Keeping the lights on

The eye-grabbing headline was about 27 Seattle City Light workers making more than $100,000 in overtime pay last year. Obviously, there has been a problem at City Light regarding the use of labor. The more significant fact from reporter Sharon Pian Chan's story, however, was that City Light has 50 vacancies among its line-worker positions in spite of offering base wages that go above $80,000 a year for experienced journeymen.

At that pay, how can they be short of people? It is easy to be short because everybody else is. Demand is high. Americans are spending and business is building. The trades require training, and the pay has not attracted enough young people into them. Indeed, five construction crafts are in union negotiations now, and they negotiate from a position of strength.

In America, that is how the market works. But the market is also sending a signal. Skilled craft workers have a future.

Americans have seen many stories about factory workers outsourced, but how can you outsource a lineman? You can't. If a seagull shorts a transformer in West Seattle, you're not going to send to India for someone to climb the pole. If you want to build a five-story building on South Lake Union, you may hire an immigrant, but he is here. His job will stay here. And it is a good job.

Increasingly, Seattle people forget about such jobs. The vision is of a city of white-collar workers pecking at computers, with low-pay folks to brew them coffee and water the plants.

People have responded with a big push for high-school academics, as well they should. Now we hear voices saying that everyone should be able to go to college — and the "be able to" sometimes gets left off.

We forget craft work. We forget that it requires the ability to calculate the angle of a wall, or how much concrete is needed in footings, or how to switch on the electricity for a neighborhood.

By forgetting this work, we devalue it. And yet the market is not devaluing it. Just the opposite.