Death of the Artisan: The State of Our Industry

If you’ve tried booking an appointment with a skilled trades professional in the last few years, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced what a lot of our clients are telling us: nobody answers the phone, nobody gets back to you, and nobody is interested in your project unless you’re spending a fortune. If that sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone, and we need to talk about why that’s happening, because the skilled trades are changing quickly.

Have you ever seen an episode of a sitcom where the main character has to hire a plumber? The image of a home service provider, whether it be the cable guy, the electrician, or the appliance repair man has taken on an unfortunate image: the technician shows up late, tracks mud across your white carpeting, smells bad, does a poor job, and charges you an arm and a leg. Somehow, as a society, we have let the perception of skilled trades turn into a last-ditch fallback for kids who couldn’t hack it in college. And you know what? Maybe society is right. Maybe the responsibility lies with every person that puts on a tool belt to reshape the image of his or her industry. Maybe we’ve all gotten a bit too comfortable with the high demand for our services and lost track of what it looks like to serve people well and take pride in our craftsmanship. That’s on us.

Unfortunately, the character I just described is nothing that young kids aspire to be when they grow up, myself included. For decades, parents and teachers and school counselors have told our youth that success in life hinges upon obtaining a college diploma. Schools are getting rid of their shop classes, and students are taking on debt they simply can’t pay back, even though a university education has never yielded such a meager return on investment as it does today.

The housing recession of 2008 dealt another critical blow to the skilled trades, leaving perfectly capable and hard-working people waiting as much as a year or two for work in their field. Older guys retired early, young people who might’ve considered a trade quickly change their minds, and much of the middle aged workforce entered a different industry altogether just to get by. Now, the ones who stuck it out, and the shops that survived, are all inundated with work that they can’t sustain.

In the state of Wisconsin, new licenses for electricians were introduced to make it easier for workers with a more narrow scope of experience to become licensed in less time than ever before. We now have people with just three years of experience carrying a journeyman’s card, and master electricians that have only ever performed residential work, and for just five short years. That means the business owner you are calling for electrical work may have less experience than ever before, if that person is even licensed.

Due to staffing shortages, companies in our industry have chosen to spend a lot less time on technical training, and push more responsibility on younger people than ever before. Of course, wages have increased for skilled labor, so bigger companies are taking advantage of entry-level positions and trying to pass them off as more skilled than they are, leading to quality control issues that put you and your home in danger.

Finally, we are seeing small, local businesses being snatched up left and right by national private equity firms that put no value in craftsmanship or training whatsoever. These investors seek out new ways to turn a complicated industry into a cookie cutter profit machine. They do this by focusing their training away from technical skills in favor of high-pressure sales and scare tactics, making unassuming homeowners believe that if they don’t spend their savings on an expensive repair they are at risk of fire or shock.

The good news is: the artist and craftsman isn’t dead yet. There are still people seeking out to be the best at their craft and earning your respect by first showing you respect. We are out there, you just have to know where to look. One thing that sets Spark Shark apart is our broad network of like-minded, skilled professionals in other industries, and in our own. When you call us, we will make sure that you are taken care of and treated fairly in every way possible.

If you want to be a part of the resuscitation of craftsmanship, join a trade. Teach your kids that there is respectability and merit to learning manual labor and honing a mechanical skill set. Support quality businesses, even if they charge a little bit more, you won’t regret it.