Most of those jobs have much lower fatality rates than logging. (Fishing is about the same, and I don't think the Bureau of Labor Statistics distinguishes underwater welders from other divers.)
So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
My snark is directed upstream, at the folks who believe paying $18/hour for one of the most deadly jobs in the country is reasonable while also having the gall to complain about not being able to hire enough people to do it. You were just in the line of fire; it wasn't intentional.
Oregon iirc, isn't a particularly cheap state. Even then, you're still making less in absolute terms, which reduces your mobility and long-term ability to move to another state if/when your logging job disappears.
At $18/hr, it's hard to argue that any of those risks are built into the compensation. That is approx. ~37,000/yr for the most dangerous job in the country, apparently.
If one is inclined towards the trades, it's not hard to see why they would pick something other than logging.
except that not all of California is large cities. The automatic minimum wage increases will occur even in parts of the state with cost of living very similar to rural Oregon.
The pacific states are uniquely expensive. It's not at all like western NY or upstate NY, or the midwest, or the south, where everything is dirt cheap, and gets very cheap in rural areas.
Right? What the hell did this industry think was going to happen if they busted up unions and insisted on paying pittance for one of the most dangerous jobs in the world?
This is exactly right. The notion of "labor shortages" is a farce. It is rhetoric used to bully politicians into making policy decisions that keep wages/salaries low.
There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
Yes, in the short term. That's actually the original goal of the H1B program, to address immediate labor shortages in fields where the time it takes to become fully trained is very long (PhDs and the like.) In the long term the problem solves itself with things like high salaries for statisticians, actuaries, programmers and so on.
The only true 'labor shortage' is when very high skilled positions are not being filled because there is literally nobody qualified to fill them. That is exceptionally rare, it usually only applies to doctors, surgeons, etc.
There's always been work and there have always been people looking for work. The problem is the people 'in charge' would rather scalp people's wages and lives instead.
Exactly. The oil companies got tons of workers in the middle of the frozen hellhole Alberta tar sands, and the mining companies got tons of workers in the middle of scorching desert Australia.
I'm going to take an unpopular opinion here, but with the increases in minimum wage in California to $15/hr by 2020 - driven by increased cost of living - these jobs will be paying slightly more than minimum wage. No doubt, the answer is "increase the logging wage", which, in reality, will happen across all skilled occupations which are now suddenly just above the minwage line. And what will be the result? Increased cost of living again.
I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.
Is there a "labor shortage" or is this just too low of a wage for the labor? If these jobs paid a lot more, I am guessing they would be filled.
If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages.
But neither is happening.
So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.
This sounds like yet another market problem being blamed on "millennials". If you pay enough I'd imagine some people would take the job. If you can't pay enough, then I guess the market is speaking to you about the long term outlook for logging.
I don't blame people for not flocking to an extremely dangerous and grueling job only to be underpaid. There's plenty of other options. I get tired of older generations somehow trying to guilt trip us into continuing in their line of work when in reality those jobs weren't very good to begin with. Work smarter not harder. Maybe they never heard of that.
half the article is basically about working smarter. new machinery that can do the work of 8 men and is much safer than the old manual methods... And the crews using these machines do attract young people. It sounds like the young people joining the industry are just decided to join crews that have greater safety and the latest technology, which means their jobs are less likely to disappear as the technology spreads; in fact, they'll be those with the most experience with new methods rather than those with the least experience with old methods.
Seems like a lot of these workplace injuries can be reduced by making the machines remotely operated. If the workers can be far enough to not be hit by the falling logs or trees, it would be no more dangerous than just another minimum wage job.
Kind of what I was wondering when I read the article: why does the operator need to sit in the cab? OTOH, it could be that "we just got these new machines to be usable with a human operator. We're working on it, give us time and we'll get to remote operation in the next few iterations."
I don't know too much about the industry except that it can be incredibly dangerous, especially with the sophisticated machinery. I knew somebody who impaled himself--he wasn't paying well enough attention (so I was told) and drove a tree trunk right into his cabin and into his abdomen. Miraculous that he survived, last I heard he was still packing and disinfecting a gaping open wound a year after the incident.
I don't think he received nearly as much training as described in the article. And IIRC he hadn't been on the job for more than a few months. But this was in Alabama, where workers are disposable.
When even a left-wing outlet like The Guardian is willing to uncritically echo capital's BS about "labor shortages" when the real cause is a lack of willingness to pay real wages, you know we're in trouble.
Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those people to get fucked.
I'd argue the problem is the lack of economic literacy before suggesting The Guardian is in cahoots with 'Big Lumber'. The headline should be: "Why won't logging companies increase wages to fill positions?"
Business and economic journalism aren't critical enough of people who complain about a "skills shortage" and accept their argument at face value. This is where capitalism should excel: you can't attract necessary talent at price point $X, then you pay >$X.
Partisan ideologies can cut in multiple directions. For example, if you have an ideology where you view capitalism as inherently evil you may be ignorant of where it could be of benefit. If you view workers are excessively self-entitled, you won't call out companies and managers for not paying enough.
