Here too. Our friend's kid went into plumbing, he gets steady well paid work with a company plus under the table jobs at least one per weekend. He's raking it in & happy about it. It is a demanding and often stinky job but very lucrative.

Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well?

I'm in the U.S. Here's an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.

It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.

For 47-2152, "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters," we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I'm talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn't even double the 25th percentile.

Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They're averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.

Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.

Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don't pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor's degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.

But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.

And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.