Yes! I grew up in California and my dad was a tradesperson. The union is the only reason my siblings and I had health insurance growing up. He never got any vacation time though, insurance was the main benefit of the union I think.

Unfortunately, other states in the US have much weaker unions or none at all, especially in the south.

I am English but moved to the Bay Area a few years back and became friends with a union electrician from Alabama so this conversation comes up a little - it sounded like unions are supported in the south even if they look a little different. However I’m not American and am not certain about that at all :)

Does not seem like given a lot of the auto factories in the south are not unionized and multiple attempts to unionize them failed because the workers reject them.

Then there was that famous failed attempt at unionizing the Amazon warehouse in Alabama? I think? Yeah there was a lot of shady stuff going down but it just does not look good among all the other failures.

States in the south have laws that neuter unions, and some that make unionizing for certain fields/roles illegal.

Unions might exist, but they might not have the same teeth they'd have in states with friendlier organizing laws.

Right to Work laws allow employees to make an individual choice whether to join a union in a unionized shop.

No one is forced to take a union job if they don't want to, those same laws break private contracts between unions and employers and force unions to represent non-dues paying employees.

Yes. My brother is a union carpenter. He gets health insurance, a pension, and now the ability to aggressively negotiate which jobs he joins.

Yes.

My brother in law lives in SC where unionization and labor protection is especially weak. I don't think that the balance of power is going to shift away from the bosses and towards him any time soon.

Probably not. Maybe you just really like people, but in a lot of trades, the people you meet are grumpy. They don't want to meet you; they just want their problem solved. Either they're building a new thing (and trying to meet an aggressive schedule... and are probably behind by the time they bring in the plumbers) or repairing an old thing (and dealing with people who are cranky that the thing failed).

It's probably not as bad as tech support, where you can guarantee that the person on the other end of the phone is angry. But it's probably at least as bad as retail, and nobody ever says "I love meeting people so I'll go handle cash from strangers".

I know that there are extroverts in the world who get a charge out of meeting new people every day. And there's a big bonus to not sitting in a chair in front of a screen, especially if you're one of those. But I've got a feeling you're a lot happier with coding-level salaries and meeting strangers after you clock out.

And you'll have clients losing their minds that their plumber charges ~$100/hr for "simple" things that the client can't or won't do themselves.

Tech people always say this but forget that being a plumber means being on their knees wading thru poop water and likely being unable to work when you reach a certain, fairly young age.

I get it, trades are important, but let's not glamorize them.

I have done far worse than wade through poop water on my knees when I worked as a teenager on a paintball site / as a rifleman in the army! But to each their own :)

Wading through poorly made npm packages with no docs is not that far from literal poop water. Maybe harder to wash off in a shower.

Not all countries have toilets that block as easily as American / Canadian toilets. So wading through dirty water is less likely in the UK for example.

Well, being an outhouse carpenter sucks too!

Nothing against them but I think glamorizing trades seems like a kind of virtue signal.

I have no issue glamorizing potentially six figure salaries that are useful to society! Personally I view software as a trade with a bubble salary range atm, but think it’ll pivot towards a trade over the next decade or two.

> Tech people always say this but forget that being a plumber means being on their knees wading thru poop water and likely being unable to work when you reach a certain, fairly young age.

Depends on the type of plumber.

Plumbers doing boiler installs or hydronic heating systems aren't dealing with toilets at all, they are doing applied engineering and math however.

The people I’ve known in trade unions locally spent a lot of time not working waiting on the bench for the next job. The work was much closer to being a short term contractor not at all in control of finding new work.

There's plenty of tradesmen in unions. And plenty of other tradesmen willing to undercut them.