Yes, it is called an insufficient pay to quality of life at work ratio, which also incorporates volatility of income.

All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.

Either the business finds a way to be much more efficient (e.g. producing cabinets much faster and selling wider) while paying the workers more, or it has to scrape by while employing some less fortunate folks. (Or shut down, or course.)

Maybe, maybe not. I will let the market sort that out.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm shows there are not many subfields of cabinetmaking that average $60K/year. One is "Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing" which averages $60,520/year, so another issue is the actual job may call for more experience than just being able to use a screwdriver.

Otherwise, residential building construction laborers make $ 42,950/year, says https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm . They have more appropriate training than a grocery stocker. Why aren't they applying?

It's actually kinda common for higher paid employees to also enjoy much better working conditions.

Compare Amazon's developers to their van drivers. The developers get much higher pay and much better working conditions.

This is my understanding as well. Random piecemeal work in random places that only have one hotel and still manage to nail you for 150/night.

Yeah you can make $45k in 3 months, but it's 4 hours from nowhere, the work isn't consistent, and they don't offer healthcare or 401k. You can't make a live out of 1 month here, 7 months here, etc., and options like buying a big sleeper van isn't really an option when winter in rural Ohio comes around, etc.

So, $25/hr, plus horrible commutes, plus tons of time and expense. There's a reason that guy can't find anybody, he's not telling you the whole story.

edit: 'of' to 'or'

  Percentile wage estimates for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters:
  Percentile          10%           25%       50%       75%        90%
                                           (Median)
  Hourly Wage       $ 14.00      $ 16.61    $ 18.66    $ 22.91   $ 28.16
  Annual Wage (2)  $ 29,120     $ 34,550   $ 38,810   $ 47,660  $ 58,570

The "Top paying industries for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" are:

                                          Employment Annual mean wage
  Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing   240      $ 60,520
  Federal Executive Branch                    190      $ 60,460
  

  Motor Vehicle Body                        3,040      $ 49,990
      and Trailer Manufacturing

  Furniture and Related                    68,860      $ 41,620
      Product Manufacturing

EDIT: in 2001 the mean annual wage for cabinetmakers and bench carpenters was $25,120 with median of $10.74/hour and mean of $11.40. https://archive.org/details/welcometoamerica00demi/page/984/... . (It is the oldest record I could find, published in "Welcome to America : the complete guide for immigrants : the English-Russian version".)

What did your father do in the cabinet field to get $20 an hour in 1991?

He had just moved to the US in 1988. He had no real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat when he was a teenager. In 1989 my mom and I moved here with him. In 1991, he got a raise to $20 and we went to Price Club (Costco) and bought a ton of groceries, and took a photo with them on the kitchen table with all 3 of us using a self timer. It's a major memory of mine.

He was one of the 'foreman' in the shop handling the custom fixture/reception desk line. So if Sun Microsystems at the time wanted new cabinets for their new building, the rest of the shop would build the boxes, but my dad's department would build the reception desk. Basically, you could give my dad some drawings from an architect and my dad could figure out how to make it, while also getting it into the building. He was still cutting and assembling then too as 'engineering' and cutlisting is a short part of that overall work.

That is because you are talking about a different sort of position.

talldatethrow described the position as "screwing a cabinet together for $60k", at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397458 . That is a cabinet maker.

From the BoL, a cabinetmaker is someone who job is to "Cut, shape, and assemble wooden articles or set up and operate a variety of woodworking machines, such as power saws, jointers, and mortisers to surface, cut, or shape lumber or to fabricate parts for wood products."

Your father did more than that. He was a foreman, he did design, and he worked on custom office furniture including installation. Of course he gets paid more than a non-supervisory cabinetmaker working in a factory.

As a first approximation, "First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers" at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes471011.htm says the mean wage is $77,650 - nearly twice as much as the mean wage for a cabinetmaker at $42,120.

So yes, every cabinet maker basically must think a little these days. You're not going to find someone screwing together ikea like boxes in America.

That's actually quite literally what my cabinetmaker did for my most recent home. Ikea cabinets cut down to size in his shop, and installed when ready/all the parts got in. Other brands seemed pretty identical to this - largely premade parts with a few sections designed to cut down to size.

