a month ago i was in hope and it was hard to order fast food, everywhere was understaffed with signs on the front wage starting $17.5/hr

i was pretty surprised.

17.50/hr is only like one Mcdonalds value meal a day more than a minimum wage job.

Construction is busy, especially commercial construction. We've had to increase our rates quite a bit to cover the wage increases skilled labour is demanding.

Yeah but its been booming for since post 2011. Because everyone wants their kids to go to university, and get a bachelors of arts and they end up working at starbucks or mcdicks cause they leave that expensive program with zero transferrable skills.

Only what I will call "post covid" have I seen a small uptick in interest in trades among recent graduates and the younger crowd. I think its become so plainly obvious now when their parents work at safeway, or as an accountant, or manage a restaurant, or whatever and make Less than $100k a year. Then they see a plumber or electrician come into their house and charge over $150/hour.

Quick math will tell you that if that plumber works a normal schedule of 40 hours a week with no OT he can gross ~300 a year, and probably profit $200k+ a year. With OT when they are charging $285/hour because you exploded your toilet on thanksgiving, if he wants to work a few days a year he can start really racking it up.

A plumber charging 150/hr is likely working for a company that’s paying them whatever the journeyman rate is. $50 ish? Owning a company can net you a lot, but comes with the stress of fixing the broken work van, paying someone to answer calls and dispatch, or doing it yourself (which is coming out of the 150 an hour)
Owning a company can definitely net you lots in the trade, but it’s not like every tradesperson is going home with money hand over fist.
The “arts degree is useless crowd” is just as ridiculous as the “you really want to fix toilets?” Crowd.

As opposed to the regular people who dont own vehicles and need to get them repaired? Note that 40x$150x 50 weeks out of the year is $300k. So I factored $100k for business expenses. Which is generous.

And if you dont want any of that hassle you can take your trades degree to any industrial site work 2on 2off and make $150k a year with no responsibilities besides showing up for 2 weeks out of the month.

I'm sorry but at this moment in time the average blue collar employee makes far more than the majority of other jobs you can get out of your average university program, and you get paid through the majority of your 4 year apprenticeship versus going to UBC and leaving severely in the hole.

This is US data cause they summarize nicer:

Holy fuck, fuck picture posting here's the link:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employmen...try-bubble.htm

What you are seeing is that utilities workers, construction workers, mining and logging, and manufacturing are all above average.

Retail, leisure and education and health lag behind.

Also plumbing is an easily accessible one for general people who know nothing of trades. Hence why I use it as an example. I would never suggest someone goes and become a shitter mechanic. Become a millwright, welder, electrician, heavy duty mechanic, steam fitter, etc. there are way better trades than being a poop technician.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CgUo0..._web_copy_link

$610k for that shoebox in Toronto!

Yeah regular peoples vehicle repairs cost as much as running a work van.
People who are good at what they do will be successful however they get there. It’s not degrees that are holding people back, it’s getting a degree with no plan of how to use it in a job market. Trades make that substantially easier because there is really no decisions to make other than who to work for, not what to do with it. Combined with work experience in the related field.

I don't know, wasn't my experience it was pretty slow back around 2011, at least commercial construction, after the Olympics it was pretty bad for about 3 years. I go back and look what we were bidding back then, labour rates were 50% of what we charge today and we couldn't buy a job at those rates.

Rates in our trade have stayed pretty stagnant the last 6 or 7 years but over the last year we've seen tradesmen demanding more and getting it and fully expect it to keep moving upward for the next few years at least. It's just way too busy for that not to happen, I can only speak on the market I'm working in which is commercial and infrastructure projects.

I might be wrongly assuming this, but I'm guessing you are limited to experience just in Lower Mainland/Areas surrounding Vancouver?

Construction is an industry that you have to go where the construction if you want to escape the valleys of the industry. I've operated across western canada for the last 10 years, and besides the first few months of Covid where there was uncertainty, I've had no issues with needing to buy jobs, or shortage of work. Yes there was peaks and valleys as we were bidding jobs and depended on how many jobs we were working at any given point, and their scale.

