It's not exactly that simple. I know an employer in the cabinetry field. It's not genius work in the shop but you can't be asleep.
He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.
The town is full of hundreds of healthy males working for Walmart, oil change shops, non commission retail, and all those sorts.
There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
> There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
Yes, it is called an insufficient pay to quality of life at work ratio, which also incorporates volatility of income.
All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.
This doesn't follow nearly as well in the trades. Plumbers make good money not just because they are good at putting pipes together, but because most people don't want to spend their day getting dripped on or even dealing with wastewater.
> All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.
This is my understanding as well. Random piecemeal work in random places that only have one hotel and still manage to nail you for 150/night.
Yeah you can make $45k in 3 months, but it's 4 hours from nowhere, the work isn't consistent, and they don't offer healthcare or 401k. You can't make a live out of 1 month here, 7 months here, etc., and options like buying a big sleeper van isn't really an option when winter in rural Ohio comes around, etc.
But with pay like that, the shop would be out of business, because the consumers won't shoulder the resulting high price of the cabinets.
Either the business finds a way to be much more efficient (e.g. producing cabinets much faster and selling wider) while paying the workers more, or it has to scrape by while employing some less fortunate folks. (Or shut down, or course.)
We do not know all the details. Does the $60K job require working nights or overtime? Does it require a flexible schedule?
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm shows there are not many subfields of cabinetmaking that average $60K/year. One is "Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing" which averages $60,520/year, so another issue is the actual job may call for more experience than just being able to use a screwdriver.
Otherwise, residential building construction laborers make $ 42,950/year, says https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm . They have more appropriate training than a grocery stocker. Why aren't they applying?
I have some family members in the cabinet business. Nobody is paying $60k/yr unless they're getting a lot of OT. They're commuting 2+ hours each way, don't get paid for the drive time, drive their own trucks, have their own tools. Most cabinet shops (almost all) don't provide any kind of benefits or PTO.
So, $25/hr, plus horrible commutes, plus tons of time and expense. There's a reason that guy can't find anybody, he's not telling you the whole story.
I've posted here before about my dad in the cabinet field. He got a raise to $20 an hour in 1991. He worked a lot of overtime too, so by the end of the year I'm sure that was over $50k. In 1991.
It’s really hard to undo people’s impression of what things are “supposed” to cost after decades of outsourcing manufacturing to low-wage countries. People who aren’t looking for artisan work really aren’t interested in paying inflation-adjusted prices from 30+ years ago, which is an interesting pairing to the not uncommon complaints that things don’t last as long.
Well, the labor force has finally decided they're not going to do hard work for starvation wages. The guys running the companies have increased prices, but haven't sent that money down to the labor force. I have a friend that's a plumber, he easily makes his company $450k/yr in billable services, he's making less than $30/hr.
The most important part is that these were not starvation wages in the 80s!
People used to pay american employees enough to survive, thrive, and even support local businesses that didn't have to crush their margins to 2% to compete with walmart.
The reason everything sucks is because americans have only cared about "sticker price" in comparison shopping for decades, and I posit that's mostly because the american income has spent the past several decades being cut in half simply because employers didn't pay people.
Yeah, between active wage theft and the growing profit-taking I’m not surprised that the union movement is stronger than it’s been in my lifetime. I don’t know your friend but I know a bunch of people like him.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for your friend to start his own plumbing company with some other disgruntled plumbers, and offer lower rates too to happy homeowners.
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics the mean hourly wage for cabinet makers and bench carpenters as of May 2022 was $20.25 per hour. Even in San Francisco the mean hourly wage was only $26.37. Lesson for today - your instincts abiut whay real world, non-dev jobs pay are totally out of whack with reality
Would you believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Here are the "Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2022" for "51-7011 Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm
(2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.
The "Top paying industries for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" are:
Employment Annual mean wage
Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing 240 $ 60,520
Federal Executive Branch 190 $ 60,460
In the "Industries with the highest concentration of employment in Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" the best paying is:
Motor Vehicle Body 3,040 $ 49,990
and Trailer Manufacturing
The most common (at 20% of the industry) is:
Furniture and Related 68,860 $ 41,620
Product Manufacturing
EDIT: in 2001 the mean annual wage for cabinetmakers and bench carpenters was $25,120 with median of $10.74/hour and mean of $11.40. https://archive.org/details/welcometoamerica00demi/page/984/... . (It is the oldest record I could find, published in "Welcome to America : the complete guide for immigrants : the English-Russian version".)
What did your father do in the cabinet field to get $20 an hour in 1991?
He had just moved to the US in 1988. He had no real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat when he was a teenager. In 1989 my mom and I moved here with him. In 1991, he got a raise to $20 and we went to Price Club (Costco) and bought a ton of groceries, and took a photo with them on the kitchen table with all 3 of us using a self timer. It's a major memory of mine.
