Fitting pipes together is not "back breaking". We're not talking about framing or roofing, in the contracting world plumbing is a light duty skilled trade that anyone with half a brain can earn a 6-figure income on. If you take care of yourself and wear protective equipment, you won't have a problem with your knees in middle age. There's no "forced retirement", someone working as an independent contractor for 25 years is likely more wealthy than the average software engineer in most LCOL or MCOL parts of the country.

The problem isn't "lack of immigrants". The problem is that when surveyed, 25% of Gen-Z said they plan to pursue a career as "influencers". My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.

I see this line about kids wanting to be influencers. Is there a credible source? And is this any different than them wanting to be a rock star, movie star, etc.? Most who have this hairbrained dream can fail quickly and hopefully with minimal cost or embarrassment and move on with their lives.

My 7 year old routinely tells me he is going to be a YouTuber. I routinely remind him about power law distributions. So far he has made 2 YouTube channels with a handful of videos each and even less subscribers. I can't recall if it was for his 6th or 7th birthday but he had been talking a lot about wanting his own "merch", so I asked him what kind of design would he put on his "merch" and he told me what he wanted. I whipped one up on a t-shirt making site and got it for him for his birthday. He still wears it and still refers to it as his "merch".

I think it's mostly harmless and of course most kids will grow out of it. It's definitely like wanting to be a rockstar, but I think the scale is larger and the barrier to entry so much lower that they seem much more convinced it's actually a viable option than what I thought being a rockstar was when I was a kid.

My guess is for many of them it will be a second "wait, Santa isn't real?" moment when they get a bit older and realize that power law distributions are a thing and that's just how it is. Followed by fun times reminiscing about it with each other as adults.

I think this comment is the first time I've realized how out of touch I may have become with the world. I had no idea that kids wants to be influencers and Youtubers instead of say, rock stars or sports stars.

In a way I find it a little sad, as a reminder humans keep getting more isolated with tech. Where 30 years ago we wanted people cheering us on, chanting our name, etc... people now seem to desire views, likes, and whatnot.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just really hard for my brain to process as I don't understand it.

Who do you think unloads the pipes from the truck, carries them up the stairs or drags them into the crawlspaces on their knees? I've never met a plumber over 50 who didn't have chronic pain in their back, shoulders or knees.

> My opinion is that younger generations have been brought up in a world where they don't need to take personal responsibility or ever get their hands dirty.

An opinion as old as recorded history at least. It wasn't novel or insightful when Horace said it in 40BC and it isn't now.

The median income for a plumber is $50k, only 10% make above $91k. https://insights.workwave.com/industry/plumbing-electrical/p...

6-figure incomes for plumbers are rare.

Where is all the money people paying tradespeople going? If I need any plumbing work done it costs me $200 an hour or more. Even with overhead and expenses, 10 hours a week gets you more than $50k a year. Twenty years ago my grandfather was a marine plumber and made $200k a year. How many apprentices and part-time plumber are in these datasets?

Same places it always has? Insurance, materials, taxes, wages, profits.

If retail stores are making record breaking profits, why are service workers paid so little? If medical costs are so high, why aren't nurses and nurse aids making more?

It's not rocket science. People aren't getting paid for the value of their labor, and productivity has rocketed up while wages have stagnated for decades. Your plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow.

> plumber charges 200 an hour and doesn't make anywhere near that much, because they work for a company who profits massively off their labor and exploits him as far as the law and supply and demand will allow

Do most plumbers responding to house calls work for an employer? There aren't many economies of scale in that work.

Being a plumber who works for a company means you are given tasks and show up at those assignments. You need to know how to plumb.

Being an independent plumber means handling: marketing, networking, customer service, etc, plus plumbing. Like any other freelance position it's not easy to break in and get enough work to live. And we're not in the days of people just opening the Yellow Pages and calling a random plumber. Now it's a labyrinth of competing search engine results, yelp reviews, HomeAdvisor references, etc.

Some people will take the time to find an independent plumber. Most people call RotoRooter or whatever company has advertised the most in their area. The plumbers, electricians, handymen I call are all independent, but they're also old, at the end of their careers, having a set of regulars they could take with them going independent, and having saved a bunch of money because they were getting paid fair wages in their prime. There are economies of scale in the skilled trades, they're just not the trades themselves.