The other thing that you are incorrectly correlating is your experience looking at your estimating history to the income level of your trades people. I highly doubt at some point in your payroll you were paying your tradespeople 50% of what you are now. Your trades when tower construction in vancouver slowed down, probably moved to home construction in whistler, or kelowna. Or Industrial construction in PG, etc.

The wage of a tradesperson never went from $40/hour to $20/hour in the history of this industry. When I started a CJM made 35-38 depending on company (this was assuming you worked for PCL, ledcor, etc). Not joe blow construction with 5 guys and a pickup. Since then hourly rates have steadily climbed to 40-45 an hour.

How does BMO print money. I'm not too familiar FeelsBadMan

Not a single meal aside from fastfood is under $17.50 tax in nowadays.

Fast food hovers around $10 for value menu. $12 - 15 for regular menu, but I can't afford non value menu so might be off :drunk:

pho is still about $13 or so for a large bowl, with tax it's under 17.50, but point taken.

Yeah the main point is that cost of living dictates that what we think is a decent wage, and totally was years ago, has been massively outpaced. It’s still the same shit wage with a different number.

I personally only look at work in the lower mainland but the company I work for had offices in Regina, Calgary, Kelowna, Victoria and Vancouver at the time so we were doing work all over western Canada.

No, the hourly wages never really dropped for guys already employed but for new hires during that period it did though because there were a lot of unemployed guys in our trade after the Olympics and certainly for the piece work rates it did. When I'm talking about bidding rates I'm referring to what we were charging, trying to keep guys busy and taking work at cost or even below cost to not lose good guys because at the time you literally couldn't buy a job, again not always a direct correlation between pricing (what we're bidding) and wages, especially in that market but wages certainly were not moving upwards.

Like I said there really hadn't been much movement in wages in years out in the field until the last year or so, two years ago the starting wage wasn't much more than it was 10 years ago. The piece work rates tell you a lot about the movement of wages but again they don't move exactly at the same as rates for hourly guys.

I agree with you on where the wages are today, we're seeing the same thing, you're not finding anyone with experience for under $40 an hour and it goes up from there.

$13 + 10% tip + 5% tax = $14.95

https://pho37.ca/
^
I started going here and it was like $15.95 but the soup is like crack :lawl:

Do you guys always order viet coffee + spring roll or share a banh mi or strictly pho?

lower mainland experience, and also experienced post olympics rut... it was rough for a few years. only 'busy-ness' felt like existing large projects or infrastructure.

commercial and even resi was tight. also loss of employees as well as meme stated, they moved to where the work was abundant as was the pay, such as oil fields back then (before they went kaput).

still happy i made the switch to construction from tech overall though, was way more stable and easier to start a family/get a home, etc.

and wtf is with pho places i see a bowl or plate for $15-17 wtf it's same as gourmet ramen now.

gourmet ramen is like that price before tip/tax these days

Pho / Ramen these days..oof. I don't think I can afford to eat out in Vancouver anymore. Need to make over $350K just to keep up with you guys.

300k as a plumber? That's got to be like top 1-3%? If we are comparing top percentile to top percentile, one could say getting an arts degree could make you millions by becoming a c-suite executive... All sources that I can find says that average salary for a plumber is like ~60-80k. Obviously better than a barista but far from 300k.

i meant viet is the same price as gourmet ramen now :(

yeah plumbers don't make that kind of money. if you had your own company you can't just work at a job site for 40 hours a week. from what i've seen plumbers are juggling jobs non stop and they will show up to a job for maybe a day at a time, then fuck off to who knows where for a week, then after non stop calls to get them to finish the job you have to hire another plumber.

Just some light reading, yea we're not in a recession guys wink wink nudge nudge :ifyouknow::troll: that's what the gov wants you to think so you don't panic sell and death spiral the economy


https://www.google.com/amp/s/betterd...ast-lower/amp/

So who is gonna make the jobs discussion thread....

My job is basically recession proof as I work across North America, things could get lean, but I will always be collecting a salary. My wife's is fully recession proof since kids don't stop getting sick unfortunately.

Hoping to upgrade real estate next year.