Blue Collar and Proud of It: The All-In-One Resource for Finding Freedom, Financial Success, and Security Outside the Cubicle (4 page)

My landscaping customers are prominent doctors, lawyers, and professors. Newton, where my business is based, is teeming with Harvard graduates and innovative businesspeople. There are investment bankers and international consultants. They understand that they need a plumber to put in their new bathtub, an auto mechanic who will fix their car, and a landscaper who will make their yard shine. And guess what? I need my chiropractor and my daughter’s pediatrician and my tax accountant just as much as they need me.

What Is Best for You?

This book is about finding the right match for you and then tackling it with all that you’ve got. I knew I could never sit in an office. In my opinion, most people are not cut out to sit at a desk under fluorescent lights all day. Just the thought makes me itchy. A great percentage of us want to work with our hands, get dirty, be outside, be creative, or just fix stuff. We don’t learn from a blackboard. Instead, we learn by trying and doing. We have to smell, touch, and feel. We learn the hands-on way, not in a classroom.

Those of us who work in the trades have immense pride. We are amazed by what we contribute to our communities, and we go home feeling that we’ve made a difference. This country was built by blue-collar workers, and it’s going to be rebuilt and built up by blue-collar workers. We’re not going away, and the work isn’t going away either. You can’t take your car to a call center in India to get it fixed, and you can’t ship your kitchen sink overseas when it’s leaking. Jobs in the building trades here can’t be outsourced anywhere. And while many factory jobs are certainly being lost in the economic downturn that’s taking place while this book is being written, a great many of the headline-making workforce cuts are taking place among white-collar workers.

Not Your Father’s Assembly Line: Blue-Collar Goes High-Tech

Thanks to overwhelming advances in technology, blue-collar work is changing rapidly. Computerized auto body shops, high-tech construction equipment, and advanced lawn irrigation systems are what blue-collar workers are now handling on the job. Much of the work is cutting-edge, and that’s why kids and twenty-somethings should feel excited and proud about choosing the blue-collar path.

Mary Stanek Wehrheim is president of Stanek Tool Corporation near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She often hosts open houses at her company’s plant to show parents, teachers, and students what her tool-making operation is all about. The people who work for Stanek are well trained, highly skilled individuals using computers and advanced machinery. As she points out, no one wants to turn over multimillion-dollar equipment to people who earned all Ds in high school and have no training. “Many kids get into the trade after they’ve floundered for a while, ” says Stanek. The reason for the floundering is that blue-collar work was not presented initially as an acceptable choice. “After they’ve left school and gotten confused, parents can be more receptive, ” to a child’s decision to learn a trade, she says. Isn’t it a shame we couldn’t make these choices available sooner? We should be able to skip over the step that sets up so many people to fail.

Opportunities are everywhere, but training and certification are a key component to success in these fields. As technology has taken off, and largely taken over, you need the skills and the know-how to run many of the machines, diagnostic equipment, and electronics that are involved. This is the new blue-collar world. In your grandparents’ generation and even your parents’ generation, people could often go straight from high school into many blue-collar jobs. While this move is still possible in some sectors, more likely you will need some type of postsecondary education— an apprenticeship, on-the-job training, or classes in a particular trade. You can’t just waltz out of high school and into most of these jobs. In later chapters, we go into much more detail about exactly what type of training you need to land a job in many of these blue-collar fields.

Changing Times

If you’ve been out of high school for a while or have been working for years in the white-collar world, it’s never too late to make a change. It’s not too late to step out of what you are doing and start something new. That doesn’t mean it’s not scary or difficult, but you can definitely take the plunge. I know the saying, “You can never teach an old dog new tricks, ” but when it comes to the trades, it’s never too late to learn a new skill. You’ll find that the unions are surprisingly open to older workers, and that age can often work to your benefit. Sometimes having years under your belt in the working world signals a really serious person who has put a lot of time and thought into making this transition. This book is going to provide you with ideas, resources, and encouragement.

My mother-in-law, Sandy O’Brien, always says, “If you don’t reach for the stars you’ll never grab one.” You see, hoping to get a star won’t do you much good. But being willing to work very hard to get the star you want is what this life is all about. Sandy went from being a crossing guard to a detective on the police force in her Massachusetts town. Such change and success take time and perseverance. If you want to be a master carpenter, it won’t happen overnight. It will take hours and years of patience, of trying, of learning, and, yes, of occasionally failing. If you want to own your own plumbing business, you have to spend years building up a reputation and a list of customers. If you want to be a success, you have to be willing to put in the work.

Have you seen the National Geographic Channel’s
Ice Road Trucker?
Or
L. A. Hard Hats?
What about
Deadliest Catch?
I’m hoping that because reality TV is shining a light on blue-collar jobs, more kids will want to go into the trades. Of all things, these reality television shows are capturing the nation’s attention and highlighting some of America’s most essential careers and hardest-working people.