Agree that it isn't easy going independent as a plumber. But it's easier than in, say, construction. That leaves room for trade-offs between ambition and risk on one hand and a safe, secure job on the other hand.

Sounds like more reason the call by many here to stop complaining and pay more seems spot on.

If you're in Oregon or California, it looks like the wages there are much higher.

Also, you're probably paying the company which manages the plumbers, of which the plumbers don't directly earn that.

If you're hiring a plumber directly, I'd assume it's a more experienced one running their own business. In addition to charging you $200/hr for the work, they're probably doing their accounting and business management, billing, ordering parts and equipment, replacing tools, and communicating with clients.

I could see that only resulting in 10-20 billable hours per week.

Also, if many of their jobs are paid in cash, it's possible there's a significant amount that is unreported to the agencies generating these statistics.

Tools, trucks, downtime, insurance, etc... All expenses I don't have as a corporate linux guy.

You pay $200/hr for the work you see onsite. What you don't see is overhead, drive time to site and back to HQ and because plumbers aren't guaranteed to work 40 hours a week.

If there is no work, the plumbers don't get paid.

To the business owners, towards tool and vehicle maintenance, to time sitting around talking to people on the phone trying to line up jobs or making bids, towards the substantial amount of material stock they need on hand, to saving money for the inevitable down turns in construction, etc.

For someone to come work in your house for 30 minutes, they have to compensate for 2-3 hours of time doing everything else.

Also it sounds like you live in a high cost of living area if you are paying that much for plumbers.

Sure there are a few good jobs plumbing new commercial construction that makes good money, but there is far more need and demand for people to crawl down into some residential crawlspace nobody else has been in for decades to fix and retrofit old garbage and clearing toilets and replacing wax rings or installing faucets or garbage disposals. Those aren't really money making jobs, especially when you have no idea what you might run into once you are down there.

According to that site, the average in California and Oregon is 6 figures for 7+ years of experience, so perhaps not that dismal for HCOL

Older generation complains about newer generation's work ethic and goals, news at 11.

Seriously, this has been done since forever, and it's such a tired trope.

And why the hell shouldn't they want to be influencers? They're responding to the world they've been handed. Why is that different than "I want to be an NBA player", or rock and roll singer before that, or baseball player before that?

Gen Z will be just fine, even if Gen X doesn't understand how.

This is the first comment I have read where "Gen X" is dragged into the generational culture war. The generic brand of that generation made me think it would fly under the radar and we'd break this tired pattern.

IMO, all generational labeling is just for clicks and rage (which brings more clicks).

Generations isnt even real. People change year on year little by little not once in 20 years. It's a gradual shift not some shift that happens new years eve one year.

The pace of change quickens due to technology enabling our interconnected world today.

It's a gradual shift that's no so gradual when looking at the block of population. Gen X are those that didn't have any digital connectivity while growing up. Millennials grew up connected through text/chat/email/very early social media, but without being constantly connected to the internet. Gen Z has grown up being connected and with information and entertainment available the time.

Generations share a "core" of experiences that happen during some of the most impactful years of their lives. First geopolitical event I remember was 9/11. For some it was the Great Recession or COVID. Those big events end up exerting a lot of influence on age groups.

I think Generations can be overused in the sense that it's used like a monolith when it's not. The clickbaity "Generation Z doesn't want to work" is actually the less clickbaity "Many in Generation Z find working a less attractive option because of these specific shared experience/values..."

> Gen X are those that didn't have any digital connectivity while growing up.

My (parents’) CompuServe and (due to living in the Central Valley but most of the BBS’s I had info on being in the Bay) phone bills fron the 1980s tell a very different story.

I think the OP was referring to majority or plurality of Gen X, not necessarily dragonwriter's, or Central Valley's experience.

Cool story.

My family didn't have internet until around 1998

Try crawling around in a 2 foot high crawl space amongst spiders and snakes while ripping out old, stinky, dripping plumbing with a sabre saw or arc welder and tell yourself it is not “back breaking” or dangerous.

Also bonus asbestos and fibreglass! (Yes, obviously wear protective equipment, but that shit travels and gets on things.)

Yeah I'm happy earning double that working in an air conditioned office surfing HN thanks.

Pipe fitters tend to have really strong hands because the pipes are heavy and awkward.

Working with awkward heavy things tends to wear out your joints

I'd be curious what your generation said they'd want to be when surveyed. I'm sure during the height of beatlemania, many people wanted to be a rockstar too.

