During college, one summer I literally had a blue collar job because that was my uniform while repairing hospital beds. Most kids would stick their noses up at it, and it definitely was not glamorous or anything to brag about, but it really was a good experience for me. I remember it and the people vividly almost 20 years later. It gives me perspective when it comes to people in the trades.

My dad, still running the business at 60, also says that young guys these days “don’t want to work.” “Work” meaning doing the job with high quality without whining. No concept that hard work is the reason most people do well later in life. Generation Y is the entitlement generation in my opinion.

(We’re hoping that the real estate bubble also didn’t contribute to Gen Y’s future demise.

But the truth is, not everyone needs college for a good career and the ROI for a bachelor’s degree does not really impress me. I look at my husband who is a bit older than me – he finished high school early and started working at his family’s boatyard at 16. Today, he is a craftsman who has never had trouble finding a job with more than decent wage because of his advanced woodworking and fabrication skills AND his work ethic. He is certainly doing better than a lot of us who got a B.A. in History or English.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have trained for a profession right out of high school like nursing or bookkeeping and only gone to college later if needed to advance a specific career trajectory. But I don’t think many parents today would support that plan for their kid – I know my parents certainly wouldn’t have at the time.

I know people say college is a really good “life experience” where you make a lot of “connections.” But so is real life at a real job. And in almost all entry-level positions today, experience can be substituted for a degree. Imagine that – instead of paying ten of thousands of dollars to increase your general knowledge, someone pays you to learn a specific trade. At the very least, people who decide to go this route should not be regarded by their peers or elders as less motivated, intelligent or potentially successful in work and life. Good plumbers and electricians are awesome.

It is with my kids. And I even use the word “suffer”.

Some of the crappiest, low paying jobs and volounteer work are the best ones for instilling a work ethic that pays dividends for the rest of one’s life.

Teenagers benefit more from unattractive work that better paying cush jobs, so I think the counter-intuitive approach is best followed. My oldest daughter has to accumulate volunteer hours as part of her “honors ribbon” at high school graduation and as soon as she turns 16, I’ve already told her we’ll be signing up at Habitat for Humanity because I want her to learn what it’s like to work hard and get dirty, and how good it feels to stop on the way home from a full day of that, stinky and sweaty, and get a hamburger and shake, and reflect on what was accomplished that day.

It builds character and an appreciation for working hard and doing a good job. You don’t get that sitting behind a computer pointing and clicking, or sitting behind a desk shuffling papers.

So, if my daughter we to come home and tell me that her friend’s Dad has a really well paying, easy summer job for her, I’d tell her “no, that will be a waste of your time. You need to do something harder”.

Steve

Why is it that when we talk about ourSELVES, and our work choices, we think we’re being rational economic actors when we decide to pursue work that offers us the greatest compensation for our effort (whether that be strictly financial or some other compensation), but we expect teenagers to work crappy jobs for low pay just because we had to do it?

Frankly, the importation of so much illegal labor has made it a suckers’ game for teenagers to do a lot of that hard work. My dad was complaining more about fast-food workers all being illegals because the kids didn’t ‘want’ to do that work (I had to point out to him that when I was in high school, the local McDonald’s briefly raised wages to $5.00/hour in the $3.35 minimum days and then had no problem whatsoever getting local kids to work there).

If economics is a good reason for you and I to pick certain jobs, it’s a good reason for them, too. So if you want better tradesmen, you’re going to have to get the contractors to give up on the illegals first, and then invest a bit more in wages to attract locals (no, there’s no such thing as a “job Americans won’t do”, but there damn well are jobs they won’t do for a specified wage – as is true with any occupation).

And like with my field, if you allow outside-of-the-market competition to take all the entry-level jobs (or, if you prefer, discourage Americans from pursuing those jobs), you’re going to see an eventual erosion of the more advanced jobs, too, because you don’t become an experienced senior guy at trade X without spending a number of years working as the junior guy. You touched on this briefly with regards to your favorite handyman, but misidentified the cause.

Insisting that teenagers give up more attractive or more lucrative options just to suffer so we can feel better, uh, ain’t gonna happen.

Our best vendors bill out between $45 and $89 per hour. Occasionally, I’ll have someone contact me looking for new clients and I’ll ask what they charge. If they say “$25 per hour” I don’t use them because I know they can’t survive on that and won’t be around long. My main guy charge $28.50 per hour when I first started using him in 1996. Now he charges $55 just to show up, plus $55 per hour after the first 30 minutes. And he tells me he made more money charging $28.50/hr back in the 1990s.

Sometimes a good property technician comes out of the apartment industry, going on their own, but often they’ve worked only with certain common apartment brands of appliances. They do ok on easy jobs but can’t handle tough problems or repairs on the older stuff that we have in the older homes.

And they underestimate the difficulty of getting around Austin, planning the service calls, coordinating with the occupant, getting in and out of the supply houses quickly, etc.

When I ran in-house maintenance back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this was a constant challenge. Some guys could do good work once they got to a property, but they burned up too much time on travel and parts, and the dreaded do-overs as well. I finally gave up and went back to outsourcing everything.

I think I just need to become fluent in Spanish, which will open up a lot of candidate vendors who are actually pretty good but with whom we would have too many communication problems because of the language barrier. Sylvia is fluent in Spanish, so maybe I’ll get her more involved too.

Steve

Part of the reason service people don’t show up on time is that they don’t want to be realistic about how long jobs will take and travel time. They want to stuff as many jobs into a day no matter what it takes. It’s how they make a living.

Oh yeah and associate degree programs aren’t cheap – ITT tech or Le Cordon Blue culinary school are each around $40k. Most parents are pushing their kids to go to college even if it might not be a good fit; but it does look cheap compared with an associate’s degree program.

