I have been saying this since the mid-90s (when I became a programmer).

My father trained / apprenticed as a tool & die maker in Germany. When he moved to North America (Alberta, Canada) this was not really a thing he could do where he moved. So he became a machinist.

Machining where we lived was/is all about the oil and gas sector and by and large not large unionized shops and not great pay. Mostly sweat shops intense work, lots of underpaid immigrant labour, and my father suffered long bouts of unemployment or unstable work through the 80s and early 90s. So yeah, formerly a 'skilled trade' and then very working class.

In the end things turned out well for him as he ended up landing into a great job teaching machining at a technical school.

He applied for a shop-assistant position at the school, after years of soul crushing unemployment or marginal employment.

They interviewed him and said he wasn't qualified to be the shop assistant -- but they wanted to offer him a position... as a teacher.

He got a full teaching job with benefits, a pension, summers off. A very happy ending.