There was no one with dreams of being a rockstar or actor before influencers. There have always been a good chunk of kids that want to do as little as possible and then they tend to figure something out or wash out. This isn't new or news.

Pay more yet also increase the supply of labor which drives down wages.

Seems not the answer.

Sometimes Econ101 supply and demand theory isn't nuanced enough. Wages can go up at the same time as the supply increases if the amount of money in the system also increases. How do you think software engineer wages rocketed up over the past 20 years?

Apples and oranges. One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems. Software in the last 30+ years has created new industries which require more software people.

> One assumes there is a relatively fixed supply of plumbing problems.

The volume of plumbing problems is going to increase at least linearly with the housing supply, which (theoretically) increases more-or-less linearly with population. Plus, people move around, so there will be concentrations of problems, and those concentrations will move with the population.

That doesn't account for how technology and building codes and material changes have made previously simple plumbing problems more complex over time.

On the other hand we now have waterless urinals. Maybe plumbing tech and equipment costs have eliminated some jobs and made some jobs less skilled as it cheaper just to replace than do repairs that take knowledge.

Software jobs are many X what they were 30 years ago, while I doubt plumbing jobs have change that much above what they were relative to the population 30 years ago.

House sizes have doubled over the last 50 years. I would not assume a fixed supply of plumbing problems.

Outside of FAANG outliers and SV, have software engineer wages really rocketed up? I've worked outside the FAANG world at companies of various sizes and industries for 25 years and haven't seen it. If anything, I'd say wage growth has been kept artificially low by H1B competition from folks born in low cost of living countries under threat of deportation if they object to the abuse they receive. The average corporate IT dept. looks more like a sweatshop now than it did 20 years ago, the ones I've seen anyway.

I'm in Philadelphia, software jobs around here pay about 2-3 times what other engineering disciplines pay for the same level of experience.

How quickly do you hit the salary ceiling though? That's what I've seen. Software devs make a lot more than other engineers when starting out. By 7-10 years of experience, the gap is much, much narrower.

You could just do what happens everywhere else, price fixing. (I mean everywhere else as in the real world, not the soft interior of an “economics” textbook).

I’ve done both kinds of work on my own home. Calling it back breaking is pure hyperbole. Is it physical, certainly. But it’s something you can easily do until you’re 50 without issue and between 40 to 50, you can start taking apprentices that do the taxes that benefit from youth. Of the plumbers and carpenters I’ve hired, they are all in no worse shape than other adults their age.

I sit at a computer all day and it’s not good for my body either as I’m more sedentary than is healthy. I would say that my work is equally unhealthy but in different ways.

Doing one-off projects on your own home is not equivalent to being a full time roofer or tile-layer, or even plumber or auto tech where you are constantly working on your back, hands, and knees.

I have my own home too and the times I’ve done my own plumbing work were hard. And that’s one of the easier jobs, never mind Roofing, I wouldn’t last a week.

My uncles a roofer and did it into his 40s but eventually started his own company when he wanted to stop carrying slate around on roofs in the miserable British winters. I think that's the usual progression - you're not literally laying tiles till you're 67.

Is starting a roofing company a viable career path for _every_ young roofer that wants to make roofing their career?

If not I think that still hits the "knees give out by 55" issue.

No, but supervising/managing is pretty viable. Also these aren’t FTSE100 companies, these are small groups of like 3/4 people who spin off and have a few commercial clients.

Relying on entrepreneurship for your livelihood and retirement as you age sounds like it'll only work for a select few

Unless there is massive population growth. Single older person can employ only so many juniors. Or other older people have to exit the market.

It's like a MLM spread across generations of workers. You recruit two workers and they recruit two workers each and then they recruit two workers each....

If you spend 2/3 of your career as one of the 2 underlings it's not MLM. Body is dunzo by say 50 for trades, which means you get 30 years as a tradesman and 15 years employing two tradesman. Retire at 65.

Or there's an increase in new buildings, or the number of buildings needing repairs increase over time, etc... With trades the number of self-employed or owners is quite high - you can either do Job A by yourself for $X for company Foo, or be self-employed and do Job A by yourself for $X++. Same number of jobs exist, just less monopolized by larger companies. I don't know why, but this is what I found in the south-west of England when I lived there. I think the experienced people tend to start those orgs to charge more then get older and need to hire apprentices to do the work for them, and so the cycle continues.

