This article originally appeared in Issue 15: Work. Subscribe to the print magazine by September 30 to receive our upcoming issue, Flourishing.
By Jesse Smith
There’s a popular story about working in the trades that goes something like this: College prices have spiraled wildly out of control, while trades salaries have skyrocketed, often surpassing those of college graduates. Even if you do get a degree, AI will displace most knowledge work. So why would anyone, the story goes, spend $200,000 on a worthless college education when union electricians make six figures performing work that’s impossible to replace with AI? There’s a populist angle here, too: The nerds with guaranteed B averages who waltzed into high-paying jobs will get their comeuppance as they’re pushed aside by the hard-working blue-collar moderates who ceaselessly toil at the real work of building the country!
The skilled trades hold a special place in the public imagination as a route out of poverty. Trades have advocates like Mike Rowe, former opera singer and host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, whose foundation routes smart, hard-working kids into the trades via scholarships. (Today, its website prominently advertises “AI-proof six-figure jobs.”) But Rowe has something in common with most people selling this popular narrative: a college degree.
Trades workers tell a very different story. When I was an apprentice over 30 years ago, we would tease the old-timers for badgering us to quit construction and return to school (the “look at these hands” lecture). In fact, one of the most reliable indicators of an apprentice’s low intelligence was being quickly embraced by old-timers, because it meant they immediately recognized that the kid’s greatest potential was in construction.
No one understood the physical demands and uncertain rewards of trades jobs better than older tradespeople. So take it from an older tradesman: The story is more complicated than you might think.
Less money
In the first place, college graduates still earn more than those without college degrees, specifically because of their academic credentials. In casual settings, people often fail to disentangle selection effects, but rigorous causal research actually does find substantial income effects of college graduation, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career, though this can vary across majors. Completion of a four-year degree is critical to the earnings leap.
It is also not the case that wages in the trades are rapidly increasing. The college wage premium grew steadily for several decades beginning in the 1970s until the 2000s. There was a brief reversal period around COVID, during which most gains went to a narrow range of subtrades. This is hardly sufficient to warrant an endorsement of trades employment based on income.
There are, of course, also potential missteps. Social work majors on average earn much less than their college peers, and the degree places students on a high-probability collision course with a low-yield graduate degree. Nevertheless, for decades the staple advice that high school graduates should attend college has probably been sound. In this regard, the old-timers with calloused hands who pressed me to leave construction were probably right.
This holds particularly true when considering the real cost of college. While the median sticker price for four-year college has dramatically increased over the past 30 years, most students pay much less than the advertised price. The average net paid price for public in-state college tuition and fees was under $2,500 per year in 2024 and has been declining since 2016.
So: The actual price paid for college isn’t very high and is declining. Obtaining a college degree unlocks higher wages. Plus, white-collar jobs are safe and easy.
More physical harm
When I was 20, I broke both my heels in a construction accident. The right one was surgically reassembled using four heel fragments and extra bone from my hip. Workplace accidents seem to have worse outcomes than similar accidents occurring elsewhere, and at the time this specific injury had a generally poor prognosis, so doctors were initially uncertain whether I’d be permanently disabled.
When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident. I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair each day, and coming home to down 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Or I think of my son sleeping with a fan every night to overpower the ringing in his ears. Over enough time, physical jobs exact a physical toll that desk jobs largely avoid.
Most white-collar professions have a trivially small risk of death. Even in gray-collar jobs that are widely perceived as dangerous, such as policing, most workplace deaths are caused by motor vehicles. But some trades jobs carry a risk of death or serious injury connected to specific and inherent job demands. That is, something that seems dangerous that you often do is the most likely to harm or kill you.
Jobs performed at heights, such as ironwork or roofing, have a high mortality due to falling. Electrical linesmen tend to be killed by electrocution. Arborists can be killed in a variety of ways: falling from heights, being struck by trees or electrocuted. For people in these jobs, these risks are widely understood and accepted. Almost every tradesperson knows someone who’s had at least one protracted absence due to a work injury, and many of us know someone who was permanently disabled or killed. These risks are probably less salient for people who have worked mainly white-collar jobs and know few people employed in dangerous professions.
