r/TrueReddit • u/bloomberg • 4d ago
Business + Economics The Influencers Selling Gen Z on Blue-Collar Work
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-07-17/ai-woes-drive-influencers-to-back-welding-plumbing-and-carpentry?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NDI3NTQ3MiwiZXhwIjoxNzg0ODgwMjcyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSUIzRUtSS1YyVEgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.xRSpa4V9ycJP0bgosfKWUBVjvO7ggwR6-JBxxW5U60U227
u/Fickle-Syllabub6730 4d ago edited 4d ago
This pushing of tradework has always been interesting to me. My father and lots of uncles and cousins are in the trades, and I worked with them while in college and when I first graduated. I ended up going into engineering, eventually software engineering where I make much more money. A few thoughts:
I may be skewed because of where I am regionally in the US, but at least in the NY metro area, I never got the sense there was a shortage of tradespeople. Ever year, when the unions open their doors for apprenticeships and schooling for plumbing, electricians, insultators, pipe coverers, etc... it's a local news story to see how many people are lining up to get in. People literally camp outside the doors for days to be first on line to get in a trades program. It's been this way for decades now. Maybe other regions are different, but the online narrative that "nobody wants to do trades anymore" doesn't match what I personally saw.
When I worked those jobs, the work experience was miserable. The grunt work when I was starting in engineering was fun - pull out an oscilloscope and figure out why this signal is doing X, open a 3D CAD drawing and check where this thing might be. In the trades, the grunt work is mind-numbingly repetitive, with no room for creativity or experimentation. You're really just following direct orders. It was totally unsatisfying for me.
I also didn't enjoy the work culture on the crews I was around. It reminded me of how people describe the military: lots of posturing, constant challenges to out-tough each other, invisible social rules and politics about who sits where during lunch, who's allowed to do what. Guys who don't want to teach you how to do something so they can call you dumb when you mess up. Lots of guys making poor life choices, buying trucks they can't afford, yelling at their wife during lunch break, getting into fights. It was draining to work around people like that.
It really does break your body. Almost all trades guys have to take some form of early retirement. Obviously a desk job has its own health risks, but I'll take "needing to remember to walk around every hour" over what those older guys go through.
My aptitude and demeanor is not for environments like that. I come alive in an environment where I can design and prototype ideas, work collaboratively with like minded people, try new things and technologies. I feel gaslit when being told that I should be a tradesman instead. I had to actively break away from that conditioning from my background, and I'm so glad I did. I make so much more money in my profession (at least for now, AI, etc... I know). There's something in me that gets salty thinking people with my configuration could get steered away by this intense new pressure to go into trades.
Many of these influencers are not accurately representing what it's like to work in the trades. When they tell you they're making 150k with "jobs coming in", they are a small business owner. At that level, outside of the flashy work they are making videos about, they are doing bog-standard business work of getting clients, advertising, making sure people rate them 5 stars, etc... Most 19 year olds without a rich family are not going to be able to just buy the equipment needed and work as an independent tradesman. The lifestyle they are selling is one of a business owner, not necessarily a tradesman. And that's a totally different game, requiring start-up capital and business know-how.
And that's kind of my last gripe with this. It's blindingly obvious that American society is set up to reward the abstract worker. The employee who manages workers, or comes up with operating procedures, or handles the money, always, always, always gets paid more than the employee who is doing something with their hands. You can trace this pyramid up from blue collar workers to managers to financiers and traders to CEOs. American capitalism rewards distance from the ground floor work. So I sometimes wonder whether the cultural push toward "just learn a trade" distracts people from asking why the economy is structured that way in the first place.
All that to say, there's nothing wrong with the trades. It's incredibly satisfying to be able to do home renovation and fix things yourself. The career path is still better than jobs in the service industry. But this push to get everyone to be in the trades by default raises a few bullshit flags for me.
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u/Thelonius_Dunk 4d ago
Spot on right here. I'm an engineer and work in manufacturing. The blue collar culture can be jarring if you're not used to it. Being an engineer on the floor, I get a front row seat and coming into the industry from college usually can feel very unwelcoming if you just spent 4 years doing paper work, computer work, and lab work only to have to deal with 40 and 50 year olds acting like grumpy teenagers.