But not everyone in that business can build their own company unless every single one is an individual contractor. What about the other 80% of those trade workers who are laying tiles until retirement or their body fails them?

Working on something at your house is very different from doing it day in and day out, year after year. I have worked many manual labor jobs over the years and after just a few years started having constant pain in my knees, feet, and lower back. My father has been in a trade his entire life and in his late 50s, he was already having many physical issues from it. Not everyone can just take on an apprentice - especially since this article is stating that nobody wants to do these jobs.

I grew up in a family of laborers and this feels very far from my experience. Can you do this through your 50s? Yes, if you avoid a major injury (your risk of this is high in these jobs). Even if you do avoid injury, your ability to do the jobs starts to rapidly decline because doing a job like this day in and day out does take a toll on your body, even if a single day of work isn't back breaking.

More than 10% of tradespeople are addicted to painkillers. I suspect your weekend warrior projects do not qualify you to understand why.

How do you explain all the back, leg, joint problems of tradespeople? I hope you aren’t really basing this on sone work you did in your home. Surely, you know that is not representative of the day-to-day work of plumbers, etc?

So instead of "barely middle-class" jobs, they choose no job?

That will turn out well for them.

I mean, have you seen how much pay has gone up in low-skilled jobs? There are signs at all the local businesses in my area offering $15+ an hour for cashiers and fry cooks and whatnot. The same kind of jobs I worked 7-8 years ago for $8 an hour. They are taking advantage of supply and demand to force jobs to pay them a closer-to-fair wage, instead of selling their time for less than it's worth and perpetuating the problem indefinitely.

To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc. I don't think most of these people are refusing to work out of activism or anything. But from a sociological perspective it's a natural response to a problem(a problem that goes much deeper than low wages imo, but I won't get into that) that acts as a corrective measure to one of the main symptoms of that problem.

In other words: there will always be a bell curve of in terms of competence and work ethic, and from a relative perspective the curve will maintain it's shape throughout time periods/generations among large enough populations. The people on the low end of that curve deserve the same amount of criticism(how much, if any, they deserve, is up for debate) regardless of whether the curve itself shifts towards one side or the other - as movements of the curve in it's entirety can be attributed to social/environment factors. I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently, and I have plenty of headcannon about why that may have happened, but I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation, and I can't see the point in condemning the low end of the curve for a certain generation over that same portion of the curve from other generations.

>I mean, have you seen how much pay has gone up in low-skilled jobs? There are signs at all the local businesses in my area offering $15+ an hour for cashiers and fry cooks and whatnot. The same kind of jobs I worked 7-8 years ago for $8 an hour. They are taking advantage of supply and demand to force jobs to pay them a closer-to-fair wage, instead of selling their time for less than it's worth and perpetuating the problem indefinitely.

Those jobs also result in products being more costly, so that the current low end wages are actually lower nominal value.

I find people using terms like "fair wage" end up making wishes and policies that end up hurting the poor, not helping them, by not understanding economics.

Fair is what a person can command from competing for jobs, and jobs competing for workers. Anything else ends up unsustainable, which usually ends up hurting the least able workers.

Mandating wages leads to lower employment - so sure you can help some by pricing others out of work.

>To be fair, I do agree that on an individual level there are tons of people screwing themselves over and messing up their lives, being a burdon on their parents or whoever ends up supporting them financially, etc.

Agreed - but who it will hurt the most is future workers, including them, as the economy is not as good and then there are less resources for everyone, including them. Of course they will continue to blame a "system" when they got what they earned.

>I do think we've seen the curve move towards it's lower end recently

Total remuneration, even at the low end, is higher than nearly all of history. And post-tax transfer it's much higher.

For example, the lowest 20% of households saw their post-tax income go from $18,900 in 1979 to $32,800 in 2018 [1], and that's not even including that households on average have shrunk in size. Per worker the returns are even higher.

A good analogy: if you tell kids that blue eyed kids are the devil, they will act like it, pass laws, and believe it. If you tell people immigrants are killing them or taking jobs, people start to believe it, and enact laws that hurt all. Similarly, if you tell enough people how bad the economy is, regardless of solid evidence, they will act like it, and in the case of an economy, they bring the doom to pass.

