America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians(wsj.com)
wsj.com
America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-is-trying-to-electrify-there-arent-enough-electricians-4260d05b
4 comments
Pay people more, if it is important people will pay for it. If you want more people to be electricians create some incentive. Why are so many people ok with the supply and demand as a concept until it's about labor?
I have honestly been researching switching to this field because of the things this article talks about, and my desire to work with my hands more, but it doesn't make sense financially.
Why would I go to a trade school and sign up to take a pay cut, making $18/hr for four years before I get on average 60k a year after that? With almost no retirement options for when the trades eventually destroy my body, not a lot of extra money to save for retirement, so what's the point?
There are plenty of people that want to be electricians - the schools only accept so many applicants. It's the same issue with the artificial doctor shortage - artificially limited supply to keep wages high.
But are the schools artificially limiting their intake, or have their own resource shortages? If the former, what do they gain from doing so such that any individual school can't decide to it's better off accepting as many students as it can?
In the case of medical schools, it is controlled by the AMA. For electrician schools, it is the unions. Both seek to keep wages high and the only way to do that is to gatekeep the credential process. Remember those that teach at these schools are doctors and electricians that benefited from the controlled system. It is the reason programmers will never have a union and accrediting agency because corporations want wages to decline, not increase.
For electrician schools, it's funding and personnel (read: funding).
An electrician is doing hands on stuff in a lot of labs. That limits the student to teacher ratio that can be sustained. So, you'd need a lot more teachers who are already certified as electricians to come teach. Are you paying them enough to get them to come teach as opposed to work or manage? (LOL--teachers always get paid absolute dogshit).
After your first year of training, the expectation is that the apprentice is getting paid. So, you need to have some companies willing to cough up to pay more for the increased number of apprentices. Who is incentivized to do that?
Want more electricians? Bump the pay to $100K/year for a journeyman. You'll have lots of people wanting to be electricians.
An electrician is doing hands on stuff in a lot of labs. That limits the student to teacher ratio that can be sustained. So, you'd need a lot more teachers who are already certified as electricians to come teach. Are you paying them enough to get them to come teach as opposed to work or manage? (LOL--teachers always get paid absolute dogshit).
After your first year of training, the expectation is that the apprentice is getting paid. So, you need to have some companies willing to cough up to pay more for the increased number of apprentices. Who is incentivized to do that?
Want more electricians? Bump the pay to $100K/year for a journeyman. You'll have lots of people wanting to be electricians.
That actually is about the average salary for electricians in Australia (though I would imagine not for those just starting out). And we still have a shortage, reportedly due to not enough students enrolling into apprenticeships.
Paywall, so I can't read this specific article but judging from the first couple of paragraphs, the headline is the bulk of the story.
Anyway, hi, I'm bityard, please enjoy my rant.
The real story is that _all_ trades are suffering to find enough workers. Well, let me rephrase that. They are suffering to find enough _quality_ workers. In talking with friends in the industry, their main challenges are 1) An ever-shrinking pool of people interested in doing manual labor 2) Many of those that are interested, are "low-quality" employees with emotional, mental, or substance abuse problems, which disqualified them from white-collar or more prestigious blue-collar work. 3) Lots of people on HN will probably say, "Just pay them more! Problem solved!" Well, it's not that simple. First, _Good_ contractors _are_ paid decently. Second, if that's really your best solution, then I hope you are also ready to pony up $50,000 for a bathroom refresh that used to cost a mere $30,000.
I'm remodeling a house right now and in my area at least, the whole contracting industry here is a dumpster fire. I will place calls to 10 different companies, 5 will pick up the phone or return my call, 3 will come out for a quote, and 1 will actually set a date to come out and do the work. The days are gone where you have the luxury of interviewing 3 different contractors, checking their references, etc. You pretty much have no choice but to accept anyone who will actually _do_ the work, and pay whatever they ask, and hope they don't cut corners or welch out of the last 10-20% of the job (my biggest issue currently).
I actually looked into becoming an electrician once my tech career winds down, figuring I could capitalize on the solar boom plus my decent understanding of electrical work, wiring, and transmission. (Once you hit a certain age, the prospect of spending 40+ hours a week staring at a computer screen gets less and less appealing.) The problem is that unlike a tech job, you don't just go through some training, get a little work experience, and "become" an electrician. After your trade school training, there is a whole apprenticeship and licensing process you have to go through before you are even qualified. All told, you are in for just shy of a decade before you start earning anything decent and that's working 40 hours a week the whole time.
To put it simply: the path to being an electrician is so arduous that the only people who can make it work are those who are effectively starting their life (or starting it over) and commit the rest of their lives to the career. There's no room for those who are technically apt but want a change of scenery from another trade.
(Someone will probably say the path to becoming an electrician is hard on purpose, because when they screw up, people die. Let me just say that I've run into many fully-licensed electricians who had no business touching so much as a light switch in someone else's home, and have seen many dangerous and bone-headed things done by supposed professionals. For better or worse, the high temporal cost of the career seems to be mostly orthogonal to the quality of work produced.)
Anyway, hi, I'm bityard, please enjoy my rant.