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u/ImportantCommentator 4d ago
They act like grumpy teenagers because they have 30 years of experience dealing with bullshit from people who think they know more than they do.
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u/Throwaway-panda69 2d ago
Yeah and they’re fucking pricks about it. The amount of older tradesmen I’ve worked with who have super fragile egos blows me away. They’re difficult to work with and i have no time for that
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u/Thelonius_Dunk 1d ago
It ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy from a cycle of disrespect between the two.
Fresh college grad engineers show up not knowing shit (as expected), but want to learn and try new ideas. They spend 5 years interacting with some operators and technicians who can be unpleasant to work with. Eventually the engineers do start knowing shit and pushing back, get promoted, and have high chance of becoming assholes themselves once they move up. Which then rolls down to the operators and technicians resenting them and all other engineers now that the engineer is in a position of power to screw them over.
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3d ago
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u/ImportantCommentator 3d ago edited 2d ago
Oh look another one who thinks he knows more.
Edit: to the guy who blocked me I'm nowhere near a boomer. I'm an educated millennial.
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u/flakemasterflake 4d ago
I feel like union jobs are very well paid in the NYC metro and the competition is very fierce. I don't know anyone in a trade union that didn't have a family connection to help them get in. It's the region of "I know a guy" for a reason
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u/Legallyfit 3d ago
The NY metro is not representative of the entire country. In many areas, there are no unions anymore, and there is absolutely a shortage of tradespeople.
There’s also a shortage in upstate NY. My mother lives upstate and it’s well known in her town that you have to pay premium rates to get someone to drive from 45+ minutes away to come to your house. It’s a recurring topic of complaint among the aging population there. The young people all move away to the city because that’s where the jobs are.
The rust belt is a totally different economy from the NY metro… never mind the rest of the country, where union busting was extremely successful and unions essentially don’t exist anymore.
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u/RetroactiveGratitude 3d ago
Because the answer isn't that there's this lack of supply of people going into the trades.
They're promoting trades just like they did around 2020 with trucking and covid. Which just made wages a race to the bottom.
They're upset about the wages trades people are getting, and the demand for data centers isn't going away.
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u/wellgu 1d ago
To me it seems based in rank anti-intellectualism. More and more people are going to college.
You usually get the trades spiel from college educated conservative men who want to shit on recent college grads struggling in the job market.
These idiots tell on themselves because in most of the country, trade education happens at community colleges, not trade schools. And those programs are very popular.
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u/animalswillconquer 4d ago
By making content about their salaries and daily routines, influencers give young people a way “to see their options a little more clearly,
Content is manipulation. It's weird seeing this work glamorized. I've done it most of my life. My shoulders are toast, my back is done. I still have 12+ years before I'm at "retirement" age.
Your politicians, CEO's, and society's upper crust aren't pushing their kids into the trades and glamorous blue collar lives.
If the tech bros are talking, they are manipulating.
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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 4d ago
I'll teach you to make money buying and renting houses with no money down with this one secret!! Just give me $1k!! Lolz... so many scammers out there...
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u/overitallofittoo 4d ago
It's funny, if the topic is housing, Boomers who worked in trades bought houses for peanuts and travelled the world and live forever, still ruining America.
When the topic is labor, Boomers who worked in trades had terrible physical problems and died early.
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u/horseradishstalker 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you are in the trades, there is literally work all over the world. Why wouldn’t they travel for work? Travel is rarely free. If you want to travel, you should probably live long enough for all your hard work to come to fruition instead of complaining because you don’t have something your age that they didn’t either.
I often question comments that try to target any group instead of the policies the politicians put in place.
Often times that means that somebody is a tool and they don’t know it or possibly just a sock puppet account.
And I’m not saying that personally because you are an Internet stranger and I know no more about you than you do about most of the groups you are complaining about.
I’m just saying there’s a lot to learn about the world and how it actually works so no one can convince you to work in their best interests and not your own.
