Matthew B. Crawford, 06.17.09, 04:55 PM EDT
The skilled trades--carpenters, electricians, plumbers--can't be outsourced to China, and the work can be deeply satisfying.


When I graduated from college with a degree in physics, I moved to Los Angeles to look for work in the aerospace industry. But I got no response to the many résumés I sent out. My time in college began to seem less like an investment and more like a form of consumption--an expenditure of four years and a fair bit of money with no clear economic rationale (though it certainly had other attractions).

My savings depleted, I found myself going around the parking lot of a home improvement store, putting fliers on the windshields of cars to advertise my services as an electrician: "unlicensed but careful." This was work I had done throughout high school and college. The flayers generated immediate response; there was clearly more demand for my services as an unlicensed electrician than as a credentialed physicist. Further, I always took pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch and see the lights come on.

These days, most people are grateful to have any job. But since the economy is currently getting reshuffled, this is also a good time to reconsider some basic assumptions about what a good job looks like. In the last 30 years, we have learned that manufacturing jobs are insecure in a global economy because anything that can be put on a container ship will be made wherever labor is cheapest.

In the last 10 years, a similar logic has emerged for the products of intellectual labor that can be delivered over a wire, as Princeton economist Alan Blinder has pointed out. Accountants, editors and architects in the U.S. find themselves competing with educated, English-speaking people in other countries. But some services can be performed only on-site. The Indians can't fix our cars--they are in India. Nor can the Chinese build you a new deck.

The work of electricians, plumbers and auto mechanics cannot be outsourced. That is reason enough for a young person to consider going into the trades. But let's take a broader view of the matter and consider also the possibility for real satisfaction, which may or may not be present in the work we do. Human beings seem to be built in such a way that we want to see a direct effect of our actions in the world and feel that these actions are genuinely our own.

Consider the striking fact that when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, most workers simply walked out. His biographer, Keith Sward, wrote, "So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963."

Obviously, the men who walked out had other options. Early on, the automotive industry had recruited people from carriage shops and bicycle shops--all-around mechanics who took pride in their skill and knowledge. To merely pull the same lever over and over on an assembly line was stultifying, and insulting too. Eventually Ford raised wages enough to keep the line staffed, and people got used to it.

This story has a parallel in our own time. White-collar work too gets routinized and dumbed-down. This fact often gets obscured by the fact that you may need an academic credential to get the job. I went to graduate school in the early 1990s and loved every minute of it. With my new master's degree, I landed a job as an "indexer and abstractor." I was to write brief summaries of articles in scientific and other academic journals.

It sounded really challenging. But my quota, after 11 months on the job, was 28 articles per day. The only way to meet the quota was to stop thinking, and in fact I was given rules for writing these summaries that were based on the supposition that it could be done in a routinized, unthinking way. The job paid $23,000 a year. I never did get used to it.

As far back as 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor-market demand creates for white collar workers "employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better-paid manual workers." What's more, "it may create unemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

The current glut of college graduates, many of them with heavy debt loads, may need to overcome this problem of being "psychically" (not physically) unemployable in manual occupations, a disability acquired from sitting in classrooms from age 5 to age 22. I am happy to report that it is possible. After getting a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, followed by another prestigious-sounding but soul-killing job at a think tank, I opened a motorcycle repair shop.

Motorcycles are made on assembly lines, but the work of fixing them isn't too far removed from what those craftsmen in the bicycle and carriage shops were doing. There's a lot of thinking involved, and it is always my own thinking. In fact, the work of diagnosing mechanical problems is often more intellectually challenging than my think tank job was. "Motorcycle mechanic" is a less prestigious answer to give at a cocktail party when someone asks what I do, but in saying it, I feel more genuine pride.

Entrepreneurship in the trades carries certain hazards. It helps to have a spouse with health insurance and a steady paycheck. All around, it's a mixed bag. But so is the white-collar job market. The most compelling reason to consider the trades is that there is a basic human satisfaction to be had from taking a tool in hand, and seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world.

Matthew B. Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.