I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because, well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017 dollars. Great job for a high school kid who had no real skills. Hardest job I've ever had by a long shot.
Longshoreman? Hard, dangerous work, but pays really well. Logging? Who the hell wants to be a logger? Anyone that has few skills but wants a decent living.
But it seems that over the years these shit jobs have started to have the shit pay to go with it. I'm sure there are multiple factors involved, starting with a downturn of union membership, but something or things has changed. And now industries wonder why they can't find anyone. Well, actually, I truly doubt they are wondering, as they ought to know better than I do what the reason is. But "they" would like to continue to live in the fantasy land where people stand in line for a minimum wage job that is likely to get them killed or seriously injured.
Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietnam war, the US military basically forced the ports to adopt container boxes. This dramatically increased the efficiency of shipping and eradicated longshoremen jobs. Nowadays though, the people operating the cranes loading and unloading the container boxes from/to container ships actually make 6 digit salaries.
The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.
Do you think part of the reason the longshore industry managed to keep a really strong union was just the geographic concentration? When you only have a few major container ports, it's gotta be pretty easy to keep union solidarity...
Yes! Actually, a lot of the older port cities were eventually bypassed because of this. For example, SF and NYC are no longer ports for shipping because rather than deal with the unions and their power, new ports such as Oakland and Newark (think that's the city in NJ) with facilities for containers were simply built close by.
If I remember The Box properly, West Coast unions faired better than East Coast unions. The East Coast unions fought container shipping tooth and nail, and when the Newark port and other East Coast ports were built they lost alot of clout and many more union jobs than necessary. Simultaneously, the leadership of the West Coast unions saw the writing on the wall and were able to achieve a less disruptive shift and downsizing. And this happened despite the fact that the West Coast unions had, historically, a more contentious relationship with business owners.
The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that.
An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.
"but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it."
This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive. Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.
I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.
The Box is a _great_ book. Easily one of the best books I've read in the past 10 years. The history and analysis was fascinating, and remains surprisingly memorable and relevant even 5 years after reading the book.
In the past 20 or so years a literary genre has emerged that uses esoteric subjects as a narrative device for exploring broader social topics. The Box doesn't fit neatly into that genre because, AFAIU, the historical material is novel, rather than recapitulating a standard theory or, on the other hand, reframing beliefs with a contradictory or counter-intuitive narrative. The book remains earnestly focused on the history of container shipping, albeit at a more macro scale. The broader relevance just naturally follows from the keen, objective description of that history.
In a lot of cases machinery means that several low skill jobs get replaced with one medium skill job. This seems likely in hay (where a lot of operations moved to those huge bales).
The article mentions that the cable anchored harvesters/forwarders replace a crew of 8.
It's a dangerous job, it doesn't earn much, most people have better options and then there's the decline in societal appreciation of manliness, so I understand no one wants this job. No perks at all, not even bragging rights.
Perhaps it even is safer to join the military nowadays?
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention any sort of social stigma against the work (beyond the low pay and danger). Logging is cutting down trees and in a world where we're raised now to conserve our forests I'm not surprised that logging as an occupation is not on the forefront of people's minds.
Even if it's done in an environmentally sound way, I'd assume that there's a stigma that would be hard to get past.
The first three paragraphs of the article describe a job that is essentially guaranteed to be taken over by autonomous vehicles and AI in the coming years. Plus pay is low, and the work is dangerous. It's unclear why the rest of the article laments that millennials don't want to learn that work.
Wood is ridiculously expensive. On a percentage basis I doubt a big increase in wages would change the price of the end product much at all.
This article reminds me of the one we get from growers periodically. They're having trouble finding people to do the work they need done, so instead of paying higher wages the solution is to start a media campaign to get immigration restrictions relaxed so they can flood the market with labor.
Another contributing factor not discussed in depth by the article is that loggers have to travel to remote sites, often without cell service or internet and usually without the ability to go grab lunch at a nearby deli. You're essentially cut off socially for the duration of the job, while having a high likelihood of you or someone close to you dying or being maimed on the job. I can't imagine too many of the current lumberjacks recommending their children follow in their footsteps.
If they don't get enough fellers then they will raise wages and overall comp. until they do. If they have enough, they will lower wages until they don't. It is a functioning labour market, and the degree to which people desire to work for lumber companies is reflected in the wages, and in turn the price of lumber.
If anything, at $18/hr for dangerous hard labour, they obviously have plenty of people who want to be fellers. There's no other way that wage would be so low.
If they have a shortage, lumber simply costs a bit more.
This sounds to me like a clever reframing to justify automating these jobs. It's not "we don't want to pay enough to get humans to do this". It's "nobody will do these jobs, so we built machines to do them instead".
I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend not to understand how markets work.
I work at a tree service which is a fairly similar profession. We clear land or remove large trees with heavy machinery. I take home about ~$15 an hour cash.