Deadliest Catch
is one of the most exhilarating shows I’ve seen. I’m always amazed to see the fishermen out in rough water, determined to bring in a boat full of crab or fish, no matter what. You’ll actually get to meet one of the captains, Jerry Tilley, later in this book. These shows are bringing the realities of jobs straight into people’s living rooms, finally illuminating their importance as well as the training required to do them.

As I’ve said before, training is a crucial topic in this book and an essential part of success in the trades. Before you can go off and work, you need to know what type of training is needed. Many companies and industries offer apprenticeships. Some are earn-while-you-learn programs, which means you’d be getting paid while going through training. Some are courses offered through a community college or specialized trade school. We talk more about unions in the next chapter, but for now just know thatmost offer outstanding apprenticeships.

If you’re still reading, I’m assuming you’re interested in knowing and exploring more. In the next chapter, we talk about what it means to be blue collar and try to help you determine if this path is the right one for you. Then we delve into a host of possibilities and the training required for specific jobs. We look at women in the blue-collar sector and different opportunities available to them, and we also talk about green-collar jobs, found in environmentally friendly and sustainable sectors, that will be responsible for much job growth in this country and represent some of the hottest jobs of the future. We tell you about some of the amazing organizations and programs around the country that are working to put pride back into the blue-collar sector while encouraging men and women to enter the trades. And we introduce some of the neatest people out there, men and women who are passionate about their jobs and proud to be part of the blue-collar workforce.

Stick with me, and I promise to tell you all you’ve ever wanted to know about getting ahead in this world while finding success outside the cubicle.

Chapter 2
What Is Blue Collar, Anyway?

H
ave you ever stopped to think about the term
blue collar
? To me,
blue collar
means skilled individuals who make the world go around. We’re talking about people who are there to fix the plumbing, the leaks, and the wiring when it’s broken. These same blue-collar people build skyscrapers, work as freight train conductors, and perform my riad other important jobs. Unfortunately, the term
blue collar
sometimes has a negative connotation, one that makes some people think of a person who didn’t work hard enough to get a college education. We need to rethink this attitude.

The actual term
blue collar
came into everyday use in the United States around 1950 and referred to the uniforms traditionally worn in factories and other industrial work sites.You’ve probably seen the exact clothing I’mtalking about: the durable clothes that won’t tear easily and can withstand dirt and grime and grease. These blue collars were worn by plumbers, auto technicians, and service people, and while these traditional blue-collar uniforms are not obsolete, you see them a bit less nowadays. Some of youmight even recognize this look since it’s cropped up as fashionable retro clothing.

But beyond the color of the shirt collar,
blue collar
came to mean a certain type of worker, one who wasn’t
white collar
, which basically meant an office worker or someone working in one of the professions. Blue-collar workers were traditionally paid hourly, although that’s not always the case now, andmany blue-collar workers are unionmembers.
Blue collar
even came to mean a way of life. It has long defined people who don’t sit in an office all day, or sit in front of a computer, with the same routine. It means a person who was often outside, in the field, or means in a shop working with his or her hands, fixing something, rebuilding a part, or operating machinery. To me, it means someone who is always looking to keep moving, doing, making, or breaking.

Traditionally, the federal government has classified all workers in the United States according to whether they were white collar, blue collar, or service workers.Chefs, police, and firefighters were grouped together as service workers, for example. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks all these nifty jobs and counts the number of workers and the salaries in each industry, recently stopped categorizing jobs according to collar color. Apparently this approach was offending some people. It doesn’t offend me, and I hope it doesn’t offend you. I’ve said it before and you will hear me say it again: I am proud to be blue collar. But the fact is that not all jobs fit perfectly into one category anymore.

Maybe you don’t even think of yourself as
blue collar
. Perhaps you use the term
tradesperson
. That’s fine, too. Whatever label you apply to yourself, the point is that the non-white-collar workforce is a crucial piece of the puzzle. We are the people who like to build, scrape, hammer, carry, dig, and put our hands to use. The idea of sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen sickens us. Thinking about it makes me want to jump out of a window, actually.You see, we don’t mind getting dirty, although not all of us will. But none of us are heading off to work in ironed pants and starched shirts, carrying briefcases.

The biggest change—and it’s huge—in the blue-collar workforce in the past generation is that you need to bemore skilled to land a job and to get ahead than fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ago. Technology is taking over, even in the blue-collar world. Every industry has been affected. Every industry has incorporated technology into its manufacturing, building processes, and overall functioning. Jobs are simplymore technical than they used to be. Installing a solar panel requires training, repairing a car often involves intricate and complicated computers, and much construction work is driven by sophisticated machinery.

In the next chapter, we give you a lot of specifics on what it takes to get started in a blue-collar job. We’ll tell you a ton about what skills and disposition you need to go into a variety of jobs, and we’ll go through the type of training, or preparation, you need to become successful. While we’re hoping this book will put you well on your way to a successful blue-collar career, we can’t guide you through every job out there. Instead we’ve focused on the most popular, the most lucrative, and the ones with the most projected growth. That said, we haven’t included in our discussion hundreds of other blue-collar jobs .