Ironic given that plenty of blue collar professionals can make a lot more than your average worker in many degreed professions. (That's not to say the average blue collar wage is higher)
I feel like referencing welding is pretty cliche, but for example:
No they don't, this is a myth that has become perpetuated in recent years.
Mike Rowe might mean well by writing articles like this, but the content is a lie. The median salary of a welder in the US is $40,240 a year according to the BLS. People are essentially selling an entire generation a load of BS in order to flood the market with cheap labor instead of paying them more.
There are some welders who make $100k a year, but they are several standard deviations above the mean. Those $100k/welders are like the $5MM/yr programmers. Yeah, they exist, but only in the top 1% of workers.
I don't want my kids to be tradespeople. I watched 2008 destroy the careers of every tradesperson friend I had, along with nearly wiping out my family's (second-generation) construction business. I had talented friends in their early 20s that were forced to move back in with family after having their work hours cut to 2-3/hr a week (but they had to report to work everyday). The ones with family safety nets went to college, those without joined the military.
If you're willing to accept the boom-or-bust nature of construction projects, or remote (as in, go to where work is in demand) work, you can make considerably more. Then there's overtime, which your salaried white-collar worker doesn't get at all.
> Then there's overtime, which your salaried white-collar worker doesn't get at all.
Not true across the board - in fact, many mid-paying office jobs are hourly and do pay overtime. I know a bunch of people that worked at AT&T as "salaried" workers, but they still needed to log their hours toward projects, and received 1.5x pay when they worked more than 40/wk, which was most weeks.
1. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Welder/Hourly_Rate
Examples:
Difficult to see work becomes root cause if phase error between protection in place and start of arc.
Ever glance over and see the bright arc? Hard to not do that.
Use of marginal protection happens for a ton of reasons.
Each flash exposure adds up.