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August 27, 2009
As corporate America has shed millions of jobs, Mr. Crawford’s philosophical musings on the spirit-restoring value of working with his hands touched a big nerve, quickly becoming a national best seller and generating widespread publicity.
It was not the only sign that recession-pummeled Americans are indulging in a romance with blue-collar trades, while also questioning the hollowness of white-collar work.
Besides “Soulcraft,” whose subtitle is “An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” Richard Sennett, a New York University sociologist, offered a tribute to artisans last year in “The Craftsman.” Reality shows like “Deadliest Catch,” featuring commercial crab fishermen, and “Ice Road Truckers,” following drivers hauling loads across frozen waters in northern Canada and Alaska, have drawn huge audiences.
The local-food movement has inspired countless people to plant vegetable gardens, while in California the so-called Maker Movement attracts tinkerers and people interested in crafts to festivals where they exchange tips about building and repairing thousands of things, from rewiring iPods to fixing bicycles. Not since the back-to-the-land days of the 1960s and ’70s has there been such a rose-colored view of working with your hands.
“I understand the interest in the trade resurgence, which is partly nostalgia and partly a real and visceral issue in people’s lives,” said Russ Rymer, a writer and fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, who is working on a book about violin bow makers. “The nostalgia aspect is evident — we’re feeling ephemeral and remembering wistfully a time when we made things. And our less tangible industries — finance and investment banking, say — have disgraced themselves in our eyes, and so we turn to a purportedly more honorable line of work.”
Whether this nostalgia translates into an actual shift in people’s careers has yet to be seen. Current government employment data does not track white-collar workers entering blue-collar jobs or training for skilled trades. Skeptics doubt that the romancing of manual labor will lead to a permanent realignment of the American work force.
Nonetheless, cultural critics like Mr. Crawford say a change is afoot, driven by a kind of collective soul-searching, growing frustration with mind-numbing, abstract office work and disillusionment with corporate America.
In a new book, “Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America,” the novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen predicts that “careers manipulating money will no longer be so seductive to a disproportionate share of our best and brightest.”
For his public radio show “Studio 360,” Mr. Andersen interviewed about a dozen people switching from white-collar careers to jobs using their hands in fields like cooking, building, art and design, including one who left real estate development to make wood objects. “It’s easy to be a skeptic and say this isn’t going to amount to anything,” he said in an interview. “I’m skeptical of utopians of any stripe, but having read about and seen how cultural shifts really do happen out of aggregate choices, I think this is real.”
One person who downshifted from a white-collar career is Monty Wilson, 44, who had earned an economics degree and raced up the ladder into a job in finance for one of the world’s largest banks, which he declined to name. But eventually he longed for something else, he said. He could woo a client for months, then easily find himself losing the client to another bank.
When times were good, he earned as much as $200,000 a year, he said, but this year he read the writing on the wall: clients in his department, aircraft financing, were fleeing. In June he resigned to pursue a decade-old fantasy of working for himself and working with his hands, and bought a wood-floor finishing business in Dallas, where he was based for the bank.
Now his navy blue and gray suits hang in his closet. He wears cargo shorts and golf shirts to work.
“I wake up excited in the morning,” said Mr. Wilson, who has taken a big pay cut and whose wife has gone back to work as a teacher to help support their three children under 13. He hopes that one day he will be able to earn what he did in the white-collar world.
“I am having fun and learning again,” he said. “Floors are living, breathing things. They expand when it gets humid, and they contract when it gets dry, and every floor is different.”
Even as the unemployment rate hovers at 9.4 percent, some skilled trades like welding and pipefitting are in high demand now, among the jobs that cannot be filled with unskilled labor or outsourced overseas. The construction industry is expected to recover and generate more demand for trained electricians, plumbers and carpenters, according to a report last month by the President’s Council on Economic Advisers.
William P. Hite, general president of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters, said his union had seen a surge in applications for apprenticeships by workers with college degrees. He said the union was also seeing older applicants, including people in their 50s, seeking the five-year apprenticeships.
“We’ve never seen that before,” he said.
Many jobs in the trades and other skilled labor fields have gone unfilled because, some sociologists say, Americans have considered white-collar work more valuable than blue collar, driving policies that give priority to four-year colleges over vocational education.
President Obama, calling on all Americans to get at least an additional year of school or training beyond high school, has uttered a term that many were shocked to hear a president of recent times say: “vocational education.”
Vocational programs — generally called career and technical programs now, partly because of the stigma that attaches to “vocational” — were gutted in the 1990s. But the president has said several times that he wants to see a fundamental rethinking of job training, vocational education and community college programs.
Stephen DeWitt, policy director of the Association for Career and Technical Education, said: “We’re glad a president is finally talking about this. You hear ‘vocational’ and people think of shop class, and those weren’t bad for the times. But times have changed.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that between 2006 and 2016, 15.6 million new jobs will be created, 10.8 million of them requiring not a bachelor’s degree or a higher one, but rather an associate degree, or vocational or on-the-job training, or both.
The projections were made before the recession, but they, along with the gutting of the financial services industry, have left many economists and sociologists to wonder what a post-recession economy could look like: Empty cubicles and nobody to fix things?
Still, if pressed, many white-collar workers musing about working with their hands might balk at the hard labor and, for skilled trades, the training necessary for these jobs, not to mention pay cuts and changes in ways of living.
“The grass is not as green as you think on the other side,” said Philip Olivieri, 31, who started his own building maintenance company in Brooklyn after working 10 years as a custodial engineer and electrician.
“Are you really ready to do five years of trade school and, before you know it, you’re hitting your 40s, lifting every day?” he said. “You become like a bull — you’re lugging around a lot of weight and it takes a toll on your body. You’re drilling into buildings. Half the material you end up breathing in.”
“Construction is not a joke,” he said. “Physical labor takes a toll on you, and people don’t realize how hard it is.”
Robert Jackall, a sociologist at Williams College who is currently updating his 1989 book, “Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers,” about greed and corruption in the financial industry, said that during the back-to-the-land movement of a generation ago, many who left jobs in cities to take up farming or live in communes “eventually couldn’t make it and ended up coming back to the standard workplace.”
Even if manual labor is having a moment in the sun, he said, “I’m skeptical that our society, and the way in which the institutions of our society are geared and the economic situation in which we find ourselves will permit the realization of this noble dream.”
Mr. Crawford, the motorcycle-repairman-author, acknowledged that he was able to leave his white-collar job for the shop only because his wife has health insurance. Society’s appreciation for skilled manual labor and craftsmanship has faded, he said, because “we’ve had this dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work, as though they are two different things.”
“There’s a lot of thinking that goes on in the trades,” he said. “And that experience of seeing a direct effect of your own actions in the world has become kind of elusive.”
It has been elusive for Joe Dietz, 30, an account executive for a construction financing firm, who dropped out of college and was a landscaper for years before he landed this job through a friend. In June, his commission-based pay started to sink, and lately, without the money he saw as the payoff for being chained to a computer, he has been asking carpenters in his Brooklyn neighborhood if they need help. He is contemplating a return to landscaping.
“Working with your hands, it’s so much more rewarding in the sense that you can physically see your progress,” Mr. Dietz said. “At the end of the day, you know that you’ve done something that is right in front of you. Right now, I’ve got $100 million worth of projects out there that could take the next 10 years to get done, if they get done.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/fa...html?ref=style
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