There’s moderate evidence that people in wealthy countries are increasingly risk-averse to things that might kill or harm them. For many folks, this may translate to an unwillingness to take on a nontrivial risk of death or injury via dangerous jobs. And there may be a subtler version of this in which people are reluctant to tinker with physical objects for fear of destroying them. I’ve found that when I coach people through DIY projects, they’re often extraordinarily fearful. And not just of electrocution or falling, but of doing something incorrectly or pushing a broken thing past the point of being reparable. (And this appears to be something that blue-collar people — perhaps due to hubris or ignorance — don’t seem to worry about as much.)
While the optimal quantity of risk-taking for a given job probably isn’t zero, it’s difficult to broadly argue against placing a high intrinsic value on human life or the avoidance of pain and chronic disability. People abandoning the trades for safe, high-paying jobs is understandable.
Internal status hierarchies
White-collar people often seem attuned to the differences in social status and compensation of white-collar jobs while remaining somewhat oblivious to the same internal dynamics across blue-collar jobs. Most realize that a partner at McKinsey is very different from a bank teller and that the great majority of college graduates have essentially no path toward McKinsey partnership.
But they’re often incapable of generalizing this to understanding the trades, or contrasting this against the backdrop of blue-collar employment. The median blue-collar worker isn’t in the trades at all: They’re probably a delivery driver for Amazon making roughly $40,000 per year. If lucrative trades employment is as simple as shaking the union electrician tree until a $125,000-per-year job falls out, why don’t delivery drivers simply pivot toward becoming one? The answer is that within the blue-collar status hierarchy, the union electrician is much closer to the McKinsey partner than the bank teller.
Trades jobs are generally among the best blue-collar jobs, and within the trades, specialized union jobs are especially coveted. These jobs are less accessible to people on the lower end of the blue-collar hierarchy. They often require training, social connections, certifications and licensing, and technical competence. I asked several acquaintances in union trades about the selection process for their jobs. Each described an initial process with 100 to 200 candidates, followed by testing and interviews that winnowed the field to one to two dozen. The final selection of between four and eight job entrants was less clear but appeared to include a mix of connections, previous credentials such as military service, and measured ability.
Public schools often have standardized tests and exams that allow for objective comparisons between students, but in the U.S., trade schools lack uniform performance metrics. Consequently, the effectiveness of any trade school is hard to determine. But we should be wary of adopting the widespread assumption that training centers — which, for have decades, have acted as a repository for young people who are unable, for academic reasons, to attend college — have better teaching methods than other schools.
AGI won’t spare the builders
What if the arrival of artificial general intelligence eliminates or substantially reduces demand for knowledge workers? Could this reshuffle the employment deck in favor of trades?
I won’t claim to know for sure: The direction and degree of AGI’s impact on employment are still unclear and hotly contested by people much smarter than I. As of this writing, large language models are much closer to human-level performance on white-collar metrics than robots are on the work of tradespeople. However, one underdiscussed part of this conversation is how AI will affect the trades themselves.
People often understand successful innovations that are service-focused (Airbnb), pharmaceutical breakthroughs (mRNA vaccines), or even radically new physical technologies (nuclear power), but don’t understand the iterative nature of technological changes to physical domains like manufacturing and construction. The trajectory of innovation in the trades is away from physical dexterity. Today, innovations often bypass dexterity instead of improving or refining it. This characteristic is common to process improvements in physical domains, but it isn’t intuitive for people familiar with the ground-breaking innovations of the past few decades.
Framing job sites of the 1950s and ’60s had many carpenters who could drive 16 penny (3.5”) nails with two rapid blows — the first to slightly set the nail and the second to fully drive it. Someone evaluating the process of mechanical fastening at the time could have reasonably assumed that making improvements to hammers, one of the few tools that predates Homo sapiens, was a fool’s errand.
But by the 1990s, pneumatic nailers — trigger-operated tools that used compressed air to drive nails with a single bump or trigger press — had largely replaced hand nailing on framing jobs, reducing demand for hammer proficiency and speeding production. Pneumatic nailing entirely bypassed hammers and the physical act of driving nails. We can see the same dynamic with the transition to rebar tie tools and auto-fed screw guns. While it’s difficult to project the specific innovations a superintelligent machine might bring to the construction industry, it seems likely that some will follow this trend.
And if some follow this trend, we might not need robotics to advance all the way to human-level handling of current tools before we see significant reductions in the need for human labor.
