FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

New York - Workin' Man's Blues?


We were at a bar with these tradesmen the other day and one of them was going on and on about how he'd taken off a day of overtime just to hang out with his buds. He kept bringing it up like it was the greatest thing man had ever sacrificed for man, so finally we were like, "Christ guy, what are you guilting out your pals over, $200?, $300?" The guy was like, "Um, try $1,000." After our spit take we did some quick napkin calculations and decided to figure out how this working-class schlub can pull in $75 an hour doing basic electrical work on the same houses the average middle-class family is struggling not to lose and still be considered a rung down the social ladder.

For starters our guy ended up being union, which obviously makes a good deal of a difference--check out this table this table at the LRA. The median for union construction is $900 a week? When was the last time anybody made that kind of money with their hands, dealing included? But even if you just take the paltry non-union wages (excluding the service industry, which everyone already knows is an inescapable poor-hole) and spread them over an average work week, you're still raking in
the same hourly wage as most paralegals.

Of course, what this chart never goes into is how these incomes AREN'T based on the average work week. We asked our pal how much time he had to put in a the job site to earn that kind of day rate and after some "poor little me" tales about getting up at 4 a.m. and working 15-hour days he finally admitted that, divided up over the year, he probably worked 15-20 hours a week tops, leaving him the rest to pick out a Ducati with flames that match his jacket. In fact, when we started asking the guys with him, the biggest complaint was how little they were able to work and how they'd sometimes have as much as a month between jobs where they had to "just sit around" and live off their earnings. Can you imagine? Meanwhile, all these lucky scions of the middle class get to spend their days hunched over a desk trying to pay off their student loans so they can start working on a mortgage they'll have to pay off.