Here's your 6-figure salary welder.
Posted on 04/22/2014 8:16:56 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
In American high schools, it is becoming increasingly hard to defend the vanishing of shop class from the curriculum. The trend began in the 1970s, when it became conventional wisdom that a four-year college degree was essential. As Forbes magazine reported in 2012, 90% of shop classes have been eliminated for the Los Angeles unified school district's 660,000 students. Yet a 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics study shows that 48% of all college graduates are working in jobs that don't require a four-year degree.
Too many young people have four-year liberal-arts degrees, are thousands of dollars in debt and find themselves serving coffee at Starbucks SBUX +0.95% or working part-time at the mall. Many of them would have been better off with a two-year skilled-trade or technical education that provides the skills to secure a well-paying job.
A good trade to consider: welding. I recently visited Pioneer Pipe in the Utica and Marcellus shale area of Ohio and learned that last year the company paid 60 of its welders more than $150,000 and two of its welders over $200,000. The owner, Dave Archer, said he has had to turn down orders because he can't find enough skilled welders.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Most of mu welding has been stick.
I was a commercial wall and ceiling contractor for over 40 years and my guys and myself had to be light guage certified.
Everything we did was 20ga. to 10 guage and almost all of it was with 3/32 7014 iron powder rod.
I started off when i was 8 and taught myself to weld and channeled the neighbors 32, 5 window coupe which by the way wound up on the cover of hot Rod magazine a few years later.
I think quite a bit of this is due to K-12 education being taken over almost completely by women.
Most women don’t want anything to do with getting dirty, working outdoors or breaking a sweat. Most women see the BA/MA/PhD track as the road to success, and they look down their nose at the trades because lots of what it takes to succeed in the trades is stuff that women see as being “beneath them.” They certainly look down their noses at working men - being in the company of women with degreed letters after their name (but no income) around men with a AAS or certificate (or lessons from the School of Hard Knocks) who do have tidy incomes is funny as hell to watch. You see the women realize “Hey, this guy is making good money...” and then they realize “Ooooo... but he doesn’t have a degree, so he’s not husband material... he won’t have read any of the books I’ve had to read.”
But then, to cap it off, it is even more amusing to listen to young women bitch, piss, whine and moan how they can’t find a man who can “fix stuff around the house.” Well, ladies, you got what you wanted when you turned men into drug-addled zombies in the K-12 system to get them to pay attention to endless droning about book learning: guys who don’t know a screwdriver from a chisel, and could (*&K-up an anvil without a hammer.
I think what has to happen to change this is to get a handle on the high schools and have vocational tracks.
When kids ask me for advice or a perspective on what they should study, increasingly I’m telling them to look very hard at the trades, welding, machining, diesel wrenching, etc. The money is there. More money is going to be there pretty quickly as the Boomers retire.
When kids ask “why can’t I get a better paying job with some BA degree?” I ask them: “Is there any situation where you can imagine you being called into the office at 3:00 AM on an emergency, and getting someone to pay you handsomely for going in?”
Usually, the answer is “no.” No one needs post-modernist trans-sexual, multi-cultural poetry analyzed, much less written, on an emergency basis. No one.
Then I point out: “Plumbers get calls at nights, on weekends, on holidays, even Thanksgiving and Christmas... and they charge appropriately, and people are willing to pay these plumbers, because they want that messy problem fixed RIGHT NOW.”
Every now and then, I’m rewarded with a light bulb going on...
later follow -up
Lord knows I like Sarah, but I happen to disagree with her a bit on this. Keep in mind that most repressive measures such as gun control, taxes, and other restrictions on our freedoms originate not at the Federal level, but at the state level. I’m not seeing how an article V convention that would in effect devolve power from the Federal to the state level would fix that.
Do we really think that giving more power to the states governments of VT, IL, NY, NJ and even TX is going to result in a freer populace?
Oops. Wrong thread.
I suspect you are correct. Plumbers and electricians are supposed to be licensed by the state; roofers, framers, drywallers, etc. don't need a license.
Of course, if they can now get a driver's license, then why not a plumber's license?
Depends on what area of the country, Rural or Urban and how many uncertified illegals are working the area.
I have found this breed of ‘college educated’ females to be unappreciative, dull, self-centered, and boring. They've worked for years to reduce K-12 males into subsurvient, harmless drones — girly men or metrosexuals — and then constantly complain they can't find ‘real’ men. Sorry ladies, you're just getting back the crop of eunuchs you've cultivated.
Why is a woman like Sarah Palin such a threat to women of this ilk? Because Palin is bright, hasn't gone to prestegious Ivy League schools, is no stranger to hard work and getting her hands dirty, appreciates men who do real work (and educational resume is no disqualifier), don't pose as pseudo intellectual phonies, and raises her kids in a hetrosexual family with a mother and a father.
Williston ND, doing residential work, about $100.00/hr. More in the oil patch.
But as a welder, wouldn’t you be spending your life in a loud, dirty, dangerous environment, wearing a funky helmut?
I teach in Rural Virginia. About 2-4% of our female population are “Princesses.” The rest have no trouble getting their hands dirty. It all depends on how they are raised up.
I am a pipe fitter working in a good modern shop. Night shift has 5 fitters and 15 welders, three welders per fitter. Tonight was a good night. I made 44 fits and the welders completed 9 pipe spools. all has to pass NDT xray. The shop is heated in the winter and lots of fans and air movers in the summer. We can take a short break whenever one wants and no supervisor bird dogging ya. Good benefits with 2 weeks vacation the first year, including holiday pay and sick leave. Not a college grad in the bunch.
Hey, by how much they’re paying, I guess they better take good care of you!
Bet you are a tough survivor though - and a highly skilled one.
But dangerous. Knew a guy who almost died. He gave it up.
Only in the mid $20’s but the bennies are good. Everything comes in pre cut to length and beveled, overhead cranes to do all the lifting. I use to work out in the field and although it pays a bit more, these old bones like this gravy job just fine. We average between 50 and 60 hours a week.
I’ve been welding industrially for 30 years. Never heard of anybody making $150K. Must be multi- certificate guys with massive pipeline experience. I make fair enough wages with good benefits. But nothing near six figures.
There are some specialty companies out there that pay extremely well. They travel extensively on a moments notice and can get a job done in a fourth of the time it takes most companies.
So are pipe fitters that much more plentiful than welders, or do you have to move up the pipefitters ranks with more skills or a higher-level employer?
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