As dexterity demands have decreased, work in the trades has also gotten more cognitively demanding. It’s likely that AI could reverse this.
This increasing complexity is a result of the broad push toward mechanization and away from manual inputs that are common to other fields such as agriculture and manufacturing. At the same time, buildings have become more complicated partly in response to increasingly unique consumer preferences and stringent building codes. Residential framing today is often aided by telehandlers, which function as mini-cranes that can lift whole building assemblies into place. Some systems within buildings, such as HVAC, are essentially governed by complex, installer-programmed computing systems. Furthermore, these systems are increasingly integrated across platforms. For example, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms might be inputs for heating and cooling systems to reduce fire spread. Optimizing these systems currently requires astute and well-trained technicians to stage and monitor them.
With improvements to video interpretation capabilities, AI could remove much of the complexity from the minds of human tradespeople. For instance, a future job site worker equipped with smart glasses and an earpiece might receive continuous direction via an AI interpreting and providing feedback on their actions. In some cases this is similar to the way I occasionally use LLMs, although at a lower level. It’s much faster to ask for torque specifications via an earpiece than to reference a manual. One of the most failure-prone jobs in residential HVAC, for example, is setting airflow. A technician might install or service a dozen manufacturers, each with three varieties of fan type and dozens of models each with unique switch set points. On complex HVAC installations there may be dozens or even hundreds of reference points such as these. Many are nearly impossible to memorize or reasonably guess. An AI with good access to the technician’s field of view and perfect equipment knowledge could readily coach dumb hands through this task.
Advice time
How can we provide better counsel to people considering a career in the trades? First, we should be as frank about the negatives as we are about the positives. We should also pay attention to who we’re talking to. The best advice will depend on whether our audience is a high school student from a blue-collar family looking to claw her way into the middle class, or a software engineer concerned that his job will soon be replaced by a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence.
The trades are more physical than working in an office, and some people find this — and working outdoors, where much trades work is performed — liberating. Some derive great pleasure from achieving a flow-like state of mind from performing specific physical tasks. Some people find it deeply rewarding to physically make things and to see progress and improvement in doing so over time. Some people derive a deep sense of camaraderie from physically toiling with other people. It could be that any of these, especially when combined with a low sensitivity toward financial compensation or status, makes the trades a better fit than white-collar employment.
In a world where white-collar people are diverted from traditional office jobs to blue-collar ones, they would likely have strengths and weaknesses relative to the existing labor force. Someone with a strong background in programming might quickly be better than many existing workers at HVAC controls. On the other hand, adapting to highly physically demanding jobs would be more difficult, so roofing or formwork carpentry would have a longer adjustment period. We might also want to match candidates based on traits like introversion and extroversion. For instance, some trades traditionally work largely in isolation and are culturally sedate, such as woodworking. Others have near continuous interaction and tend to be culturally boisterous, such as framing.
There’s one thing we need to avoid: reducing the trades to a simple morality tale. A trade job can be a great fit for the right person, but it’s not a magic ticket to prosperity or a guaranteed hedge against AI automation. They’re also not a monolith. If you’re interested in training or retraining as a roofer or a plumber, an electrician or an HVAC installer, don’t waste your time listening to opinions on “the trades” — talk to the people who do them.
Jesse Smith is a contractor with a background in carpentry and HVAC. He co-owns Tay River Builders, a home remodeling company, and Willard Brothers Woodcutters, an exotic lumber store and furniture shop. His company has performed over 2,000 energy retrofits.
This article originally appeared in Issue 15: Work. Subscribe to the print magazine by September 30 to receive our upcoming issue, Flourishing.
Excellent.
I would add that the tradesmen I know, and I think you should include skilled mechanics, have bodies that are broken by 50, years before Medicare kicks in. We think about the 1 in 100 that has their own contracting business but ignore the 99 broken bodies from working on knees and repetitive motion or needing to exert force behind a wrench for years.
My stepfather, a plumber and a carpenter, died in his sleep at age 64. I remember how exhausted he would be when he came home from work, the layers he wore on especially cold days, the necrosis he developed from the brown recluse bite on his knee. My dad, who installed fiber optic cable, was so crippled by knee problems after falling down a ladder in a manhole he couldn’t cross the room. Every breath was labored because he was exposed to toxic chemicals. All so they could pay for my college education where my greatest threat was too cold air conditioning.