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I have a BA degree from Harvard.
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I have been a licensed electrical contractor for 39 years.
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I have never made a penny from my BA degree (other than showing up on my resume).
I have a BS from a run-of-the-mill state college. I’ve made 30 years worth of good pay from that BS. Right after college I almost went into the electrical trade (I was an apprentice for a year) so it could’ve gone your direction too.
I did two semesters in college and, due to a lack of direction, was not a really good student. I figured I would take the basics and figure it out later. I ended up in the Student Center majoring in bridge and minoring in snooker.
My BIL recruited me into the carpenter’s union, which was pretty good for a bit until the Jimmy Carter recession hit. I bounced around a bit and when my job running the tongue saw came to an abrupt end I took the job at the fire alarm company. 42 years I mad a good living as an electrician specializing in commercial fire alarms
My degree only served the purpose of getting job interviews for non-degree-related work. I landed three good jobs that had engineering degree requirements and then found out that the “requirement” was just a culling tool to cut down on applicants.
My comment was based on conversations with people who run apprenticeship programs in British Columbia, union, non-union, and government programs, including the Red Seal program. They pretty much agree that employers hire fewer apprentices/journeymen/Red Seal people per job than they did in earlier days and have largely opted out of apprentice training programs. More typically–and they are talking trends, not absolutes, of course, so mileage varies–the work is “deskilled” and paid less, with tradespeople with “papers” doing some supervision and final hook-up, etc. There are always counter-examples, of course, but the people I spoke with were unanimous that becoming a tradesperson is not a ticket to the good life, even for those with good work habits, skills, and training. There are fewer routes to the good life in trades, academia, or anywhere, it seems. The old rule still fits many people: if you want to be rich, choose your grandparents wisely.
In his 1903 book “On Track,” the author notes that it would take 2 years to train someone to be a good railway construction worker–the work was more skilled than just banging on a spike. But, he lamented, railway companies had no interest in training, because it would mean having to pay higher wages. Instead, they preferred to throw masses of cheap labourers at the job. Plus ca change?
For what it’s worth, I ended up calling the flooring retailer, and they assigned a different crew to install our floors and baseboards.
This second crew is fantastic. Hard working, very communicative, conscientious, cheerful, etc… Everything you could ask for really. The very first thing they did is plastic and tape off all the cabinets and shelves and doorways. We still got a lot of dust, but they did their best to mitigate it, which is all anyone can ask.
So I guess mileage varies; that first guy was a total zero, but the second crew is awesome.
Isn’t Taylorism mostly the largely defunct exercise of performing “time and motion” studies - following workers around with stopwatches to see how long it takes to perform tasks? Nothing wrong with wanting to save money by making workers more efficient. But modern management techniques focus more on holistic results, rather than making each task more efficient.
There’s another book called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber that has a similar theme about the proliferation of nonsensical financial and middle management jobs. It’s like we don’t want to pay people to do real work but are perfectly willing to pay some MBA like me a ton of money to do fuck-all
The ironic thing is I do most of our home repairs myself because we can’t find good contractors.
My WAG.
The competent ones all work for the big construction firms which only leaves the dregs for small companies and self employed. Obviously there will be exceptions, but the quality talent has already been scooped up by places with benefits and stable business.
This recent article Built Trades | Phenomenal World examines the myth of construction trades as great jobs, citing among other things the decline in the unionization rate from over 50% to less than 20% and thus a fall in wage rates and benefits.