i invite her to go lay bricks.
can’t wait to see what the security of the “trades” is like when diesel hits $10/gal and only the 1% can afford construction materials for their weird little palaces.
When a shock like that happens, being trained in a trade will be 10x more valuable than a bachelor’s degree as certification to be a “knowledge economy” worker (labor aristocracy).
the either/or mentality is absolutely busted. education is perspective and it should be perennially persued. formal education is a massive, international network that has no dues, and can never be rescinded or suspended.
i learned two trades, both before i got my bachelor’s in my 30s. i eventually even got a masters, which i got an employer to pay for.
formal education has given me alot more resilience and professional mobility to adapt and achieve material stability. the US labor market has been shocked constantly for 30+ years. so, the shock isn’t coming. its been here. it is here now, in the room with us. there is no silver bullet.
every 5 years the media dumps out a new message to push young people to specialize in the latest thing that rich people want. learn to repair computer. learn to nurse. learn to code. learn to fix my toilet. learn to build my wall. then they drive down wages and hang the specialists out to dry.
when you’re in your late 40s, you’re not going to be laying bricks anymore. your back and your knees won’t let you. your value to the community is going to be driven by your knowledge and experience. so you better have aquired some, and hopefully its about more than what rich people wanted you to know 30 years ago.
i have always used my knowledge and experience in my tradeable skills to leverage my formal education further, but the actual skills themselves are something i use with my own hands (and still pursue mastery in) to achieve my own, non-professional goals and build resistance to labor “markets” in the future.
my overall point is that this writer should go pick up a trade if they’re so disillusioned with their education. they won’t though, because that’s not really why that article got published or why the “fuck school, learn a trade/Mike Rowe/anti-intellectualism” has permeated the media landscape off and on for decades.
and as soon as a trade worker has enough material cushion, they should pursue an education too. and they should pursue it in something they want.
Dunno if I’ve said it before, but on the post-capitalist commune, everybody ideally has at least one area of expertise in something material, and one area of expertise in something social or academic.
there was a conceptual idea at the founding of the land grant public universities in the US, that they would provide a “classical” (history, literature, etc) and “practical” (math, chemistry, agriculture etc) education. the story was, they wanted to be more modern than the private and religious academies of elite families.
for all the historic and current issues of those institutions, there is a transformative logic to combining disciplines that are pedagogically differentiated by the established order and delivering them into each student’s mind.
i did an interdisciplinary undergrad at 30 and i thought i wouldn’t give a shit about part of it, but it ended up opening a whole new lens for me to investigate and interrogate my surroundings. it also doesn’t surprise me at all that the land grants are now under heavy assault by conservatives & reactionaries, which is happening quickly after decades of neoliberal infiltration and domination of those institutions cutting away any resistance by actors in their shared governance structures and populating their boards with absolute ghouls.
also, it feels like all of the specialists, the people who did the one thing, are walking around with one eye closed and trying to use one tool to fix every problem.
You SHOULD probably learn a trade though. Like… Knowing how to build stuff is going to become a survival skill for a lot of people very soon.
New “learn to code”
That’s what I’ve been saying!! Encouraging everyone to get into trades is going to cause the exact same problem. In a decade or so there’s going to be so many layoffs
It won’t be huge layoffs like in tech because there aren’t big “tradeswork” companies that own the sector. Big Tech lays off workers to stifle wages and churn through the available workforce. Contractors hang a shingle to start their own business, or rely on a midsized contracting co and get paid per dispatch. More likely there just won’t be enough work to support all the licensed contractors, so they’ll close up shop. Some midsized companies might be vulnerable to private equity takeover if they become insolvent with the level of work available.
Private equity is a massive player in trade work right now and the current “boom” is in building data centers that won’t get used or will never be finished. The layoffs are coming one way or another.
I’m pretty sure this whole push is happening because you can potentially make a good living in the trades. Same with tech, they simply want to keep wages down.
