
The job no one wants: young people won't work in logging - hecubus
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/23/logging-industry-work-employment-oregon
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mikestew
I'm old enough to remember a time when shit jobs paid really well because,
well, they were shit jobs. Let's take the bottom of the barrel: bailing hay in
the August heat of the Midwest. Dead simple job: take heavy bail of hay, put
it on truck. Alternatively, take bail from truck, put in barn. Anyone with two
working synapses could do it. And it paid the equivalent to $16/hour in 2017
dollars. Great job for a high school kid who had no real skills. Hardest job
I've ever had by a long shot.

Longshoreman? Hard, dangerous work, but pays really well. Logging? Who the
hell wants to be a logger? Anyone that has few skills but wants a decent
living.

But it seems that over the years these shit jobs have started to have the shit
pay to go with it. I'm sure there are multiple factors involved, starting with
a downturn of union membership, but something or things has changed. And now
industries wonder why they can't find anyone. Well, actually, I truly doubt
they are wondering, as they ought to know better than I do what the reason is.
But "they" would like to continue to live in the fantasy land where people
stand in line for a minimum wage job that is likely to get them killed or
seriously injured.

~~~
hangonhn
Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that.
Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of
flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them
too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The
container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and
destination instead of the ports. During the Vietnam war, the US military
basically forced the ports to adopt container boxes. This dramatically
increased the efficiency of shipping and eradicated longshoremen jobs.
Nowadays though, the people operating the cranes loading and unloading the
container boxes from/to container ships actually make 6 digit salaries.

The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in
unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and
mechanization.

(Source for all this is: The Box ([https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-
Container-Smaller-Econom...](https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-
Smaller-
Economy/dp/0691170819/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1503601940&sr=8-5&keywords=the+box))

~~~
mikestew
_The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that._

An admittedly bad example, I guess. I was thinking welding might fit in that
category (wearing a hot, dark mask all day in not always pleasant conditions),
but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly
enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it. OTOH, a
lot of welders I've known over the years were heavy drinkers.

~~~
hangonhn
"but it takes a fair bit of skill, and it might still pay well. And, oddly
enough, a lot of welders I've known over the years seem to like it."

This is the part that I often find the most fascinating and unintuitive.
Difficult but skillful jobs often have very satisfied workers.

I used to use janitor as the canonical example of an unfulfilling job but was
recently corrected by a friend who told me that janitors actually seem to
enjoy their jobs because their workload is bounded. They just need to clean
the building so they just get their job done and don't have to worry about it
when they're not working. Also, janitors at places like hospitals find a lot
of worth in what they do and some will go the extra mile because they believe
they help patients feel more comfortable in the hospital.

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anonacct37
This sounds like yet another market problem being blamed on "millennials". If
you pay enough I'd imagine some people would take the job. If you can't pay
enough, then I guess the market is speaking to you about the long term outlook
for logging.

~~~
intothev01d
I don't blame people for not flocking to an extremely dangerous and grueling
job only to be underpaid. There's plenty of other options. I get tired of
older generations somehow trying to guilt trip us into continuing in their
line of work when in reality those jobs weren't very good to begin with. Work
smarter not harder. Maybe they never heard of that.

~~~
hardlianotion
It's not an "older generation" thing. It is a "shitty employers try to have
their cake and eat it" thing.

~~~
dclowd9901
They got greedy during the downturn and don't want to give up the sweet
milking of the labor supply.

I wonder how we recovered from this after The Great Depression...

~~~
georgeecollins
Unions

------
wahern
I don't know too much about the industry except that it can be incredibly
dangerous, especially with the sophisticated machinery. I knew somebody who
impaled himself--he wasn't paying well enough attention (so I was told) and
drove a tree trunk right into his cabin and into his abdomen. Miraculous that
he survived, last I heard he was still packing and disinfecting a gaping open
wound a year after the incident.

I don't think he received nearly as much training as described in the article.
And IIRC he hadn't been on the job for more than a few months. But this was in
Alabama, where workers are disposable.

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Boxbot
> Now, fellers can earn as little as $18 an hour.

So they get paid a little more than someone serving burgers in California but
have to deal with much more remote, skilled, difficult, dangerous work. I'm
getting really tired of articles posing this sort of thing as a "labor
shortage".

~~~
cglace
They would have a significantly lower cost of living. So they should be able
to save much more.

~~~
SwellJoe
Also, their likelihood of dying young is among the highest in the developed
world, so they may not need to save at all! What a deal.

~~~
cglace
I never said it was a good deal. Just that cost of living is lower. No need to
snark.

~~~
SwellJoe
My snark is directed upstream, at the folks who believe paying $18/hour for
one of the most deadly jobs in the country is reasonable while also having the
gall to complain about not being able to hire enough people to do it. You were
just in the line of fire; it wasn't intentional.

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whataretensors
Lower worker supply because the job sucks? Increase wages. Capitalism!

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twunde
Another contributing factor not discussed in depth by the article is that
loggers have to travel to remote sites, often without cell service or internet
and usually without the ability to go grab lunch at a nearby deli. You're
essentially cut off socially for the duration of the job, while having a high
likelihood of you or someone close to you dying or being maimed on the job. I
can't imagine too many of the current lumberjacks recommending their children
follow in their footsteps.

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microcolonel
Who cares?

If they don't get enough fellers then they will raise wages and overall comp.
until they do. If they have enough, they will lower wages until they don't. It
is a functioning labour market, and the degree to which people desire to work
for lumber companies is reflected in the wages, and in turn the price of
lumber.

If anything, at $18/hr for dangerous hard labour, they obviously have plenty
of people who want to be fellers. There's no other way that wage would be so
low.

If they have a shortage, lumber simply costs a bit more.

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an27
It's a dangerous job, it doesn't earn much, most people have better options
and then there's the decline in societal appreciation of manliness, so I
understand no one wants this job. No perks at all, not even bragging rights.

Perhaps it even is safer to join the military nowadays?

