Ape Man

I always get mad when I hear people spouting off about how the immigrants are taking away jobs from those poor blue collar Americans. Speaking as a blue collar American, I know that this is not so. There are plenty of good jobs out there for blue collar Americans; you just have to want them.

I live in an area that is aging rapidly because most of young people move out of the area. One of the commonly cited reasons for this outward migration is that there are no jobs in the area. Yet at the same time a local heating company sends out flyers advertising the fact that they will hire people off the streets with no experience and pay them to learn how to be HVAC techs.

This is not a scam and it is not an isolated incident. All over the country there is a desperate shortage of HVAC techs. The trade magazines are full of advice on how to find and retain techs. And this is not just because of the boom times that we are currently living in. People in the north need their furnaces fixed no matter what the economic climate is like. Likewise, most people in the south would have to get pretty desperate before they would live without air conditioning. So you have this constant demand that has to be met and yet HVAC techs are retiring in droves.

Of course, there are other trades that are in similar positions. Certain medical jobs are also in high demand around the country. The long and the short of it is that you can get a decent blue collar job anywhere in the country by just taking about 6 months of education at a local trade school. And if you are poor enough, you can find government money to fund that education.

I know of an immigrant from Africa who held down a low paying job, went to a trade school, and supported his family back in Africa all at the same time (he planned on using his trade education to get a better job so that he could pay his way through college). If some dude that just got off the boat can do it, a native born American can do it.

The reason that this issue bugs me so much is that a few years back I wanted to better myself. I wanted to get into either the electrical field or HVAC field. To that end I wanted to take classes in the evening so that I could qualify for jobs in the field. I started out wanting to take one evening HVAC course that would have qualified me for a particular job that was always in demand. But that was canceled twice on me in spite of the fact that a co-worker and I went around trying to draft people to take the class. So I started trying to take any class that was remotely connected to the fields I wanted to get into, but they kept on getting canceled for lack of interest.

It was very frustrating for me to see all these jobs available in those sectors and yet there was not enough interest in those trades to warrant holding evening classes to enable one to get a job in those areas. As it turned out, that did not matter. I more or less got to where I wanted to go anyway.

But it still amazes me that there is so little interest in learning a trade that will pay you a decent wage. And I still find it disgusting that so many of my compatriots lie around complaining that immigrants are stealing all the good jobs.

Their definition of a good job seems to be one in which you don’t have to know anything and you don’t have to do anything and you still get paid well. I don’t know that such jobs were ever plentiful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Economics, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.