The job, it's dangerous as fuck. My boss went to a funeral today for someone who had been doing this 30 years or so.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread> Death or injury “can come from trees falling in the wrong direction, or hitting another tree and falling back on someone”, he said.
Stupid millennials, how could they resist a dangerous job that is also in decline?!
So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor shortage".
At $18/hr, it's hard to argue that any of those risks are built into the compensation. That is approx. ~37,000/yr for the most dangerous job in the country, apparently.
If one is inclined towards the trades, it's not hard to see why they would pick something other than logging.
If you want low cost of living, you need to move to the midwest or south, or throughout the NE in upstate or western NY.
The pacific states are uniquely expensive. It's not at all like western NY or upstate NY, or the midwest, or the south, where everything is dirt cheap, and gets very cheap in rural areas.
There is no such thing as a labor shortage in a labor market.
I don't know what the answer is, but perpetually increasing the minwage just so we can play catch-up to perpetual increases in cost of living is probably not it. The goal would be, of course, to examine why cost of living is on such an upward trajectory and try to stabilize or reduce it even. As to how that can be achieved? That's an open question.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/SB3_FAQ.htm
If there was truly a labor shortage within a free market than wages should rise until they start attracting people to fill the positions. Similarly, if wages are low in a region, then housing costs should fall dramatically to affordability levels of those local wages.
But neither is happening.
So what there really is then, is a shortage of people willing to work a particular job at that particularly low wage. Perhaps that's because cost of living out west in the pacific states is astronomical compared to the rest of the country. The prospect of earning $18/hour for dangerous work in rural areas where entry level fixer housing is $250k-300k+ (if not twice that) is not going to be particularly attractive to many people, especially since $18/hour wouldn't even qualify them for a mortgage. So wages either have to go way up, or housing has to come down. Or they'll have to import cheaper labor from somewhere else. Or perhaps what is more likely in our modern world is for the industry to simply lobby the government for subsidies (as if extracting resources from public land for private profit wasn't a big enough subsidy as is) and have taxpayers keep them afloat.
I wonder how we recovered from this after The Great Depression...
As the sole representative of everyone aged 8 till 40, I would say we are turning a new leaf here.
I feel like this is an outreach problem more than anything. Recruit at high schools and job fairs and you'll get bodies.
I don't think he received nearly as much training as described in the article. And IIRC he hadn't been on the job for more than a few months. But this was in Alabama, where workers are disposable.
Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those people to get fucked.
Business and economic journalism aren't critical enough of people who complain about a "skills shortage" and accept their argument at face value. This is where capitalism should excel: you can't attract necessary talent at price point $X, then you pay >$X.
Partisan ideologies can cut in multiple directions. For example, if you have an ideology where you view capitalism as inherently evil you may be ignorant of where it could be of benefit. If you view workers are excessively self-entitled, you won't call out companies and managers for not paying enough.
Longshoreman? Hard, dangerous work, but pays really well. Logging? Who the hell wants to be a logger? Anyone that has few skills but wants a decent living.
But it seems that over the years these shit jobs have started to have the shit pay to go with it. I'm sure there are multiple factors involved, starting with a downturn of union membership, but something or things has changed. And now industries wonder why they can't find anyone. Well, actually, I truly doubt they are wondering, as they ought to know better than I do what the reason is. But "they" would like to continue to live in the fantasy land where people stand in line for a minimum wage job that is likely to get them killed or seriously injured.
The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.
(Source for all this is: The Box (https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...)
An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions), but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.
This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive. Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.
I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.
In the past 20 or so years a literary genre has emerged that uses esoteric subjects as a narrative device for exploring broader social topics. The Box doesn't fit neatly into that genre because, AFAIU, the historical material is novel, rather than recapitulating a standard theory or, on the other hand, reframing beliefs with a contradictory or counter-intuitive narrative. The book remains earnestly focused on the history of container shipping, albeit at a more macro scale. The broader relevance just naturally follows from the keen, objective description of that history.
The article mentions that the cable anchored harvesters/forwarders replace a crew of 8.
Perhaps it even is safer to join the military nowadays?
Even if it's done in an environmentally sound way, I'd assume that there's a stigma that would be hard to get past.
Especially people that aren't confused about where toilet paper comes from.
This article reminds me of the one we get from growers periodically. They're having trouble finding people to do the work they need done, so instead of paying higher wages the solution is to start a media campaign to get immigration restrictions relaxed so they can flood the market with labor.
If they don't get enough fellers then they will raise wages and overall comp. until they do. If they have enough, they will lower wages until they don't. It is a functioning labour market, and the degree to which people desire to work for lumber companies is reflected in the wages, and in turn the price of lumber.
If anything, at $18/hr for dangerous hard labour, they obviously have plenty of people who want to be fellers. There's no other way that wage would be so low.
If they have a shortage, lumber simply costs a bit more.
I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend not to understand how markets work.
The job, it's dangerous as fuck. My boss went to a funeral today for someone who had been doing this 30 years or so.
S