>I can't see any reason to blame all individuals within an entire generation

I wouldn't blame them all. But if enough act a way to make their economic outcomes worse, then all of them will suffer over time. And they'll take others along for the ride.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-income...

"Fair is what a person can command from competing for jobs, and jobs competing for workers. Anything else ends up unsustainable, which usually ends up hurting the least able workers."

Unsustainable, huh? I'm from the Netherlands where we've had minimum wage since 1969. The job market hasn't exactly broken down in those 53 years. Actually, we have the lowest unemployment in recorded history. Also, minimum wage just got upped by more than 10%.

You know why? Because otherwise people working full-time can't even afford the basics. Even if you have zero empathy in you, how exactly does it benefit society to have productive members of society suffer, become homeless, resort to crime, go hungry and freeze?

> Those jobs also result in products being more costly, so that the current low end wages are actually lower nominal value.

If low-end workers' wages double and that makes costs go up 10%, or even 20%, pretty sure they're still ahead.

You’d be surprised. Sometimes quality of life is better spent not working when you can lean on family and friends Or your own small retirement fund.

Not saying someone’s life choices are right or wrong one way or the other in this case. I’m very grateful for my position but would be lying if I didn’t say I day dreamt occasionally about quitting work and living like a backpacker.

>Sometimes quality of life is better spent not working when you can lean on family and friends Or your own small retirement fund.

And then when enough do, and the result becomes a lifetime of un/under-employment, then they want the retirements or lives of those before or around them, who do you think will pick up the slack?

Sure, quit and be a backpacker. Doing it a while is fun, probably even healthy, but a lifetime of it will not end well for many people. And generally if enough people do it, then society as a whole will have to pay for it.

I mean, if enough enough refusing to enter the rat race makes society hurts, maybe a new way of social organization will be creted?

> who do you think will pick up the slack?

Machines? Volunteers? Hobbyists? Artists? Researchers? Bored people?

Pretty funny thing to say on HN, which consists of people in the industry of automating things.

That seems like society's problem more than their own problem. Society failed to incentivize them to live a lifestyle that is best for society, and society will pay for it. If it gets bad enough these people won't roll over and die in a ditch, starving people become violent and will take by force what they aren't getting by what they deem is a fair exchange.

Humans aren't the ones changing, society is. And its failures are its own.

They are the symptom the of a failing society not its' cause.

Independent plumbers/local plumbing businesses can easily earn $1,000/day with 2-3 service calls. Not sure how universal healthcare, PTO, immigration, and more pay have to do with this.

Edit: Thank you for all the downvotes for me calling out the weird correlation between tech benefits/politics and plumber skill-shortage + high-reward wages. Your wokeism will forever benefit society.

The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.

Get a job with the local power company, or one of their contractors. You will have to work in bad weather, after storms, and travel a little bit.

The average salary for a journeyman lineman in Michigan is $161,000 per year

No it isn't. You cherry-picked that single report, which was based on 76 turbotax returns. I suspect their data is wrong or corrupted, because making $160k as a journeyman lineman is only achievable with a decade experience and a truckload of overtime. Look around a bit further, or talk to actual linemen or unions, and you'll see the average salary for a lineman is about a hundred thousand dollars a year less than that.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/journeyman-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/DTE-Energy-Journeyman-Linem... https://www.linemancentral.com/states/michigan

Read some Reddit posts where people ask linemen how much they make. People reply with over $200k.

Yeah, because that's more reliable data.

Have you considered that they may not be telling the truth?

I know a lot of linemen and they do pretty well. $70k would be zero overtime.

Do you think they don't earn 30-40 per hour and have the ability to make tons of overtime?

The power company pays office workers time and a half to do "line watch" where they just park by a downed power line with a light on their roof until a crew shows up to fix it.

I don't feel the need to read Reddit, since I worked as a lineman for several years. It's possible to make bank in all kinds of trades, but that is absolutely not the norm, or even the average.

Tradesmen are some of the first people to inflate their actual wage because otherwise they not only have a "lower class" career, but they are also not doing as well as everyone else and it makes them feel like shit.

I would not accept their personal anecdotes over documented tax returns.

What do independent plumbers have to do for healthcare for them and their families? Is there a better option than COBRA? I honestly don't know.

