> A crane operator in New York City earns $82.15 an hour in base pay and benefits, according to the Engineer News-Record, a trade publication. That's well's above the $66 an hour he would earn in Chicago or the $39 an hour in Washington, D.C.

> But the real reason New York crane operators and other operating engineers earn such big salaries is overtime and benefits. A relief crane operator working 56 hours of overtime per week for 52 weeks will earn $332,667 in overtime and $159,053 in overtime benefits at the World Trade Center. As a worker's salaries go up, so do the amounts employers must kick in for annuities and pensions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303936704576399...

Plenty of opportunity to learn a proper skill, like drywall finishing, electrical work, plumbing, or carpentry/cabinetry, and command better than $15/hr in the USA.

I edited "most people" to "many people" because I really don't have the numbers.

From anecdotal experience from friends and family, I'd think most people won't make it through 40 years of hard manual labor without injury. For every 60 year old you see on a job site, we don't know how many of their peers have stopped working construction.

I wasn't talking about skilled trades. Every electrician or plumber I've ever met, even the ones who only do new work, wouldn't call themselves a "construction worker", or say they worked in construction. I was assuming the article was talking about what the BLS calls "construction laborers", but maybe it was talking about all possible trades involved in construction? I only read the article summary.

>I actually think that for a lot of these kinds of jobs that you could be doing them well into your 50s just fine.

That's likely true for some trades and some people, but from some googling it does look there the risk to your body from working construction is pretty significant. I was able to find a German study of 14k construction workers that said for construction industry as a whole, workers were 1.5x more likely than other blue collar workers to receive a disability pension for musculoskeletal problems, and 1.8 times more likely for accidental injuries. They were over 2x more likely to be disabled from musculoskeletal problems as the general working population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1741071/

https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/portfolio/

https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/featured-home/sylvan-knoll-1/

Going from an old house built in 1890 to one built in 1980 with 2x6 walls and modern insulation has been nice. I'd like to go the next step, and homes like the one above combine a nice interior with great efficiency.

Going from a 30yr old furnace and standard 10yr water heater to a highly efficient single tankless system was a great step up, both from the energy efficiency and creature comfort perspectives.

A good parallel is motorcycles. A good motorcycle rider is much less likely to experience accidents than a bad rider, but even the best rider is still more likely to experience accidents than a car driver, simply because of all the other people on the road. You only have so much control. Likewise, even the best construction worker is still more likely to wear out their body or experience accidents than the average office worker.

No company in your industry has ever offered you anything like his union pension, because no companies in any industry (excepting maybe railroads?) offer anything like his union pension. They all stopped doing it some time between him and you.

The young people of today can't go back in time to when your dad was the same age. They have to take the jobs that are offered now. And the companies of now have worked very hard to bust the union influence of the past, so that they can offer crap pay and crap benefits, and shovel most of the risks of working the job onto the worker.

Young people are taking one look at that, and deciding to not even take one step down that career path. All this tells me is that young people are not as stupid as companies assumed them to be. The companies offering jobs that don't balance remuneration with worker risk then have to rely on workers with lower expectations, which is to say immigrants from countries with lower quality-of-life norms. They don't look at the work by judging the job in relation to other jobs in the US, but by comparing it to a similar job in their country of origin, and finding that it is X% better. Then the political scene changes, those workers start to dry up, and the companies are screwed--or, more accurately, hoist on their own petards.

Generally speaking, the old pension plans are only for those grandfathered in, new pay scales are lower, and hours to get better service time and benefits are higher.

Also, watch what companies do in terms of carving off subsidiaries with more of their retirees for intentional bankruptcy (see Patriot Coal). Those benefits will be cut in chapter 11 and then offloaded to the PBGC to be paid by the public.

He's lost his hearing, but that's genetic; nothing to do with his labor.

Article: "there's a labor shortage"

'crooked-v: "So pay them more"

'rhexs: "No need," because there is plenty of cheap labor.

Something here doesn't add up.

So are prices rising or aren't they?

This draws parallels to the easy credit that was extended in the last housing collapse to people that shouldn't had mortgages for houses they can't afford in the first place.

Not saying anyone who gets into construction makes millions but there definitely is a path for growth and good pay is possible. It is however not a glamorous job, you need to get your hand dirty and work with some unhealthy products you need to protect yourself from (as much as you can at least...). It's a tough job but it does pay well. I personally wouldn't do it because of the physical aspect but financially it is definitely interesting.

The CTO of Coinbase envisions that construction[0] as an industry is ripe for disruption, reaping the fruits of technology like VR controllable drones[1]. If you make construction like a video game, “young people” will flock to it.

[0] https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-bala...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W18Z3UnnS_0

Being able to see your family on a regular basis, being home, not risking your life driving everywhere, all of these have to be made up for in pay.

Welcome to a tight labor market. May it last as long as possible until public policy catches up.

https://www.aniwaa.com/house-3d-printer-construction/