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Employers Need Wind Power Technicians
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that Oklahoma is one state benefitting from the energy boom. With a wind power rush underway, companies are competing to secure the windiest spots, while breathing life into small towns. The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground. So even with a job that can pay a good starting salary (for technicians with a GED or high school diploma who complete a four-week turbine maintenance training program), there aren't enough qualified technicians to do the work. 'It seems odd, with America's unemployment problem, to have a shortage of workers for a job that can pay in excess of $20 per hour. But being a turbine technician isn't easy,' says Logan Layden, adding that technicians typically have to climb 300 foot high towers to service the turbines. Oscar Briones is one of about a dozen students who recently finished a maintenance training program after leaving his job as a motorcycle mechanic and now has his pick of employers. 'So I was in the market to find something else to do, and this seemed pretty exciting. Being 300 feet in the air, that's pretty exciting in its self. So yeah, I'm a thrill seeker.'"
Because if you do that, nothing better will come along. The rate for the jobs that come along will start to align with the lower rates.
This is what caused the unions to form to begin with. Large, dangerous industry like mining and manufacturing, paid enough for people to survive but not enough for them to ever prosper. It was a form of "voluntary" indentured servitude.
If everyone got together and demanded better conditions or raises, they would get fired and replaced with the never-ending line of people desperate just to survive. Only by striking and creating a picket line to actually shut down business would any real change ever get made.
For a modern example, see the stories on Foxcon and China. We in the West gape in horror at the working conditions and pittance for wages. But compared to the other options -- subsistence farming, etc. -- it is fantastic. If a worker doesn't toe the line, they're fired and replaced with any one of the teeming masses desperate to escape the crushing poverty they now live in.
Yes, it can go too far. See the auto industry and the various stories about Teacher's unions where people clock in, then punch out for a 5 hour lunch, etc.
But the whole "take the cut for now because something better will come along" doesn't scale.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Back when I climbed telephone poles for a living (and had the body that goes along with it), I regularly climbed towers for our amateur radio repeater network. Once you're in place and tied down, the work is actually fairly easy. But we had a lot of ground support (and ropes and pulleys) to do the heavy lifting. But the first time you go above 50 feet or so it gets a little unnerving.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."