I had to dip into this for a few years. In the U.S., an ACA ("Obamacare") plan is $500-$2000 a month, depending on the state, with extra assistance for low incomes. There are bronze, silver, and gold plans with higher tiers decreasing copays and annual out-of-pocket maximums but significantly bumping the monthly dues. Private insurance also exists but almost universally has inferior terms (payout caps, gaps in coverage, weasel wording, etc.).

In my experience, for a typical ACA bronze plan, the annual maximum out-of-pocket payout is roughly $20,000, and the monthly dues are about $700, meaning worst case you're looking at ~$30,000 out pocket for a year. Add about 50% if you have children. Sadly, none of this is tax-deductible as far as I can tell.

Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans. The constant enrollment and transfer paperwork becomes non-trivial, even without trying to qualify for an income-based discount.

>the annual maximum out-of-pocket payout is roughly $20,000,

https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...

The annual max family out of pocket is legally capped at $18,200, but most plans will be less than that.

>Another issue with ACA marketplaces that I found was they churn a lot; every year when you have to renew coverage you can have an entirely different set of providers and plans.

This is not my experience, I have been able to purchase the same BCBS health plan from the same insurer for many years.

In NJ, I would budget $30k per year for premiums for a gold level plan for a family of 4, assuming you are not getting any premium tax credits. Of course, out of pocket maximum is up to another $18k.

https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...

>Sadly, none of this is tax-deductible as far as I can tell.

It should be tax deductible if you are self employed:

https://www.healthinsurance.org/obamacare/self-employed-heal...

And if you are working for a small business that does not offer a group health plan, you should be able to get premiums reimbursed from employer with pre tax income:

https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/qsehra/

If you have a high-deductible health plan, generally you can open an HSA account, which does allow for medical expenses to effectively be tax-deductible.

There are a bunch of restrictions and loopholes though. I once opened an HSA and then actually had to close it because it turned out my insurance plan had *too* high of a deductible to be eligible, go figure.

I mean Obamacare exchanges exist but (as the insurance industry wants) it mostly sucks in terms of costs/coverage. COBRA is still better because you get tied to your former employer's risk pool even though you pay employer share of healthcare costs.

You can buy the same health insurance on healthcare.gov that businesses buy from the same insurance companies.

They even have metal levels so you know you are getting the same actuarial value. A silver BCBS plan from an employer is basically the same coverage as a silver BCBS plan from healthcare.gov.

False in my state, at least. And ours is on the healthcare.gov fallback (the state didn't set up an exchange).

The state of things here:

1) Most insurers don't offer anything on healthcare.gov. Most years, there are two providers on there, though sometimes one will drop off and another will come in, so it does vary a little year-to-year.

2) Zero insurers here offer individual plans outside hc.gov, so if they're not on there—and most aren't—you can't get one. Seriously. Ask them, ask insurance brokers: "nope, no insurers offer individual plans in this state anymore—if it's not on hc.gov, it doesn't exist"

3) The networks for the hc.gov plans usually suck compared to the ones available to businesses. This may not be captured in the "actuarial value".

4) I've also never seen an employer mention which metal-level their plans is so you can compare them, but maybe they can find out if you ask. I know for a fact the top-level employer plans cost quite a bit more than the best-available plans on hc.gov (and they're waaaaaaay better)

You mention BCBS. They do operate in this state. They are not on hc.gov (not the version we see, anyway) and will not sell you an individual plan outside of it, either.

That sucks, I have not experienced that in NY/NJ/CA/WA.

NJ even has a public document listing all the insurance prices, and they matched the amount quoted to me by the insurance agent for my business.

https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...

BCBS is also a network, not the insurance company. So you never buy insurance from BCBS, but rather whichever insurance company has chosen to be a franchise, such as Regence, Horizon NJ, Independence, Elevance, etc.

Yeah, my impression is that healthcare exchange plans are much better and cheaper in blue states than out here in flyover country. It's a shitshow out here. A wallet-emptying shitshow. Not exactly worse than before—at least stuff like pre-existing condition exclusions are gone—but definitely not good either.

COBRA is for temporarily keeping employer provided healthcare after leaving a company and is basically a non-option except as a short term bridge to a new employer provided plan. I believe independent workers generally go to the health care exchanges and buy a private health care plan. Rates vary wildly by state, coverage details, and your age but I've recently looked in Washington state for midrange (silver) plans and they are around ~$400 a month (with no dependents).

I know people who surfed the COBRA wave - ie, joined full-time for a company for a month every year or two to keep COBRA going and then going back to contract work in the interim.