~~~
bm1362
I'd argue that the military is an order of magnitude safer and you'll get a
decent wage, prestige, the GI bill and free housing.

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hkothari
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention any sort of social stigma against
the work (beyond the low pay and danger). Logging is cutting down trees and in
a world where we're raised now to conserve our forests I'm not surprised that
logging as an occupation is not on the forefront of people's minds.

Even if it's done in an environmentally sound way, I'd assume that there's a
stigma that would be hard to get past.

~~~
maxerickson
Most people don't care _that_ much.

Especially people that aren't confused about where toilet paper comes from.

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tmh79
maybe the industry should pay young people more for their labor...

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
$18 dollars an hour for arguably the most dangerous job in the country. That
doesn't seem like a great deal to you?

~~~
autotune
How about: underwater welder, fisherman, skydiving instructor, firefighter,
electrician, policeman, astronaut, or sanitation engineer?

~~~
pseudalopex
Most of those jobs have much lower fatality rates than logging. (Fishing is
about the same, and I don't think the Bureau of Labor Statistics distinguishes
underwater welders from other divers.)

------
mistercow
This sounds to me like a clever reframing to justify automating these jobs.
It's not "we don't want to pay enough to get humans to do this". It's "nobody
will do these jobs, so we built machines to do them instead".

I'm totally for job automation, and think we should find better solutions to
the problems it causes than "be less efficient". But I also think we should
own up to those negative effects instead of playing a game where we pretend
not to understand how markets work.

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gozur88
Wood is ridiculously expensive. On a percentage basis I doubt a big increase
in wages would change the price of the end product much at all.

This article reminds me of the one we get from growers periodically. They're
having trouble finding people to do the work they need done, so instead of
paying higher wages the solution is to start a media campaign to get
immigration restrictions relaxed so they can flood the market with labor.

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Analemma_
When even a left-wing outlet like The Guardian is willing to uncritically echo
capital's BS about "labor shortages" when the real cause is a lack of
willingness to pay real wages, you know we're in trouble.

Seriously, $18/hr. for the most dangerous job in the country? I'd tell those
people to get fucked.

~~~
TheCowboy
I'd argue the problem is the lack of economic literacy before suggesting The
Guardian is in cahoots with 'Big Lumber'. The headline should be: "Why won't
logging companies increase wages to fill positions?"

Business and economic journalism aren't critical enough of people who complain
about a "skills shortage" and accept their argument at face value. This is
where capitalism should excel: you can't attract necessary talent at price
point $X, then you pay >$X.

Partisan ideologies can cut in multiple directions. For example, if you have
an ideology where you view capitalism as inherently evil you may be ignorant
of where it could be of benefit. If you view workers are excessively self-
entitled, you won't call out companies and managers for not paying enough.

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antisthenes
This actually looks like my ideal job, if only it pays a decent wage and you
do everything with the machines.

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ringaroundthetx
Surprised this wasn't title "Millenials killed the logging industry"

As the sole representative of everyone aged 8 till 40, I would say we are
turning a new leaf here.

I feel like this is an outreach problem more than anything. Recruit at high
schools and job fairs and you'll get bodies.

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wand3r
I work at a tree service which is a fairly similar profession. We clear land
or remove large trees with heavy machinery. I take home about ~$15 an hour
cash.

The job, it's dangerous as fuck. My boss went to a funeral today for someone
who had been doing this 30 years or so.

S

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anotherbrownguy
Seems like a lot of these workplace injuries can be reduced by making the
machines remotely operated. If the workers can be far enough to not be hit by
the falling logs or trees, it would be no more dangerous than just another
minimum wage job.

~~~
mikestew
Kind of what I was wondering when I read the article: why does the operator
need to sit in the cab? OTOH, it could be that "we _just_ got these new
machines to be usable with a human operator. We're working on it, give us time
and we'll get to remote operation in the next few iterations."

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TheCoelacanth
Why don't people want to work in the most dangerous job in the country for
2.5x minimum wage? It's baffling.

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foxyv
Basic microeconomics here. There is no labor shortage, the jobs are just
priced too low.

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whipoodle
> “Logging is difficult, dirty, dangerous, and declining.”

> Death or injury “can come from trees falling in the wrong direction, or
> hitting another tree and falling back on someone”, he said.

Stupid millennials, how could they resist a dangerous job that is also in
decline?!

~~~
dang
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments here?

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ddebernardy
The first three paragraphs of the article describe a job that is essentially
guaranteed to be taken over by autonomous vehicles and AI in the coming years.
Plus pay is low, and the work is dangerous. It's unclear why the rest of the
article laments that millennials don't want to learn that work.