Didn't seem to take much more than a measuring tape and a couple different saws to me. I'm sure I'm being flippant, but it was eye opening seeing that process vs. watching my grandparents build a second home growing up.

Part of the reason wages have not kept up is also due to the work becoming less skilled. The middle has been more or less completely hollowed out as far as I can tell. The types of job my grandfathers both would have set the dinner table with in their respective trades simply no longer exist. You either need to go mass-market low-end and seemingly as low quality as gets you a check in the mail, or high-end luxury market and all the spit'n'polish that entails.

I'd love to be wrong - but trying to simply find those craftsmen in the "middle" to hire is more or less impossible for me.

When I said people should go work for a cabinet shop and make $60k+, I meant in a place that's making medium to high grade cabinets, custom hopefully or atleast to spec for track homes at worst.

What you're describing is somebody modifying mass produced cabinets from a catalog and installing them.

The installers I know all make $80k+ a year if they do work you're not embarrassed about.

Now you are describing a position which requires non-trivial training.

How long does it take to learn those skills? Who pays for the training?

https://www.carpenterstraininginstitute.org/apprenticeship-p... says "To graduate from cabinet maker apprentice to journeyworker, you’ll complete 7,000 hours of on-the-job training (OJT) and 640 hours of classroom learning." That's much more training than needed for stocking. It gives these statistics for the carpenters training as a whole:

  Average earnings for all first-year students:
    $33,436 – $46,363 + benefits*
  Average earnings for all second-year students:
    $45,600 – $63,200 + benefits
  Average earnings for all third-year students:
    $51,666 – $71,646 + benefits*
  Average earnings for all fourth-year students:
    $57,748 – $80,077 + benefits*
  Journeyperson
    $60,789 – $84,295 + benefits*
  Foreman
    $72,485 – $97,010 + benefits*

Can you point to a job listing for this sort of position? I looked and found roughly comparable positions, but paying less than $80K.

"As a Woodworking Prop Builder, you will play a pivotal role in bringing our clients' visions to life by crafting unique and eye-catching props and decor pieces. Your craftsmanship will be on display at a wide range of events, from weddings and corporate gatherings to private parties and more." paying $18-$22 hourly

"The Craftsworker, Carpenter position focuses on carpentry and basic construction related projects/repairs. The position requires good math skills and the ability to think outside of the box. Experience in set design or custom woodworking is a plus. The Craftsworker, Carpenter works with a variety of materials, such as wood, fiberglass, rebar and concrete. The Craftsworker, Carpenter is often called upon to build/construct things that don’t come with blueprints or an instruction manual; they are built to specifications of the client and/or to fit in an allotted amount of space. Projects can vary from day to day, based on work orders, department requests, routine maintenance, or capital projects. Tasks can include such things as roofing; fencing; wood structure repairs; fixing doors/door hardware; installing door systems and windows; fixing ADA building access buttons; fixing shift doors in an animal enclosure; constructing safety fences/barriers for an exhibit; designing and building an automatic animal feeder disguised to look like a tree; or constructing various exhibit elements such as artificial plants, rocks or trees." paying $30/hour. That's far more than cabinet working and still only $60K/year.

(The site I was using doesn't have linkable URLs.)

Zip Recruiter says things like "$12-22/hr".

Cabinet Maker salary in the US average $37K/year says https://mint.intuit.com/salary/cabinet-maker based on nearly 3,000 income tax records, with a max of $70,500.

That's a simple way to resolve this impasse - point to a job ad for a cabinet maker offering $60K/year for someone with no "real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat". [1]

You know an employer right now who is looking for people. Can you point to a help-wanted ad for that company showing what they are looking for?

I did a job search and found a $66K/year Cabinet Maker I job in Hawaii (which is one of the best paying places for cabinet workers according to the BLS tables you don't trust), for the state Department of Education. However, it requires apprentice training or 4 years of carpentry experience. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Cabinet+maker&l=Hawaii

From the same site, in Hawaii, there's an offer for on-the-job training, starting at $17/hour, so about $35K/year + overtime.

Otherwise there are cabinet maker jobs in Hawaii in the $20-$25/hour range and require a few years of experience. The same holds for elsewhere in the US.

