Why children should aspire to be plumbers not lawyers
Among my generation of middleclass, universityeducated male friends, there are countless who can explain the geopolitical significance of Turkey’s recent election, but barely one who could hang a painting straight.
As for changing a fuse, bleeding a radiator or fixing a tap, forget it. You need to get a real man in for that.
Hardly surprising, then, that new figures reveal that electricians, plumbers and plasterers are among the highest-paid workers in the country, with some earning more than £150,000 a year.
All over Britain, skilled tradesmen are now bringing home up to six times the average wage. A junior doctor earns £23,000 a year, working night shifts and long hours. A newly qualified sparky, by contrast, can easily make £1,500 a week.
There was a time, of course, when every home had its own live-in handyman. He was known as ‘the husband’. The quality of the work wasn’t always perfect, and he did require a certain amount of nagging and strong tea; but it at least meant that a blocked sink or a broken Hoover wasn’t the end of the world. BuT
most modern husbands, mine included, are far more likely to be found building a LEgo Death Star spaceship at the weekend with the children than repointing the garden wall.
Hence the rising salaries in the manual labour market — and the boom in websites such as TaskRabbit, where helpless wives can find handymen for all sorts of niggling jobs, from fixing a wobbly shelf to sorting out a patch of damp.
Let us not forget the success of the boss of Pimlico Plumbers, Charlie mullins, testament to the benefits of knowing one end of a stopcock from another. Born in Camden, he grew up in a council flat and left school at 15 to become a plumber’s apprentice. He’s now worth £70 million.
one fellow I employed recently to help with an especially fiendish flat pack came all the way from Canada. He had moved to the uK to work in the banking sector, but had lost his job a few years after the 2008 crash.
Since then he had been making a perfectly good living as a general odd jobber — self- employed and master of his own destiny.
He much preferred his new life, he said. And there was no shortage of work to be had.
There may be something a little surreal about this army of surrogate husbands filling in for other men’s DIY inadequacies. But what is real is what it tells us about the future of the job market — and the entire post-war theory of education.
Since the Eighties, governments have embraced unquestioningly the notion of expanding university provision. In 2002, Tony Blair promised to get half of all young people into university and numbers have risen steadily ever since.
no one then would have thought to contest his vision of democratising higher education. But perhaps it’s not so straightforward after all.
The problem with flooding a marketplace is that you inevitably devalue the product.
Thus, the more undergraduates who enter the job market, the less their achievements count. And when you think what it costs for a young person to obtain a degree — three to four years of study, potentially £50,000 worth of debt and little guarantee of a well-paid job at the end of it — you do wonder whether it’s worth it.
Perhaps instead of aspiring for our boys to be doctors, lawyers and accountants, we should be encouraging them to be plumbers, builders and electricians.
Could it be that, after years at the top, the age of the middle- class intellectual professional is drawing to a close, driven to extinction not only by the Darwinian march of technology — but his own stubborn refusal to finally get around to changing that damned plug?