I really wonder what the results will be in the coming 5-10 years in a country whose infrastructure has already begun to crumble at the seams.
Because while, "thanks" to globalization and everyone speaking English, you can offshore the manufacturing of your iPhone to China, your HDD to Thailand, your chips to Taiwan, your Mercedes to Poland, your Nikes, jeans and t-shirts to Bangladesh, or the SW dev work of your website to Ukraine, but you can't offshore a government mandated and strictly regulated gas boiler inspection, which if fucked up, could get you and your neighbors blown up. On the same note, you can't offshore medical care, education, police, fire fighting, lawyers, real-estate, etc.
>[...]Same 100€ per hour as freelancer software developer colleagues. While their employees work for peanuts[...]
Are you talking about the trades people earning peanuts or freelance SW devs?
Independent contractors who own their own business are making bank. Source: my uncle is a self employed plumber. He can't even reply to all the calls he's getting and has to turn many down despite asking for a lot of money. The fact that he's not paying much in income taxes, doing most jobs on a handshake deal and cash payments helps a lot too.
Sometimes I am thinking, that I need to open my own shop as electrician and work as electrical engineer part time. I really hate sitting all day and electrician’s tasks are not too hard on the body. Dust can be dealt with using modern equipment attached to decent vacuum.
Problem is not yet big enough and the hurdle of getting into construction is not so high that it's impossible to learn the trade in 6 months.
On the other hand if that would mean that construction industry is not competitive, then well, I see a lot of Turkish and Chinese companies getting deals in EU.
In Germany, with its apprenticeship system, it is. Typically it takes three years. In some trades you can work without the official license, but in many you are not allowed to. The whole apprenticeship system is so fundamental in Germany that I think it would be very difficult to get rid of it.
As stupid as “am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” is in general – for the trades it might actually make sense.
I personally wouldn't encourage people to think of the trades as a stable income, especially in Germany. A new technology (say, PVC pipes) can be extremely disruptive, and these technologies come out all the time, rendering entire skills and categories of skilled workers invalid as they enter the workplace. In Germany, techniques and materials are very archaic (flax for pipe-seals, etc) so I suspect there's even more risk of disruption there than elsewhere.
The basic problem is that capitalism tends to replace skilled trades with unskilled ones - the classic example is the weavers put out of work by looms. As such, getting a stable income from a skill is always a risky proposition, even if it's the only game in town.
Funny example you chose. How is that different than SW devs? Actually, I think tech makes you obsolete way faster if you don't actively keep up. What you get taught in university is mostly obsolete from what's hot in the filed by the time you join the labor market so it's mostly up to the workers to keep up with the latest trend if they want to be employed long term.
I met way more unemployed old-aged former sys-admins and DBAs in Germany that couldn't find work because their obsolete skills weren't needed anymore in any private company who instead proffered to hire youngsters for the new tech or has offshored their jobs to a sweatshop callcenter in Eastern Europe, yet I have never met an older plumber who can't find work regardless of his grasp of new plumbing tech. In fact, the older the buildings are, the more maintenance they need, and the more archaic the technology they used is. It's a win for the gray beards.
>In Germany, techniques and materials are very archaic (flax for pipe-seals, etc) so I suspect there's even more risk of disruption there than elsewhere.
Knowing Germany, the archaic things are usually in most demand and Germany in generals is skeptical to new technologies and processes that do any disruption of the status quo. Like I said, the older the building, the higher the maintenance work they need, and the more archaic the plumbing is, the more value people familiar with the older tech have.
I'm not saying plumbing is better than SW dev, I'm pointing out job security for those who aren't up to date on latest tech.
I rarely saw a native working at trades. They usually own or run the business but don't seem to have a stereotype of treating their employees well.