The real story is that _all_ trades are suffering to find enough workers. Well, let me rephrase that. They are suffering to find enough _quality_ workers. In talking with friends in the industry, their main challenges are 1) An ever-shrinking pool of people interested in doing manual labor 2) Many of those that are interested, are "low-quality" employees with emotional, mental, or substance abuse problems, which disqualified them from white-collar or more prestigious blue-collar work. 3) Lots of people on HN will probably say, "Just pay them more! Problem solved!" Well, it's not that simple. First, _Good_ contractors _are_ paid decently. Second, if that's really your best solution, then I hope you are also ready to pony up $50,000 for a bathroom refresh that used to cost a mere $30,000.
I'm remodeling a house right now and in my area at least, the whole contracting industry here is a dumpster fire. I will place calls to 10 different companies, 5 will pick up the phone or return my call, 3 will come out for a quote, and 1 will actually set a date to come out and do the work. The days are gone where you have the luxury of interviewing 3 different contractors, checking their references, etc. You pretty much have no choice but to accept anyone who will actually _do_ the work, and pay whatever they ask, and hope they don't cut corners or welch out of the last 10-20% of the job (my biggest issue currently).
I actually looked into becoming an electrician once my tech career winds down, figuring I could capitalize on the solar boom plus my decent understanding of electrical work, wiring, and transmission. (Once you hit a certain age, the prospect of spending 40+ hours a week staring at a computer screen gets less and less appealing.) The problem is that unlike a tech job, you don't just go through some training, get a little work experience, and "become" an electrician. After your trade school training, there is a whole apprenticeship and licensing process you have to go through before you are even qualified. All told, you are in for just shy of a decade before you start earning anything decent and that's working 40 hours a week the whole time.
To put it simply: the path to being an electrician is so arduous that the only people who can make it work are those who are effectively starting their life (or starting it over) and commit the rest of their lives to the career. There's no room for those who are technically apt but want a change of scenery from another trade.
(Someone will probably say the path to becoming an electrician is hard on purpose, because when they screw up, people die. Let me just say that I've run into many fully-licensed electricians who had no business touching so much as a light switch in someone else's home, and have seen many dangerous and bone-headed things done by supposed professionals. For better or worse, the high temporal cost of the career seems to be mostly orthogonal to the quality of work produced.)
Everything in this post matches up 100% with my experiences too. Artificial time gates on multiple levels before you can do anything even if you're actually competent.
Like that for a lot of licensed work, not just trades or union jobs. Getting a license to cut hair and do other salon work requires more of an official time commitment than dropping everything and getting into programming.
Like that for a lot of licensed work, not just trades or union jobs. Getting a license to cut hair and do other salon work requires more of an official time commitment than dropping everything and getting into programming.
>For better or worse, the high temporal cost of the career seems to be mostly orthogonal to the quality of work produced.)
I have a dumb question but could you just find like a bone-headed unsavory character like an unemployed chronic-alcoholic felon that has a license but no work and just like work 'under their direction' and give them a 10% cut or something?
I have a dumb question but could you just find like a bone-headed unsavory character like an unemployed chronic-alcoholic felon that has a license but no work and just like work 'under their direction' and give them a 10% cut or something?
Yes, you can do that... you just have to find that person. The felon part may be the hold up, some licensures get taken away in certain states.
Technically you could start an electrical company, licensed under a qualifying employee. Basically you need to find a low level employee that has the work experience to show and enough study skills to pass the test. Then they can be your means to a license. Aka, how random business men can sometimes own have construction companies without ever having worked in the field.
FWIW, the average electrician salary in Australia seems a good deal higher than in the US (by at least 50%!), and there's reportedly a similar shortage here. Supposedly it's largely due to a lack of students choosing such an apprenticeship. But why that is I'm not sure anyone fully understands.
Technically could you do the electrician school, skip the apprenticeship and just work on your house? How important is it to learning the typical things you'd see on a standard house?
It's not hard. I'm an EE and I've wired two houses after studying the code on my own. I hired an electrician to check and sign off on my work, which was much cheaper than hiring him to do everything.
The work I did was more code-compliant than work I've seen in other houses done by so-called "licensed" electricians. Possibly because I took the code literally and assumed compliance was non-optional.
The work I did was more code-compliant than work I've seen in other houses done by so-called "licensed" electricians. Possibly because I took the code literally and assumed compliance was non-optional.
When I was a fresh EE I was hired as a backdoor to hiring an electrician because an EE is cheaper. Everything about it was hilariously easy and we were wiring up some insane shit, think 300 amp 1kV motors that will kill people if it goes wrong. Theres very little that goes beyond your 101 level linear circuits, some gauge tables, and youtube videos for how to crimp and mount the breakers, ground faults, etc.
It will make more sense when you realize the trades were basically designed to suppress the 'out-group' from joining the union or being hired to keep up the union workers wages. That's why hiring an EE is so much cheaper than hiring an electrician.
That is, the dirty secret is: the trades have a vested interest in having 'shortage.'
It will make more sense when you realize the trades were basically designed to suppress the 'out-group' from joining the union or being hired to keep up the union workers wages. That's why hiring an EE is so much cheaper than hiring an electrician.
That is, the dirty secret is: the trades have a vested interest in having 'shortage.'
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You need between 4,000 - 10,000 (depending on the state you are licensing in) hours of on the job experience as an apprentice working under a licensed journeyman to get your journeyman license
So, in the range of two to five years ?
Makes me think of The Money Pit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO9nxRjIv2A