years its something like 90% failure rate just for a normal business. Owning a construciton company requires a totally different skillset than working as a tradesman. You can be good at one and not good at the other.
I can't believe you expect anyone to take you seriously saying being a tree trimmer is a good job that pays well. Show me the average pay for a tree trimmer.
And I'm not saying we shoudl take away choices. I'm just debunking the false information out there on trades.
Ahh I always wondered why anyone would choose to become a proctologist. Maybe there just aren't enough good openings? No pun.
LOLZ the one time I needed one, no rectal surgeon around. Luckily though my parents know a gastro-enterologist who could fix my hemmorhoids through minimally invasive surgery.
There is some gray area though. Hardest labor job has to be soldiers. They dont make much.
Military can be hard, or it might not. Some folks spend four years driving a bus on a base in USA, others work in nice office environments doing administrative stuff, while others (the small exception at this point) are actually in danger in a war zone.
I think there are a lot of jobs harder, both physically and from a training standpoint, than most soldiers.
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.
I am not defending their use, just offering suggestions on factors (it’s not all money). But financially there is also the “Home Depot” factor which I think has become a big driver ( much as Walmart accelerated the push to move factories off shore). Big chains drive down costs by offering cut rate carpet installation or kitchen renovation and then the small business person has to find a way to compete with those prices. Using cheaper labor is one of the only ways to do that. Cheaper labor and cheaper materials, everybody loses. I think they are a bigger part of the changes than simply more illegals being here (there’s actually was a downward trend over the last decade+, so why weren’t they used as much back on the day?)
It’s not just illegals (and I don’t know that they are all illegal in any case. I discovered when we had our roof done that in the northeast anyway, almost all of the roofing help is Costa Rican, not Mexican). The roofing company owner told us it’s that way everywhere down here.
In health care the foreign workers are not illegal. But they work cheaper, do as they are told, don’t call out, and so companies love to hire them. Maybe because they are from poor countries, and are beholden to supporting family back home, but it’s definitely a different work culture. The same is true of the Eastern European students who are brought over to work at the Jersey shore each summer ( I can tell you from living there for 18 years, that the reason for that is they simply could not find enough American kids to fill the positions).
I’m just saying there are few one-issue problems, and the changes to cheaper illegal and legal foreign labor have myriad causes and reasons.
But to imply all trades should be looked down on by potential students because s few have gone this route, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There are college degrees that are worthless as well yet no one saying “it’s foolish to go to college”. Trades cover a broad area, and not all trades use unskilled labor. There is still a need for skilled craftsmen and tradesmen in most genuine trades and this won’t change.
Part of the push if from businesses for this reason. The more people flooding the market the less they have to pay them and the easier it is to get rid of them. People love to glorify the trades (people who don't work in them or have real knowledge of them), but the reality is they don't pay that much compared to college graduates. They are good to get into if your working retail for in the food industry or can't go to college.
spoken like an anti-business and anti-capitalist person. We all have our right to our opinion.
A college graduate that owes $400/mo (about the $30K average debt) that's earning $10/hr in retail or gig economy should love $15/hr.
A HS grad making $9/hr to start should love the opportunity to find something to do that pays $15/hr.
Guess what. I have 14 years in the construction industry, with 5 of that on the management side where we oversee projects from start to end and manage the subcontractors. What are your qualifications?
https://www.nvoicepay.com/resources/...ompanies-fail/ While roughly half of all small businesses fail within just five years, the statistics are much worse for construction companies, with only 36.4 percent ever reaching their fifth year of business. In fact, of all industries, construction has the lowest success rate, and here's why.
This is just 5 years in. After 10 years its something like 90% failure rate just for a normal business. Owning a construciton company requires a totally different skillset than working as a tradesman. You can be good at one and not good at the other.
I can't believe you expect anyone to take you seriously saying being a tree trimmer is a good job that pays well. Show me the average pay for a tree trimmer.
And I'm not saying we shoudl take away choices. I'm just debunking the false information out there on trades.
small businesses fail because they're not good businesspeople. I read the link, and it included some very basic but sound advice that most people don't know/learn.
With your experience in the construction industry, where is their abundant qualified legal labor, and where is there not?
Do y'all generally look for lowest-cost labor that may have higher error rates, or pay subs based on their effectiveness?
Guess what. I have 14 years in the construction industry, with 5 of that on the management side where we oversee projects from start to end and manage the subcontractors. What are your qualifications?
https://www.nvoicepay.com/resources/...ompanies-fail/ While roughly half of all small businesses fail within just five years, the statistics are much worse for construction companies, with only 36.4 percent ever reaching their fifth year of business. In fact, of all industries, construction has the lowest success rate, and here's why.
This is just 5 years in. After 10 years its something like 90% failure rate just for a normal business. Owning a construciton company requires a totally different skillset than working as a tradesman. You can be good at one and not good at the other.
I can't believe you expect anyone to take you seriously saying being a tree trimmer is a good job that pays well. Show me the average pay for a tree trimmer.
And I'm not saying we shoudl take away choices. I'm just debunking the false information out there on trades.
Yes, it’d Be a heck of a lot better job than driving Amazon Flex. And probably more than he’d be making if he went to college and got some generic degree. Once he got a high skill level he could start his own business. As you said, starting a business in a skilled trade is very different than starting a construction company. I don’t know why you’re making this so narrow. There are many trades aside from construction.
Again, no one on this thread has yet to explain to me why it would be a better thing for people to have less choices for careers
Whenever I hear that phrase about a huge shortage of tradesman I shudder.
My son graduated from a technical high school as an electrical apprentice. For 2 years he tried to get a job as an electrical apprentice. For any given job there were 15-30 applicants. We gave up and had him go to another state to see if he could do better there. He landed a job in 2 weeks. So we had to set him up in that state, and probably spent about as much to do that as many spend on a years college. Not quite a year later, he is merrily working the trade he wanted but couldn't get here.
Translation of we are really short of electricians here (at least in this state) ...... we want apprentices that have at least 2-3 years experience, electricians who are already journeymen, electricians who have 3-5 years previous construction experience, electricians that aren't really just electricians (this was for Electric Boat, a giant military contractor. I was told on another forum "They're always hiring!" No, not really.) I could go on but I think I've made the point. I am grateful my son didn't spend thousands of dollars on electrical training here. I'd recommend anyone contemplating entering the trades research what the job market really is in whatever area he/she lives in.
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