He was one of the 'foreman' in the shop handling the custom fixture/reception desk line. So if Sun Microsystems at the time wanted new cabinets for their new building, the rest of the shop would build the boxes, but my dad's department would build the reception desk. Basically, you could give my dad some drawings from an architect and my dad could figure out how to make it, while also getting it into the building. He was still cutting and assembling then too as 'engineering' and cutlisting is a short part of that overall work.
From the BoL, a cabinetmaker is someone who job is to "Cut, shape, and assemble wooden articles or set up and operate a variety of woodworking machines, such as power saws, jointers, and mortisers to surface, cut, or shape lumber or to fabricate parts for wood products."
Your father did more than that. He was a foreman, he did design, and he worked on custom office furniture including installation. Of course he gets paid more than a non-supervisory cabinetmaker working in a factory.
As a first approximation, "First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers" at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes471011.htm says the mean wage is $77,650 - nearly twice as much as the mean wage for a cabinetmaker at $42,120.
> You're not going to find someone screwing together ikea like boxes in America.
That's actually quite literally what my cabinetmaker did for my most recent home. Ikea cabinets cut down to size in his shop, and installed when ready/all the parts got in. Other brands seemed pretty identical to this - largely premade parts with a few sections designed to cut down to size.
Didn't seem to take much more than a measuring tape and a couple different saws to me. I'm sure I'm being flippant, but it was eye opening seeing that process vs. watching my grandparents build a second home growing up.
Part of the reason wages have not kept up is also due to the work becoming less skilled. The middle has been more or less completely hollowed out as far as I can tell. The types of job my grandfathers both would have set the dinner table with in their respective trades simply no longer exist. You either need to go mass-market low-end and seemingly as low quality as gets you a check in the mail, or high-end luxury market and all the spit'n'polish that entails.
I'd love to be wrong - but trying to simply find those craftsmen in the "middle" to hire is more or less impossible for me.
That's not a cabinet maker, that's a handyman basically.
When I said people should go work for a cabinet shop and make $60k+, I meant in a place that's making medium to high grade cabinets, custom hopefully or atleast to spec for track homes at worst.
What you're describing is somebody modifying mass produced cabinets from a catalog and installing them.
The installers I know all make $80k+ a year if they do work you're not embarrassed about.
You earlier described the position as "screwing a cabinet together for $60k", when you wondered why a stocker making $40K wouldn't want to change jobs.
Now you are describing a position which requires non-trivial training.
How long does it take to learn those skills? Who pays for the training?
https://www.carpenterstraininginstitute.org/apprenticeship-p... says "To graduate from cabinet maker apprentice to journeyworker, you’ll complete 7,000 hours of on-the-job training (OJT) and 640 hours of classroom learning." That's much more training than needed for stocking. It gives these statistics for the carpenters training as a whole:
Average earnings for all first-year students:
$33,436 – $46,363 + benefits*
Average earnings for all second-year students:
$45,600 – $63,200 + benefits
Average earnings for all third-year students:
$51,666 – $71,646 + benefits*
Average earnings for all fourth-year students:
$57,748 – $80,077 + benefits*
Journeyperson
$60,789 – $84,295 + benefits*
Foreman
$72,485 – $97,010 + benefits*
which again means $60K/year requires a lot more training than being a stock clerk.
Can you point to a job listing for this sort of position? I looked and found roughly comparable positions, but paying less than $80K.
"As a Woodworking Prop Builder, you will play a pivotal role in bringing our clients' visions to life by crafting unique and eye-catching props and decor pieces. Your craftsmanship will be on display at a wide range of events, from weddings and corporate gatherings to private parties and more." paying $18-$22 hourly
"The Craftsworker, Carpenter position focuses on carpentry and basic construction related projects/repairs. The position requires good math skills and the ability to think outside of the box. Experience in set design or custom woodworking is a plus. The Craftsworker, Carpenter works with a variety of materials, such as wood, fiberglass, rebar and concrete. The Craftsworker, Carpenter is often called upon to build/construct things that don’t come with blueprints or an instruction manual; they are built to specifications of the client and/or to fit in an allotted amount of space. Projects can vary from day to day, based on work orders, department requests, routine maintenance, or capital projects. Tasks can include such things as roofing; fencing; wood structure repairs; fixing doors/door hardware; installing door systems and windows; fixing ADA building access buttons; fixing shift doors in an animal enclosure; constructing safety fences/barriers for an exhibit; designing and building an automatic animal feeder disguised to look like a tree; or constructing various exhibit elements such as artificial plants, rocks or trees." paying $30/hour. That's far more than cabinet working and still only $60K/year.
