America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

Carpenters too? I'm not from the US but this is a crowd I know and talked to quite a bit, at least in western Appalachia. It seemed to me they are shafted quite often, as big companies hire them as subcontractors 90% of the time and underpay them. The last 10% another tradesman/local architect get a contract and hire them directly and they earn almost twice their usual pay but that's a small minority of their contracts.

Agree. Carpenter is the lowest of the trade skills unless you are in a specific niche.

Rough framers cutting and nailing together dimensional lumber, yes I agree that is entry-level work does not pay very well. Skilled carpenters who can do things like design and build a beautiful deck or flawless ornamental woodwork, built-in cabinets, or custom furniture, or solve a tricky framing issue in an expensive historic renovation earn much more.

I should add that all the people I know who are earning really good money in the trades put in some years, established a solid personal reputation in the area, and then started their own businesses.

If it was entry level work my house wouldn't have the bends in it that it has.

All woodworkers are not carpenters. Also to make furniture you need tools, expensive ones. Some coop exists (i've seen one in Ohio) to help independant carpenters do "built-in" furniture (especially planning the wood), but most of the time it's company material they use.

Also, in the US (at least west appalachia, but it might be all of north america), it seems that the logging/milling industry has incestuous relationships with the building industry, and it seems to be pretty hard to find cheap wood from clearcuts if you're an independant. The person who hosted me and my familly for two weeks in WV used wood he logged himself for his home and dependencies (he was 70 btw), but even for a contract he got he couldn't use the wood from the nearby mill and imported it from Ohio/Canada. And it was in 2018 so there weren't as many pressure on wood availability as post-covid or right now.

I'm not sure I follow. Perhaps your house has bends in it because rough framing is entry-level work.

Then it isn't entry level work. Entry level work is work you can do without experience and do it "right" in that the job gets done without errors. Shoveling concrete is entry level. Laying a proper concrete foundation is not. Operating a chop saw is entry level. Framing a house is not.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how much of the economy is basically just trust-peddling. Jobs and entire companies that essentially only exist to vouch for the people who do the actual work (and take a healthy cut of the pay in the process). In some cases, this is probably a useful service. In others, it's clearly preying on the trust deficits that certain people, who are otherwise hard-working, upstanding members of society, suffer from. That's parallel to how big corporations have convinced us to trust them and their representatives over independent workers. Sadly, a lot of the attempts to disrupt this status quo just end up with a new middleman.

I'd think about it less as trust and more as risk. Specifically, risk arbitrage.

The originating buyer wants quality work, probably as a one-off, but doesn't know or want to know how to find someone like that. Everyone is high risk.

A matchmaker company in the middle has ongoing relationships with the end contractor, knows their work is decent, and provides a framework / legal liability / insurance on top. The contractors they know are lower risk.

So the matchmaker can charge {full cost of high risk - slight discount} while knowing they're actually only taking on {lower risk}.

Where it seems to go pear-shaped is when the matchmaker gets too large and can no longer individually vouch for their contractors (e.g. IBM Services and globally integrated service companies).

We might be having a case of is/ought talking past each other.

Many people are hired onto rough framing crews with no experience. That's what defines it as entry-level work, IMO. You're saying that people without experience make errors in rough carpentry, which makes it not entry-level. (I would say that makes it "not unskilled" but still "entry-level" [because you can be hired with no experience].)

> Some coop exists (i've seen one in Ohio) to help independant carpenters do "built-in" furniture (especially planning the wood)

In EU aa lot of in-built furniture is made out of "furniture board", it's particle board with some veneer. There are a lot of local companies selling that board, you can order already cnc cut and drilled pieces, you just need to specify drilled holes positions and sizes and you can offer custom furniture. Buy some off-the shelf fasteners and you're ready to go. Made a small library shelf this way for myself and it was 2x cheaper than anything ready made, but looks perfectly profeessional. My local carpenter friend orders at the same company, made me a kitchen much cheaper than anything available at big retailers.

Well of course producing your own wood would be cheaper than paying market rate. Lumber growers are a business too, they grow where it’s cheap and ship to market that pays best. A local guy not getting it for a discount isn’t incestuous, it’s capitalism working as intended.

Fair enough

Trust is an appropriate metric to consider. Often, the matchmaker company isn't being evaluated on material criteria like performance; they're contracted because there is some preexisting relationship (not always direct) between decision makers at the two firms, or because they hold a certain reputation. You could say that risk to firms are lowered because liability is transferred, but that's sort of orthogonal to my point that the point of existing from the point of view of the middlemen is not to trade in risk but it trust. Risk is a commodity, trust is scarce.