-Anon

They can get paid well there without a degree, but if they are often contract workers on an inconsistent basis, and need to get around $50-80 / hour to make a decent living. So I would guess that mechanical labor contractors should be paid in the same range to keep attracting the same class of smart, productive, but not as educated people.

If you are not paying that much, then that fact is likely the reason you find yourself driven toward turnkey vendors. A similar situation to paying less for a discount realtor; you get what you pay for.

Hi Bill, I think the main way out that I’ve been shifting toward is using bigger turnkey vendors instead of the small handyman and solo operators. This is more expensive but the outcome is more predictable and reliable.

For many years I enjoyed the benefits of working with small mom and pop operators. Mainly, we have a personal relationship with a lot of our small vendors and this makes communication much smoother. But since that category of small vendor (who can be trusted and is reliable) seems to be shrinking, I’ve started more and more turning to the bigger service companies who I know provide training and can be held accountable to the outcome.

What I don’t like about that is not always knowing exactly who it is that will be representing us with an owner or tenant when they show up to do the work. We know it will be someone from XYZ Company”, and they’ll be wearing a uniform, but I don’t know the specific individual who will be doing the work.

In contrast, when I send my plumber Larry, who is a one-man show, he and I have a 15+ year relationship of working together. I tell my tenant “Larry, my plumber” will be calling, and there are never any surprises or disappointments. He shows up on time, gets the job done, leaves and sends me a bill. Same with my maintenance guy Mark and a few other long term small vendors.

But the world doesn’t seem to be producing any more Larrys or Marks. And there is a risk every time we try out or test a new guy that the job won’t be done right and we’re back to scratch looking for a good painter or make-ready cleaning crew. So that’s when it just seems easier and more prudent to call and larger company and send them out, and let them do the training and weeding out of the bad apples instead of us.

Steve

Try Bryant Electric, longtime in business and locally owned

I have to disagree with Tony about the Brainwashing at the University Level though. This country’s High School Education is so watered down that many college freshmen are barely capable of writing a coherent 250 word essay. I do not recall where I read it, but the claim is that a college educated individual will make $1 million more than a person with a high school education. But he right about the stigma to the trades.

Our oldest daughter wants to be a Chef (She’s eight – not likely to remain on that course). We have already told her: If that’s what you want to do, first you go to college and get a business degree. Then you can go to Culinary school. And she can work in a restaurant while she goes to school, but college is not negotiable.

And just to chime in with every one else, Jobs I had before self-employment: Did a summer at UPS loading trucks (hot!) – Hot dog stand during college – apprenticed with a remodeling contractor – foreman at a Zinc foundry. Not sure if these made my work ethic stronger, or showed me this is the kind of job I would have if I did not work my butt off.

Outsorcing to crappy sub-vendors….that’s the american problem. It happens with our manufactured products, and the services too.

As a nation, we have moved away from quality and pride of craft towards low cost/pursuit of the quick buck. Current economic conditions may change this.

Immigration, price sensitivity, competition from the bottom labor rungs have made “blue collar” jobs less lucrative. At the same time, the skills required to turn those jobs into a profitable business (e.g., go from being a plumber to a small business with many plumbers employed) have likely increased. Running a small business is a very complex, multi-faceted job. So the incentives to excel are more limited.

At the same time, I suspect the decline of unions has also decreased the availability of craft training in the construction trades — and as such has had a negative impact on many of the services you use as a landlord.

I don’t see an easy way out of this one — it will take a long time and culture shift to fix. Maybe an increase in living standards worldwide (decreasing the availability of low cost labor) will be the path forward for us here.

Probably 80% of kids that go to college should probably go to school to learn how to do a job instead.

I think the problem is not so much the youth. I think it’s the way technology has redistributed work. I think in your generation Steve a tradesperson was essentially the competent, smart guy who perhaps didn’t have the ability or opportunity for college. They were a step above the people who ended up in the factory or mill. I think now we have made these careers into the bottom rung career, which underestimates how hard they really are. Much like computer repair, plumbing and electrical work is trivial unless you have something that isn’t standard. Being a contractor doesn’t just mean you’re a guy who has a truck, it’s every bit as difficult a project management exercise as software project management, possible more so. But we’ve advertise these jobs as the jobs that you fall back on if you can’t do anything else. There’s no prestige, and no acknowledgment that you might need a brain to do it. I think that’s really where the problem lies.

It’s like when you complain about Realtors. Why are so many Austin Realtors so bad? Because for the past few years it’s been advertised as the job where you didn’t really have to work and there was tons of easy money to be made. The type of people that end up in a field, I think, is dictated by the way society perceives that job.

Like the others, I think you have a point. Due to the way older things were built and such, most of us picked up basic fix-it abilities growing up. On the other hand, the Chevy Tuck I owned and drove 135K miles before I bought my current Chevy truck last year was never touched by me, at all. I did the oil changes at the lube place, replaced the brakes once, tires twice, and a new battery also, but I really think that was it. No other repairs.

But still, there are opportunities for young people to experience hard work even in these modern times. And a work ethic, the idea that one can look at a completed job and deem it good enough or not, is not necessarily limited to trade work. It can apply to anything.

There just doesn’t seem to be, in today’s younger workforce, the built-in “quality assurance” gene that many of us had on board by default growing up. I remember spending a week hand sanding a bike frame when I was 15. And my friends would come and help. We knew the paint job would not be right if it wasn’t sanded and primed right. Everything was like that.

Even the worst and most irresponsible hooligan bums that I grew up with would have been ashamed to claim ownership of the tile job pictured above. There was a since that your finished product, whatever it was, said something about you. Today, I just see more and more people calling substandard work “good enough”.

Steve