(The site I was using doesn't have linkable URLs.)
Zip Recruiter has positions for cabinet maker in the range "$12-22/hr".
It matters to me. And unless we want to assume my father was special and gifted a salary long ago, and now everyone I know in that industry from his lifetime in it is an anomaly, I have to talk about it.
Sure you could. At that point you should just give up entirely on talking to people if you think I'm lying about the experience of my cabinet maker father.
You could be telling the truth as far as you know. Did your father tell you everything?
That's a simple way to resolve this impasse - point to a job ad for a cabinet maker offering $60K/year for someone with no "real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat". [1]
You know an employer right now who is looking for people. Can you point to a help-wanted ad for that company showing what they are looking for?
I did a job search and found a $66K/year Cabinet Maker I job in Hawaii (which is one of the best paying places for cabinet workers according to the BLS tables you don't trust), for the state Department of Education. However, it requires apprentice training or 4 years of carpentry experience. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Cabinet+maker&l=Hawaii
From the same site, in Hawaii, there's an offer for on-the-job training, starting at $17/hour, so about $35K/year + overtime.
Otherwise there are cabinet maker jobs in Hawaii in the $20-$25/hour range and require a few years of experience. The same holds for elsewhere in the US.
I did find that CalTech is looking for "a Journeyperson level contributor in carpentry and cabinet making" at https://phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti... and they pay $29.75 - $43.75 Per Hour, but require "Completion of apprenticeship or equivalent training, one year or more of journeyperson level experience and five or more year’s total experience in cabinet and/or carpentry trades"
Furthermore, that person "will apply journeyperson level skills in providing building maintenance, laboratory installations and rehabilitation projects. This person will also apply cabinet making skills to the layout, fabrication, and installation of new and rehabilitation projects" and must be able to weld, and they would like someone with at least 5 years of work experience in a university or facilities setting and CNC machining certification.
So yes, "approach $100k for dependable people that known the field" is possible. But that's someone with years of experience, and for something far beyond the basic skills your father had.
> He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.
I've seen trade jobs that get described like this. However the reality is different. The jobs are effectively seasonal and no one makes $60k because they don't end up working a full 52 weeks of the year. They get paid per job and once they finish the job there's no work and thus no pay until the next job. A lot of times employees are expected to own and supply their own tools. They often also require a commute out to a job site.
Working trades like this ends up averaging out to a bit better than minimum wage but without predictable schedules and/or long commutes. When someone makes six figures it's because the job was a new subdivision or something.
If you fail at hiring you have failed at the most important aspect of running a business. He is doing something or several things wrong, and there is no excuse. He can't blame anybody but himself for his troubles finding people. Just like you can't blame your competitors if you don't get customers. Hiring and training is a crucial part of running a business. Is he training young men to work for him, or is that "somebody else's job"?
Usually the issue there is nobody knows it exists. Or they are intimidated by not having skills, and having worked for WalMart, no expectation of any meaningful training.
Also, they don't own a suitable truck, nor own the suitable tools. The job might pay twice as much as WalMart, but if it costs you $40k-80k to enter that line of business, the wage differential is insufficient to pay both the capital expenditure plus depreciation of the required equipment. With auto mechanics, the folks selling tools (such as the Snap-On Tools truck operator) will handle the financing.
It might ease of connecting workers to jobs. Walmart, wuick lube places, retailers all spend a lot of effort to make it known they're hiring and how to apply.
I'll tell you exactly what that is is cuz I'm that guy. Couldn't get anyone to take a chance and train me. I'm rather quite handy and safety conscious but couldn't get a job doing production work without experience period.
If you want stock boys you can pay em cheap but you gotta train em.
Instead I moved and found work in tech which matched my education.
Prior experience cannot be the for setting wages. No matter how rustled an employers jimmie’s over big numbers, when enough are out of because it does not make financial sense to take a job, people will revolt.
If small businesses cannot hang due to their model (and sensibilities) being based on 1990s math, the solution is tax the mega rich and rebalance the market in the aggregate.
Screwing a cabinet together is actual work, you need to complete things at some expected pace at some expected quality (it's a low bar, but there's a bar).
At Walmart most of the time you can just fuck around and not do much work, if you get fired at Walmart you just go fuck around at an oil change shop until they fire you. I know men that have done this their whole lives.
For a much more charitable view, Everyone everywhere in the US knows walmart and how to get employed by them. Further, they trust walmart will pay on time. How many people know of Dave's cabinetry shop? How many people trust Dave's shop?
To me, a large part of the actual problem here is a marketing problem. It's really hard for a small shop to market that "hey, we need workers, we are willing to pay a premium, and no we aren't a scam company".