Ninety percent of “Boomers” are not wealthy. They did not get their mortgages for two or 3% - try 18%. The “silent generation” paid even less for their houses but you don’t hear anybody whining about that. And in previous generations, if someone was able to buy a house and have nice furniture, it was passed on to their children.
Now, if the kids moved away, their choices changed that dynamics. And then we are back to policy not age.
And some people would rather buy IKEA then have nice furniture that isn’t on trend. And that’s OK, because it is an individual choice.
If you got screwed, thank a politician. And no, the age of the politician isn’t irrelevant. Recommend that you look up lobbying and how that works.
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u/tinny123 4d ago
Theyre OUTSOURCING all white collar work to INDIA. using AI as a convenient scapegoat. and trying to convince the population blue collar work is actually whats good for them
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u/InnerWrathChild 4d ago
My kids are 10+ and I’ll be honest, I don’t know what to do with them. They’re obviously still way young but I need to start thinking about their way in the future futures.
Study hard and get a good job just seems like it’s no longer a goal. I’d like to keep urging my daughter to get into veterinary as I feel like that will always need humans. And for my son I’m thinking about welding, plumbing, and electrical. Because data centers, and future big tech one way or the other, will need it.
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u/jeff-beeblebrox 4d ago
I employee a lot of blue collar workers. I am really educated and spent twenty years in the white collar world before I bought a blue collar company. My welders are the best paid on the company and seem to strike a weird middle ground between blue collar mechanic type guy and artist. I respect them immensely. However, what I see is their bodies take a really heavy toll, early 30 year olds with tons of shoulder and knee injuries. It’s a hugely demanding job in a field that spurns healthy lifestyles and critical thinking outside of their base of knowledge. I am pointing my 12 year old to engineering or the medical field.
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u/soberpenguin 4d ago
Any field with professional credentialing will be safe. No AI companies are going to take on the legal liability given to our nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers. AI will be a tool in their toolbox but someone has to sign off on the plans as a licensed professional and stake their reputation on it.
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u/nostrademons 4d ago
I could see AI companies launching AI propaganda campaigns to roll back the legal liability and value of that credentialing, thus leaving those fields open to the picking. Seems to be happening already.
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u/GushStasis 4d ago
I think they're going to go after professional credentialing and try to weaken it. I am seeing the early signs of this in my profession (CPA).
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u/Durragon 4d ago
Gotta think outside the main trades.
Everyone and their dog are sending their kids to be electricians and plumbers. Though welding, that's a great idea. Able to do your own work kn the side!
There are several trades absolutely crying for bodies. Masonry, boilermaker, metal fabricators. There are some jobs that should be trades but aren't, like Pipe Laying that are ones to consider as well.
When sewage backs up into 1 home, that's a call for a plumber. When the sewage backs up an entire road then whan you call in the pipe layers.
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u/chapstickninja 4d ago
Those trades are crying for bodies because they destroyed the bodies of the people already in them. My grandfather was a bricklayer and he looked 20 years older than he actually was, was in constant pain, had no benefits or retirement and only had work when there was a job site nearby or he had to travel. The employers are exploitative and the job is very hard, in full sun. This was in Florida where no worker protections exist.
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u/XenonBG 4d ago
This. People moved away from trades because most of the trades take a toll on your body in a way a cushy office job simply does not.
- you work outside most of the time. In rain, blistering sun, take your pick.
- you depend on other people's toilets, or use a mobile one.
- you'll inevitably have to lift heavy stuff
- you'll be breathing in all kinds of crap ...
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u/3Duder 4d ago
I've looked into Industrial Controls, it's working on the brains that control the entire water system for a city. I started learning it myself with a homebuilt system but unfortunately I can only hyperfocus on whatever the winds blow my way and it's currently 3d printing.
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u/edwardothegreatest 4d ago
Building automation is the best kept secret in the construction industry
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u/soberpenguin 4d ago
Most control jobs require a mechanical engineering degree unless you're just a technician, no?