I just left FTE and took COBRA and they are giving me 18mo!

"Giving".

Normally it just means you get to pay the full cost of your health plan, which is often double or more what you were paying as an employee. It's just so you're not immediately ineligible for the employer's group.

Unless yours is also paying the premium those 18 months, which I've never heard of but I suppose is possible.

You can find a bronze plan on the healthcare market place for < $300/month. I'm self employed, paying around that for an HSA eligible plan, and haven't seen a doctor in 5+ year. Mostly keep it for the HSA account/investing, or I'd forgo it. If your spouse has a FT/W2 job, they'd likely get solid health insurance to cover the family.

This varies wildly by state. Where I live the cheapest bronze plan in 2022 was $700/mo with no dependents.

It varies more by age. A bronze plan under $300 per month is only possible for someone in their 20s.

You can see premiums for 2023 for NJ here for all ages and plans, and adjust up or down 20% for other states.:

https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...

https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...

The downvotes should be a hint for you to re-evaluate your position and maybe look for logical errors. Instead you've doubled down and threw in some ridiculous piece of your worldview (that thing with wokeism) to shift the blame away from yourself to everyone around you.

Well here's some logic for you. Before entering enterprise tech (8+ years), I managed a finish-construction company warehouse. Being good at web development, I helped a buddy start a locksmith company and have a small portion of equity for doing all his marketing/SEO (since 2012). He makes close to $1mil/year and lives out of a warehouse... Spare me with your "ridiculous piece of your worldview"...

How are you "not sure" what healthcare and independent workers have to do with each other?

I dislike wokeism as much as anyone else but what does this have to do with being some. I think the idea that plumbers make $1,000 a day as if that translates to their salary is a bit silly. How many plumbers fob you out see riding around in Lambos or do you think they are just too modest for that?

Your mistake is the assumption I'm translating it into salary. That $1,000 a day can go towards additional employees (coverage area) and marketing.

> universal healthcare, universal mandatory PTO

I'm all in favor, but that exists elsewhere, and there's a labor shortage too.

I don’t think it’s correct to characterize the 10 million men who can’t or won’t work as a labor shortage; it sounds more like excess supply. The solution to this is to increase the demand these laborers have for work.

As you say in your post, paying more might do it. I’m sure businesses would pay more if they needed the employees and could profitably employ them at a higher wage. Surely they’d rather make less money per employee than not make any money. So, they must not be able to pay more than they are.

We could lower the minimum wage; maybe there are employers who would employ those 10 million men if they could do it at a lower cost, but still the workers wouldn’t be willing to work any more than they are now.

That leaves raising the opportunity cost of not working, e.g. not paying people who won’t work as much to not work. That’s the answer that the people who have answers “that the economists don’t want to hear” don’t want to hear. UBI/negative income tax or cutting welfare programs would help those folks get jobs, but with the risk that some might not, and would end up on the streets.

Looking at some random sources around [1], some of the studies on this conclude the issue is these men don't want to work for such low status/pay jobs, and the skill bars are too high for the jobs they would work.

Many are dependent on wives/parents to get by. So not paying welfare probably won't help much because those men aren't on it to begin with.

If you want people to work, you need to be willing to take on some of the opportunity risk and train them. If you want them to work in the trades, you probably need to train them and pay them well.

Even then the status issue wrt blue-collar work is hard to get around without a significant cultural shift.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/08/15/men-not-a...

What? Those are exactly the type of solutions economists would prescribe.

Yeah I grew up learning trades from my parents and neighbors and friends, worked in trades a number of years. I left the trades because it isn't worth it. The pay is not much better than working as a cashier or working in the local jail's kitchen around here. The work is inconsistent as hell both on a micro and macro level. And I am currently watching the ravages of their time in the trades on their bodies through my family and neighbors as they live with constant pain and are both literally and figuratively limping their way into retirement with not a whole lot to show for it as their compounding health issues drain most of their savings. Sadly most will never get to actually enjoy retirement, they look and feel 20+ years older than they are and can't afford to vacation or enjoy anything but the most barebones hobbies.

Yep. My partner and I come from blue-collar families. A major motivating factor for each of us getting a tech degree was that we saw how the blue-collar lifestyle physically destroyed our parents. The white-collar sedentary lifestyle requires some maintenance to stay healthy, but I don’t expect to lose any fingers or knees because of it.