> Ironic given that plenty of blue collar professionals can make a lot more than your average worker in many degreed professions.

No they don't, this is a myth that has become perpetuated in recent years.

Mike Rowe might mean well by writing articles like this, but the content is a lie. The median salary of a welder in the US is $40,240 a year according to the BLS. People are essentially selling an entire generation a load of BS in order to flood the market with cheap labor instead of paying them more.

There are some welders who make $100k a year, but they are several standard deviations above the mean. Those $100k/welders are like the $5MM/yr programmers. Yeah, they exist, but only in the top 1% of workers.

I don't want my kids to be tradespeople. I watched 2008 destroy the careers of every tradesperson friend I had, along with nearly wiping out my family's (second-generation) construction business. I had talented friends in their early 20s that were forced to move back in with family after having their work hours cut to 2-3/hr a week (but they had to report to work everyday). The ones with family safety nets went to college, those without joined the military.

A half-way decent welder can generally make $20/hr, and live in low cost of living areas. That's a good living for many people.

If you're willing to accept the boom-or-bust nature of construction projects, or remote (as in, go to where work is in demand) work, you can make considerably more. Then there's overtime, which your salaried white-collar worker doesn't get at all.

Then again, the white collar worker spends evening with his familly. Travelling worker does not and it makes relationship with both kids and wife harder. You have to factor that in too. There is reason why remote work pays more.

Most white collar ( real workers ) spend their evenings doing house shores and their brain is already in half a coma.

At least in Canada common rate is about $40+ for a decent welder

They do in locations such as California.

Sure, but $20 an hour isn't really "more" than what people are making in degreed professions.

> Then there's overtime, which your salaried white-collar worker doesn't get at all.

Not true across the board - in fact, many mid-paying office jobs are hourly and do pay overtime. I know a bunch of people that worked at AT&T as "salaried" workers, but they still needed to log their hours toward projects, and received 1.5x pay when they worked more than 40/wk, which was most weeks.

Can make a lot more means nothing if you don't look at the distribution. According to Payscale[1] more than 90% of welders make less than $26/hour. I'm sure that there exists some welders that make 6 figures but 9/10 out of them don't come within a mile of that.

1. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Welder/Hourly_Rate

The downside being, of course, that your vision only lasts so long as a welder.

Why is that? If you wear your PPE (helmet with appropriate shade while welding, face shield while grinding), I would think you would be protected.

You largely are, but incremental damage does happen through error largely.

Examples:

Difficult to see work becomes root cause if phase error between protection in place and start of arc.

Ever glance over and see the bright arc? Hard to not do that.

Use of marginal protection happens for a ton of reasons.

Each flash exposure adds up.

Yeah, and my experience with welders (used to supervise shipyard jobs on drilling rigs) is that a lot of them are pretty bad with eye protection while using cutting torches as well.

Oh good call. Those are well above safe limits. I see this all the time myself.

Yep - this largely what I've been told. Incidental flashes and cumulative exposure.

Less so your vision and more your lungs.

The salary distribution function has a much different shape, trades vs. college. The expectation value of Total lifetime earnings does too.