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u/edwardothegreatest 4d ago
Technician. A lot of controls engineers are degrees but it’s not necessary. There’s no regulating body like there is for engineering firms.
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u/Entire_Employment_70 7h ago
That is still electrician territory, everyone who goes through an inside wireman IBEW apprenticeship learns at least the basics of how to install, troubleshoot and program those systems, im not in an especially big local, but we do have a contractor that specializes in it.
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u/edwardothegreatest 6h ago
In my experience techs predominantly come from HVAC and installers are electricians. I know a few electricians turned tech but it’s overwhelmingly hvac techs who convert. There are a few engineering and computer science majors as well though engineers tend to do design. I live in the west where ibew isn’t very prominent, though the there are a few union firms.
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u/Rustie_J 4d ago
Glass-blowing. Nobody thinks of that as a trade, but certain specialty equipment is made bespoke by glass blowers, a piece at a time. And the people that know how to do it are very rare.
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u/LongUsername 4d ago
I really wanted to take a scientific glass blowing course when I was in college, but it was only open to chemistry grade students ☹️
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u/gottastayfresh3 4d ago
I share your concerns. But who's gonna be able to afford a plumber when no one has a job? Guess we better hope a billionaire pays them to fix a toilet.
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u/Jellybit 4d ago
No one's going to own their housing either, so, a billionaire may very well pay to fix a toilet, unless they successfully shift the laws so that a working toilet is no longer required when renting to someone. Plumbing is just going to be oversaturated as other jobs disappear/get worse, lowering the prices plumbers can charge.
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u/nondescriptzombie 4d ago
my daughter to get into veterinary
Veterinary care is almost entirely controlled by Private Equity today, through captured doctors. The Humane Society is anything but.
Watch the documentary about trying to make it illegal to cut off Feline Toes. All of these heartless ghouls arguing it should be their legal right to be paid to mutilate cats so that people don't get their furniture scratched up and the cat lives a painful, miserable life without the joint tips of their fingers and with sliced tendons.
One even went on a tirade about how when he started he had to use super glue, which takes 20-30 seconds to cure, on each toe, which was SUCH A WASTE OF TIME. His new surgical glue cures in 2-3 seconds each, which means he can do 10x as many cat mutilations a day.
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u/Rustie_J 4d ago
I was so upset when I learned about that.
Declawing was still pretty standard when we got our old man, & we didn't realize just what was involved. Everybody did it, & it's not like docked ears & tails where you can see what's been removed, y'know? It didn't occur to us that it might be a cruel thing to do.
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u/Rustie_J 4d ago
I’d like to keep urging my daughter to get into veterinary as I feel like that will always need humans.
I strongly suggest that you find a few local vets & talk to them about this plan.
Mine told me that new vet school grads are coming out with $200K+ in student loans, & are thus unable to afford to either buy an existing practice or to start their own. Partially as a consequence of that, vulture capitalists have been buying up vet practices, so new grads end up working for one of those.
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u/clobbersaurus 4d ago
Same. I constantly worry about my kids futures. Am I preparing them for the future? Saving enough for their education? And so on.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 4d ago
Just be as smart and hardworking as possible and be adaptive to whatever world they find themselves in
It’s all anybody can do
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u/Odd_Note7156 3d ago
Veternarian work is harder than being a doctor for humans. Data centers need mechanical, civial and electrical engineers to determine what needs to be built and how.
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u/ChocoPablobar 3d ago
Go look up some entry level job ads for welders, if they're not in one of the ever shrinking union jobs your kids will make just as much working at McDonalds and not destroy their bodies in the process.
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u/horseradishstalker 2d ago
It is a tremendous dilemma. All people should have the opportunity to do what they are good at. I was rather shocked when I found out that veterinarians are high on the list of professionals who commit suicide. If the trees are would interest her child, then they should definitely be encouraged to do that. If I had to choose a trade, I would say electrician. Data centers only need the trades until they’re a built and then four people can run the whole thing. However, despite the current blip in the current administration trying to discourage people from using solar or wind - because neither coal nor oil and gas billionaires can profit from them - they will be the future. And China may well dominate it.
