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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

You have to pick the right trade, though, which requires quite some economic forecasting. Several of my extended family members took exactly this route for the reason you suggest, and they're now unemployed former steelworkers. In retrospect they would've been better off with a university degree, as unemployment rates are much lower for people with degrees. I know people with degrees who got laid off from steel companies too (doing engineering, HR, accounting, IT, various things), but they had a much easier time switching industries to find new jobs.

Most of the building trades have also fared badly (with electrician somewhat of an exception), as wages have collapsed over the past few decades in trades like carpentry and roofing.

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I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plumbing. [quote from "The Graduate"]

:-)

Seriously though: I have been begging plumbers to come and work on a reasonably high-priced project at my house. I reached out to 10+, no one is interested - they are booked for weeks in advance.

> reasonably high-priced project

What would it pay for them?

The one quote I was able to get - $6K, labor only. No more than 2 days of work for 1 person. All plumbers based within 10 min drive.

You're not telling the full story.

$6k got me a 4 hour response of a 5 man crew with an excavator to replace a rusted section of a wastewater pipe, which involved digging 14ft down and demolishing part of my driveway (and pouring new concrete in after it was finished)

> No more than 2 days of work for 1 person.

You'll have us believe a plumber charges $375/hour for this project, based on the $6k quote?

This is not typical, so either your project is extremely difficult or you're not telling us something else.

My brother is a "plumber" but he never took the exam or whatever and got his license. It's the same thing over and over--people with ambition succeed, people who lack it do not. If he had studied and gotten that license he would have been set for life, but no, always the "helper" or taking far lower paying jobs at schools and hospitals instead.

Aren't there programs to retrain workers whose jobs are offshored?

Not really

There are Federal programs to retrain and financially assist those who have be displaced by offshoring.[1]

The problem is that these programs are notoriously underfunded (the financial assistance barely helps. It's like 10k a year if you're very lucky), have their resources misallocated, and do just enough to say that they're doing "something". Their funding is also often lumped in with other welfare "handouts". So when people vote against funding "handouts", they vote against helping people who need it most.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance

There are such programs, but their effectiveness and avilability varies widely depending on where you live.

Where I live, we have Second Career Ontario[1]. When I was in college, several of my classmates were formerly highly paid tradespeople who ended up unemployed and unable to find work after the decline in Ontario's manufacturing sector. The Second Career program funding was enough for them to go back to school for a couple of years. To to best of my knowledge, all of my classmates ended up making the transition to a new career successfully.

I've seen programs in other jurisdicitions that provide some funding for retraining, but not enough funding to teach people enough skills in enough depth for them to realistically be able to move to a new career.

[1] http://www.secondcareerontario.com/web/second_career/

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