On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:56:38 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

I am having a hard time thinking of a trade that takes 4 years to
learn. This is more about limiting the number of people who can get
into the trades.
There may have been a time when trades were arts but technology has
made the most intricate skills obsolete. Nobody is packing oakum in
cast iron pipe and filling it with molten lead.


Your experience on jobsites that are more than stick built houses and
tilt up strip malls obviously is limited. Try laying out and building a
one wythe serpentine wall 100' feet long, building a 12 story
loadbearing office building, doing the pipe welding for a nuclear
facility or the iron work on a 60-story building and get back to me with
your two weeks of training. Your arrogance about the lack of skills of
construction craftworkers never ceases to astonish.

I did not say "2 weeks" I said "not 4 years" but why let the facts get
in the way of a Harry rant.
In that 60 story office building most of the people working there are
going to be doing repetitive low skill jobs. When I was working for
the state we were not doing any stick built residential, it was all
commercial and stick built is actually pretty rare around here anyway.
That is a northern thing. Houses are typically CBS. By the time you
put in all of the connectors to hold the "sticks" together, it is
cheaper to go in with concrete block.
Block is being replaced with ICF so the block stackers may find their
jobs in danger too, although laying block is not high skill.
You seem to be fascinated by guys who weld pipes in nuke plants but
that is your typical diversion.
Robots weld better than people and we haven't built a new nuke plant
since the Carter administration.
It is still true that technology is dumbing down just about all of the
trades. I am also not saying there are not skills needed but I do
think "4 years" is ridiculous for most of them if the person is much
smarter than a fruit fly. To start with, different people learn at
different speeds but the union is locked into a set schedule.
Universities have the same problem. They have it dumbed down to the
speed of the dumbest person and then pad that up with extra time
anyway. It happens any time you pay by the hour and not the job.