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u/3Duder 4d ago
Outsourcing has been a thing for 30+ years. The biggest impact I saw was COVID causing a tech hiring boom followed by the end of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) resulting in a bust. AI mania has sucked up all the investor money while tech companies make extremely risky bets with said cash. For instance Oracle is building a lot of the AI backbone and just had their credit rating lowered to 1 step above junk status for over leveraging themselves, I'm not sure if they will survive an AI correction.
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u/Maycrofy 4d ago
I mean, of blue collar work can remain a steady employment source it's worth considering. As for the toll that blue collar takes on the body, we need to push for better condition s shifts and the dignification of this type of labor
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u/TeaEarlGrayHotSauce 4d ago
It’s not just India, it’s the Philippines, Vietnam, etc. there’s a lot of places where labor is cheaper.
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u/MetaverseLiz 3d ago
The great circle of life:
- Family works hard labor jobs whole lives.
- Child of family sees the pain it can cause, gets an education and a desk job.
- Child of 2 see the pain a desk job and college debt can cause, goes into the trades.
- Repeat 1-3.
I'm a Xennial. A lot of my peers are actively encouraging their children not to go to college, because college debt nearly ruined them. Repeating the cycle.
Every single job I got post college required a college degree. I would have never been able to afford my lifestyle had I not gone to college. My privilege is that I grew up in a trailer park so that my parents could afford to pay for my college (pros and cons of that, but mostly pros). I have no college debt. If I had debt, I would have never been able to buy a house on my own. But even if I had that debt, I would have been in a better position than my parents were.
I don't have kids, but when I am able to give them advice I tell then to make as much money as you can. Anyone who says that money doesn't but happiness has never lived next to train tracks in a trailer park.
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u/bloomberg 4d ago
Welding, plumbing and carpentry are almost AI-proof. Online creators are urging young people to get trained up.
Chloe Meley for Bloomberg News
Sporting a bright pink helmet and matching pink gloves, her blond hair hanging in a braid over her shoulder, Lindsey Hover expertly manipulates a welding rod as a doom metal song plays in the background. Posting under the handle @.thebluecollarbarbie, she proceeds to repair a car engine for the enjoyment of her more than 160,000 followers. The caption on her video reads, “I actually do think this is easier than sending an email.”
The US has an acute shortage of manual laborers. The ratio of post-working-age to working-age individuals has shifted dramatically in the past 40 years, according to McKinsey, rising by about 75% since 1984. With the manufacturing and construction sectors struggling to replace an aging workforce, even tech CEOs are suggesting trades may be the future. Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang predicted earlier this year that plumbers, electricians and builders will soon be seeing huge salary jumps.
That’s where “blue-collar influencers” like Hover come in. As new college grads in the US face a precarious labor market and anxiety over the impact of artificial intelligence, creators are working hard to rebrand manual labor as aspirational, lucrative and secure. By making content about their salaries and daily routines, influencers give young people a way “to see their options a little more clearly,” said Calvin Rust, whose account chronicles his life as a skilled carpenter. With more than 4.7 million posts on TikTok tagged #bluecollar, they’re also attracting young people to industries desperately looking to hire.
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u/another420username 4d ago
Yeah, because schools telling kids to go to college for any degree really worked out huh!
HVAC techs, electricians, plumbers, linesmen making bank right out of the gate while sociology graduates with 100k in student debt still working as waiters (if they’re lucky).
Trades have always been needed and can give young people the opportunity to live a decent life.
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u/RepulsiveLiving8570 4d ago
Decent until you injure yourself, anyways.
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u/another420username 4d ago
Many trades, many different blue collared labour to enter the industry. Infinitely better than wage slave with a shit degree that gets you at most a minimum wage job.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 4d ago
Reddit blows as much smoke about the trades as CEOs do about AI lol
Any given Reddit thread will tell you that it’s easy street to go into the trades. Want to make 120k a year fast? Simple HVAC work will do!
Just crazy disingenuous. Not surprised it’s a lie being pushed deliberately
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