Well, and you have to put up with Dave. He might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with him, for all we know. Dave can't afford to pay me enough to put up with his toxic abusive bossiness.
Well, and you have to put up with your Walmart boss. S/he might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with them, for all we know. Walmart can't afford to pay me enough to put up with their toxic abusive bossiness, and don't offer much guarantee that the potential boss is better than Dave.
Walmart might be the biggest scam company in the United States — they've stolen over $100 million in unpaid overtime, and pay wages so low that they've recommend their employees utilize foodstamps. Then there are the standard corporate playbooks: a popular one is to keep a significant amount of employees just under full-time so you don't have to legally give them benefits.
There are hundreds of Dave's at corporate Walmart, and they care so little about the employees at any given location that they probably wouldn't even return an email, let alone talk to shift workers face-to-face.
What makes it harder for many of those smaller shops is that they require the new worker to own their own tools. WalMart does not require workers to supply their own forklifts, nor bring their own mops & buckets when they start working there.
Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.
Idk if you've been to a Walmart or an oil change place.. but they get people to work pretty hard and efficiently for low wages. That's basically their secret sauce. My Walmart appears to be staffed by zombies, yet for the most part the store functions pretty well day in a day out, 365 days a year.
Yes but they also get people who will just do the bare minimum and make everyone around them pick up the slack until someone takes the effort to fire them. There's essentially an entire category of people who do this.
They get paid the bare minumum and do the bare minimum in exchange. I don’t see a problem here. What do you do BTW? I would bet that not assembling cabinets.
The problem is that they put the whole store behind, then Walmart blames everyone for the store being behind and pressures them accordingly. Which is Walmart's fault, of course, but Walmart might as well be a force of nature as far as its workers are concerned; they can't change Walmart.
They're actually dead weight that the entire organization carries around, I honestly think in some cases they'd be better off being paid to not come to work.
What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.
Custom cabinet work does not have a low bar. You need to be familiar with multiple joinery techniques and finishing methods, even if your parts are coming straight off a CNC. Getting them perfectly square, face framed, mounted etc takes a lot of time and attention. For houses where the framing was done poorly, it takes even more time.
I believe fairly competent cabinet assemblers / installers are making $40-75 / hour depending on location. Everyone else paying less is half-assing it or doing a poor job.
Sure, but an apprentice can learn the basics to be useful on the job in a couple days.
That's not the point anyway, working entry-level retail is pretty much a 0 stakes job — quality has been mostly engineered out of it. Even a basic cabinet assembly job requires some quality control. Some people do not want to do anything of quality.
IMO we'd all be better off if people had a universal basic income and these people could spend more time finding something else to do with their time.
A Walmart job is an exceedingly reliable paycheck for a clean job in a climate-controlled environment where the majority of the occupational risk is exposure to the public.
I can't fault anyone for choosing that option if they can live with the income level, it's relatively sane.
> Personally, I'd rather work with all of the chemicals...
My best friend was a chemist. He told stories of some of the accidents he saw (or heard, or saw the property damage, or triaged victims of, or ...) during the relatively few years when he worked in a lab like that.
Quite a few of the chemists in that lab left chemistry, and did not return. My friend left the lab, and moved into computational chemistry.
> and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
This is so bizarre. If someone knows how to build a cabinet, why would you promote them so they no longer build cabinets? If someone loves building cabinets, the only way to make more money is to stop building them...
It's one of the problem why companies cannot find skilled workers...
A friend of mine explained it as "We rise to the level of our own incompetence". Start a job at level 1, do a good job, get a promotion/find a new job to rise to level 2. Repeat until suddenly, you were really good at doing X job, but just got promoted/moved to doing Y job and now you are struggling because it's not very related to what you did in the previous position that you were good at.
It makes sense at a certain level, and can explain why we get so many people in positions they don't seem suited for.
Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building. But being an expert builder usually means you are intelligent and thoughtful and logical. So if you combine your cabinet experience with those traits, you are a great candidate for project manager, where you can be paid more and provide more for your family.
It's not like they are forced into it. No shortage of people that turn down the chance to get into management.
> Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building.
That's rarely a thing. Most jobs pay is not correlated to the value it creates. Simple example is software development. Team of 10 can create product that generates millions every day, but their pay will not be correlated in any way with that revenue. Maybe a manager will get a bonus, but most of the money flows to the owners.
Sounds like an advertising problem. How would anyone know about those cabinet making jobs, as opposed to very visible jobs at places like Walmart? I've certainly never seen an ad for a $60k a year entry level cabinet-making job!
He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.
The town is full of hundreds of healthy males working for Walmart, oil change shops, non commission retail, and all those sorts.
There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.