The April Jobs Report: White Collar Blues, Blue Collar Wins

Supply and demand, it turns out, can be a wonderful thing. Especially if you're a carpenter or an electrician.

The April jobs report is out, and it's not terribly encouraging. Hiring is down, wage growth is down, and unemployment is up. Things aren't looking too good for Bidenomics.

The US economy added 175,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 3.9% last month, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Friday. Wall Street economists had expected nonfarm payrolls to rise by 240,000 and the unemployment rate to remain at 3.8%, according to Bloomberg data.
Wages also rose less than forecast, with average hourly earnings rising 0.2% over last month and 3.9% over the last year. Economists had expected to see a monthly jump of 0.3% in April and a 4% rise over last year.

It turns out that the Biden administration is about as adept in matters economic as they are in... well, everything else, which is to say, not very.

Nancy Pelosi Flips Her Lid When MSNBC Host Points Out Inconvenient Truth About Biden's Economy

But there's a bright spot in the employment picture right now, and it's one that Democrats can take some credit for, although it wasn't intentional. It turns out employment in the trades is much more solid. In other words: While white-collar workers are sweating a tepid jobs market, blue-collar workers are enjoying a seller's market.

America's job market increasingly appears to be splitting into two tracks, economists say, alongside a steady demand for skilled workers and a flagging interest in hiring more "knowledge-based" professionals.
The evidence can be found in the data, which shows a higher unemployment rate for professional and business services workers, and a lower one for people who work in manufacturing.
"It's a buyer's market for brain and a seller's market for brawn," said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at the jobs and workplace search site Glassdoor.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching the jobs market as well as trends in education for the last twenty years or so.

It hasn't been exclusively Democrats that have pushed the "every kid should go to college" horse squeeze, but they have hammered that notion the hardest, and you can look at the state of higher education now and see the results — tons of government money poured into grants and government-guaranteed loans, lowered standards to give access to members of favored groups who would not otherwise pass the requirements and a blossoming of useless Underwater Ethnic Dog-Polishing Studies degrees that equip young adults with no marketable skills but saddle them with five or six figures of debt, which they then scream for the taxpayers to take on for them.

Meanwhile, the young men (and, yes, it's mostly men) who are going into the trades are doing quite well. A welder in the United States, as of May 1st, can expect to earn as much as $87,000 to $163,000 per year. A carpenter can earn from $63,000 to $104,000. An electrician, from $68,000 to $113,000. That's not a bad wage for an honest day's work that doesn't carry with it an enormous load of student loan debt, not to mention losing four to eight years earning a degree that equips one to be no more than a Starbucks barista.

For some years now I've been advising young men, including my sons-in-law and my older grandson, to forget college and go into the trades. Our oldest daughter's husband runs a small handyman and woodworking business with his father, and they are constantly working and making, candidly, a very good living. For young men right now, the trades are where it's at, and it's largely because we have failed, as a nation, to place value on blue-collar work.

That may be changing now. The April jobs report may be showing some evidence of this.

We used to be a nation of people who make things. We can be again, but we need to get young people disabused of the notion that they can go to a university, spend four to eight years whining and protesting, come away with it with a horse-squeeze "Studies" degree, and earn anything more than minimum wage.