Mechanic shortage means longer waits, $100k salaries for some technicians
newsday.com
newsday.com
ICE vehicles aren't going away. But as they're replaced, the willingness (and ability) to pay for repairs will go down.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31743/w317...
And yet the experience of applicants is often very different. They apply and never hear back. Or they never receive offers that match.
So what's the discrepancy? Either one side is lying, or there is something being miscommunicated.
My guess is that often what employers mean is 'we cant find anyone with these specific skills at this price point'.
You have to realize there is a finite number of people with X years experience in Y. If you want to know how many people have 10 years experience doing Y, it's upper bounded by the number of people who were employed in Y 10 years ago.
Blue collar workers are performing pretty over recent years.
Of course this would cut into profits.
And for all the owner-operated mechanic garages out there, which is probably the majority of them, their profit IS the labor bill. "cutting into profits" while raising salary are literally opposite concepts.
Or you call a plumber for a simple repair and there goes one kilodollar, while the guy doing the work gets a few hundred of it. The rest is all going to the overhead of phone answerer, scheduler, manager, business entity owner, franchiser, etc. I suspect the majority of "cost disease" is going to such intermediaries, and the thing about intermediaries is they know their main job is maintaining their position.
The trades are relatively efficient at forming new entrants. Most of the plumbers, painters, carpenters, et cetera I've worked with ran their own businesses. That didn't make them cheaper.
I think this somewhat ties into business discovery getting harder. There was a period where the Internet was making this better, but has now been seemingly completely locked down by web spammers and the surveillance-adtech industry making it into a pay to play game (aka more overhead). I'm halfheartedly in the market for contractors myself, and it seems like the best way to find leads is to sit down for lunch at a restaurant next to a main road, and write down the phone numbers on the trucks going by. At least that only requires people to spring for the fancy truck wrap, rather than the fancy website and surveillance-based advertising.
[0] My aunt's drain was slow and I was too swamped to look at it, so that's who her helper ended up calling (sigh). If I had known the bill was going to come to $1200 for installing 12 feet of PVC pipe, I would have made the time.
[1] Warranty recall.
The good news is, in most towns, you only need to do this once. From there you can rely on referrals.
If you start a shop, you will quickly find that many customers want mints on their pillows and telephone sanitizers - Even if as an owner, you would prefer to fire the lot of them and take an buy a new vacation home.
OTOH, at some point outsourcing will become a viable alternate.
Pack up all the cars that need expensive repair, ship them to Mexico for fixing, ship them back once repaired.
Yet somehow we still get articles like this that are basically saying "wow, the top 1% of a mediocre-paying field gets 6 figs, why oh why are people not clamoring to work?
So tired of this low-intelligence conversation.
It's more like propaganda to attract more people into the field.
It’s not that low, it’s higher according to many sources.
And training. One of the smartest people I know spent $50K to get trained as a certified Ford mechanic, then another $50K on tools. He became a general contractor because working on houses used the exact same principles but everything is way easier because it's at a far larger scale.
And sorry about your dad. A lot of these guys sacrifice their knees as well.
There's way more lifting and carrying of heavy things when dealing with houses. Apartments without elevators are the worst, since you need to carry the heavy stuff up and down the stairs.
What your comment and sentiment misses, I think, is that a significant percentage of mechanics do shade-tree jobs that won't ever be accounted for in official reports. Dealers and shops have become extremely hit-and-miss, part quality fell dramatically during the pandemic (ask me how I know), and thrifty consumers are more inclined to spend money on independent mechanics that work out of a small shop; there's a ton of money not being accounted for in the process. Maybe not "cool" or "attractive" to you, but I'd love to never have to touch a keyboard again and spend my time working on cars, boats, and fabrication.
I’d love to have this option in the UK. Everything being over regulated the type of service is all but extinct.
Statements about populations are not refuted by quibbling about exceptions.