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I thought this link was going to be the recent muckracking shakedown of HVAC contractors from Asterisk Magazine. The claim is that HVAC as an industry is uniquely fucked in ways that other skilled-labor services aren't. I don't know enough about HVAC specifically to evaluate that claim, but having worked in other highly-regulated skilled labor contractor industries, the failure modes the author mentions are quite familiar to me.
The core problem is that intelligent, skillful, educated, motivated people don't want to do manual labor in non climate-controlled conditions. By the time you get someone trained and up-to-speed to competently execute the job, they're gone. You might get people to do it for six-figure salaries, but if performance metrics aren't legible to all parties, there is little incentive to burn profit margin on that.
I'm not sure exactly what effect the pandemic has had on all this. Sure there were layoffs and job-shuffling in 2020, but that was almost 4 years ago now. One thing I have noticed (admittedly small sample size) is that people who were in college during covid cannot be relied upon to know any specific knowledge one might expect someone with such a degree to know. They are still more generally intelligent than candidates without a degree, but very little learning seems to have happened 2020-2021.
Well, duh, any statement becomes true if you add that many qualifiers. When and where did intelligent, skillful, educated, motivated people ever want to do hard manual labor?
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I am an HVAC tech, although in a niche, not what the article is talking about. And while there’s plenty of lazy technicians working for contractors who don’t give a shit, the quality of HVAC equipment has also declined precipitously, mostly due to government efficiency standards putting extra gewgaws on the machine that supposedly reduce energy use but in practice just break a lot, but also because the supply chain issues mixed up parts supplies and lots of manufacturers haven’t managed to route back to the same quality of parts they used pre-pandemic.
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The mention of Manual J calculations in that article reminded me of the recent Technology Connections video about how lazy HVAC industry practices lead to companies selling oversized heaters to homeowners, which will become a problem if we switch over to electric heat pumps in the future (since oversized heat pumps will short-cycle, eating into the efficiency gains they normally have). (ETA: Not to mention customers getting ripped-off by being sold more expensive units with more heating capacity than they really need.)
Some anecdata: a local plumbing/remodeling company likes to advertise their quality service over the skeezy competition, to the point where I wonder if many of the blue-collar trades aren't actually rife with workers who will do what's quick and cheap over doing what's correct or desirable. (See also: this Kontextmaschine post about how the working-class used to live and work back in the heyday of American manufacturing.)
Rivethead is a phenomenal book by the way. I've never seen a clearer picture of what life was like for an American factory worker before full globalization.
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