I did find that CalTech is looking for "a Journeyperson level contributor in carpentry and cabinet making" at https://phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti... and they pay $29.75 - $43.75 Per Hour, but require "Completion of apprenticeship or equivalent training, one year or more of journeyperson level experience and five or more year’s total experience in cabinet and/or carpentry trades"

Furthermore, that person "will apply journeyperson level skills in providing building maintenance, laboratory installations and rehabilitation projects. This person will also apply cabinet making skills to the layout, fabrication, and installation of new and rehabilitation projects" and must be able to weld, and they would like someone with at least 5 years of work experience in a university or facilities setting and CNC machining certification.

So yes, "approach $100k for dependable people that known the field" is possible. But that's someone with years of experience, and for something far beyond the basic skills your father had.

Certainly not something a stock clerk could easily retrain to do, as you complained about at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397458 .

[1] What kinds of sailboat? A dugout canoe with a pole sticking in it? A small sailboat like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenichi_Horie#First_solo_voyag... requires advanced carpentry skills - Kenichi Horie paid someone else to build it.

People used to pay american employees enough to survive, thrive, and even support local businesses that didn't have to crush their margins to 2% to compete with walmart.

The reason everything sucks is because americans have only cared about "sticker price" in comparison shopping for decades, and I posit that's mostly because the american income has spent the past several decades being cut in half simply because employers didn't pay people.

If small businesses cannot hang due to their model (and sensibilities) being based on 1990s math, the solution is tax the mega rich and rebalance the market in the aggregate.

I've seen trade jobs that get described like this. However the reality is different. The jobs are effectively seasonal and no one makes $60k because they don't end up working a full 52 weeks of the year. They get paid per job and once they finish the job there's no work and thus no pay until the next job. A lot of times employees are expected to own and supply their own tools. They often also require a commute out to a job site.

Working trades like this ends up averaging out to a bit better than minimum wage but without predictable schedules and/or long commutes. When someone makes six figures it's because the job was a new subdivision or something.

At Walmart most of the time you can just fuck around and not do much work, if you get fired at Walmart you just go fuck around at an oil change shop until they fire you. I know men that have done this their whole lives.

To me, a large part of the actual problem here is a marketing problem. It's really hard for a small shop to market that "hey, we need workers, we are willing to pay a premium, and no we aren't a scam company".

Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.

There are hundreds of Dave's at corporate Walmart, and they care so little about the employees at any given location that they probably wouldn't even return an email, let alone talk to shift workers face-to-face.

What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.

I believe fairly competent cabinet assemblers / installers are making $40-75 / hour depending on location. Everyone else paying less is half-assing it or doing a poor job.

That's not the point anyway, working entry-level retail is pretty much a 0 stakes job — quality has been mostly engineered out of it. Even a basic cabinet assembly job requires some quality control. Some people do not want to do anything of quality.

IMO we'd all be better off if people had a universal basic income and these people could spend more time finding something else to do with their time.

I can't fault anyone for choosing that option if they can live with the income level, it's relatively sane.

... at Wal-Mart.

Personally, I'd rather work with all of the chemicals on the "Things I Won't Work With" list, but that's just me.

My best friend was a chemist. He told stories of some of the accidents he saw (or heard, or saw the property damage, or triaged victims of, or ...) during the relatively few years when he worked in a lab like that.

Quite a few of the chemists in that lab left chemistry, and did not return. My friend left the lab, and moved into computational chemistry.

If you want stock boys you can pay em cheap but you gotta train em.

Instead I moved and found work in tech which matched my education.

This is so bizarre. If someone knows how to build a cabinet, why would you promote them so they no longer build cabinets? If someone loves building cabinets, the only way to make more money is to stop building them...

It's one of the problem why companies cannot find skilled workers...

It makes sense at a certain level, and can explain why we get so many people in positions they don't seem suited for.

It's not like they are forced into it. No shortage of people that turn down the chance to get into management.

That's rarely a thing. Most jobs pay is not correlated to the value it creates. Simple example is software development. Team of 10 can create product that generates millions every day, but their pay will not be correlated in any way with that revenue. Maybe a manager will get a bonus, but most of the money flows to the owners.

That is part of my calculation of where to work, not purely money.