The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Longshoreman? Hard, dangerous work, but pays really well. Logging? Who the hell wants to be a logger? Anyone that has few skills but wants a decent living.
But it seems that over the years these shit jobs have started to have the shit pay to go with it. I'm sure there are multiple factors involved, starting with a downturn of union membership, but something or things has changed. And now industries wonder why they can't find anyone. Well, actually, I truly doubt they are wondering, as they ought to know better than I do what the reason is. But "they" would like to continue to live in the fantasy land where people stand in line for a minimum wage job that is likely to get them killed or seriously injured.
The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.
(Source for all this is: The Box (https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...)
In the past 20 or so years a literary genre has emerged that uses esoteric subjects as a narrative device for exploring broader social topics. The Box doesn't fit neatly into that genre because, AFAIU, the historical material is novel, rather than recapitulating a standard theory or, on the other hand, reframing beliefs with a contradictory or counter-intuitive narrative. The book remains earnestly focused on the history of container shipping, albeit at a more macro scale. The broader relevance just naturally follows from the keen, objective description of that history.
An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.
This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive. Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.
I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.
The article mentions that the cable anchored harvesters/forwarders replace a crew of 8.
I wonder how we recovered from this after The Great Depression...
I don't think he received nearly as much training as described in the article. And IIRC he hadn't been on the job for more than a few months. But this was in Alabama, where workers are disposable.
So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages.
But neither is happening.
So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.
I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.
If you want low cost of living, you need to move to the midwest or south, or throughout the NE in upstate or western NY.
At $18/hr, it's hard to argue that any of those risks are built into the compensation. That is approx. ~37,000/yr for the most dangerous job in the country, apparently.
If one is inclined towards the trades, it's not hard to see why they would pick something other than logging.
The pacific states are uniquely expensive. It's not at all like western NY or upstate NY, or the midwest, or the south, where everything is dirt cheap, and gets very cheap in rural areas.
If they don't get enough fellers then they will raise wages and overall comp. until they do. If they have enough, they will lower wages until they don't. It is a functioning labour market, and the degree to which people desire to work for lumber companies is reflected in the wages, and in turn the price of lumber.
If anything, at $18/hr for dangerous hard labour, they obviously have plenty of people who want to be fellers. There's no other way that wage would be so low.
If they have a shortage, lumber simply costs a bit more.
Perhaps it even is safer to join the military nowadays?
Even if it's done in an environmentally sound way, I'd assume that there's a stigma that would be hard to get past.
Especially people that aren't confused about where toilet paper comes from.
I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend not to understand how markets work.
This article reminds me of the one we get from growers periodically. They're having trouble finding people to do the work they need done, so instead of paying higher wages the solution is to start a media campaign to get immigration restrictions relaxed so they can flood the market with labor.
Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those people to get fucked.
Business and economic journalism aren't critical enough of people who complain about a "skills shortage" and accept their argument at face value. This is where capitalism should excel: you can't attract necessary talent at price point $X, then you pay >$X.
Partisan ideologies can cut in multiple directions. For example, if you have an ideology where you view capitalism as inherently evil you may be ignorant of where it could be of benefit. If you view workers are excessively self-entitled, you won't call out companies and managers for not paying enough.
As the sole representative of everyone aged 8 till 40, I would say we are turning a new leaf here.
I feel like this is an outreach problem more than anything. Recruit at high schools and job fairs and you'll get bodies.
The job, it's dangerous as fuck. My boss went to a funeral today for someone who had been doing this 30 years or so.
S
> Death or injury “can come from trees falling in the wrong direction, or hitting another tree and falling back on someone”, he said.
Stupid millennials, how could they resist a dangerous job that is also in decline?!