What career are you even supposed to enter these days besides rich parent’s failson
Brickies do ok wage wise but it’s brutal work
Not to mention the cancer
Most construction work is going to expose you to a myriad of cancer causing chemicals.
It’s always the rich folk telling you how easy it is to just become an electrician or a plumber!
It’s kinda funny how so many chuds are just right-wing Maoists. Literally down-to-the-countryside-movement but in all the worst ways.
White collar graduates should consider burning down pedoantic and new york crimes for false advertising, and then get free trade training in jail for 2 years
Not bricklayers, but electricians and plumbers are doing very well at the moment. Got a mate who’s working on a data centre at the moment and he gets £40 an hour. Whether there’s point in training up as one specifically for this boom in demand I’m not sure, as it may not last very long.
I also know an HVAC guy who makes about £90k a year. He leads a team on maintenance and install, but yeah, trades are doing quite well at the moment if you’re in a more senior position.
If everyone starts training up as a tradie then those rates will go down.
tell your friend to do shoddy work that will cost way more to fix in three years
I’m considering getting trained in a trade but it ain’t gonna be bricklaying. I don’t think my body can handle that.
As a European male of fighting age, I’m seriously considering doing an electrician training in case I need to emigrate in the mid term, I’m sure every country needs electricians to an extent
I mean it’s in The Atlantic and the more of its readers that become bricklayers, the better.
I think some should consider becoming bricks
Some of them should become more acquainted with bricks.
You are what you eat
You have bricks in the US? I thought you build everything out of cardboard
Bricks are for driveways, cardboard is for walls.
For throwing them at cars? Waow
cinder bloc
I did trade work for more than two years until I got fired lol. I might get back into it if anyone will hire me to do it since I’m going to need a job soon. Here’s what they don’t tell you about it:
There is so much to know about it. It’s kind of incredible how complex the machines are that support our existence. There’s no end to what you can learn, and guys with decades of experience would still run into problems with weird machines (although they always managed to figure things out). And if you’re as unlucky as I was, you’re going to get stuck with a company that won’t train you enough, and will then blame you for your mistakes, or get tired of you asking for help. You might also get frustrated with the possible fact that the machines you’re working on shouldn’t exist and are deliberately designed to be as confusing as possible in order to increase profits for the manufacturers.
Destroying your body sucks. It can also be fucking gross.
White male coworkers are uninterested in unionizing. I got relatively friendly with all of them before I broached the subject. Not a single person expressed interest, despite the company showing us that they were making ridiculous profits and paying us next to nothing. Not every coworker was blatantly rightwing, though. One was a Ukraine lib, one never discussed politics (or much of anything…), one declared that he was an antivaxxer basically the moment I met him, another went through rightwing talking points as if he was reading from a Fox News teleprompter during our first five minutes together. There’s actually a lot of solidarity versus the customers, but no solidarity at all versus the company.
People seem to think that you’re smart and foolish at the same time, which is kind of weird. Like…working in the trades requires brains, but supposedly the intelligent people in our society work in offices, so what the hell is going on with you?
You will start to hate dog owners if you don’t already.
No one in Klein’s family has done any actual work in at least four generations.
Etc.
You will start to hate dog owners if you don’t already.
“Oh no it’s fine, I know you said he’d need to be kept in the backyard away from you while you work, but he’s a sweetheart and wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
They always say that the dog is friendly, even as the dog is screaming at you and trying to rip your balls off. This is an interesting definition of friendly.
Fully going to admit it, I’m a total wimp and wouldn’t last a week as a bricklayer.
And that’s why I resent how there’s a shrinking pool of options for careers, if part of getting a job is about “fit”, then logically I should look at roles I’d actually be a good fit for or that anything beyond destroying my body is seen by the porks as unbecoming for the working class.
Based. :Lucio-Urtubia-shining:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You know I think Id rather live in a homeless camp than be a bricklayer tbh
Hey I’d love to learn welding. Sadly my body is destroying itself and I get no help from the government.
