…unskilled male wages in England have risen more since the Industrial Revolution than skilled wages, and this result holds for all advanced economies. The wage premium for skilled building workers has declined from about 100 percent in the thirteenth century to 25 percent now.
That is from Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, p.298.
This does not hold in the US. Unskilled construction workers make about $10 per hour. Carpenters plumbers and electricians are paid near $20. I checked a English web site and the ratio there seems to be about 8 to 11.50 or about 50% premium.
Could it be that as educational levels rise, there are fewer and fewer people to fill unskilled jobs?
Well I don’t know that I am any better of a source than an English Web site, but from my personal experience as a guy who works in the trades I would say that the figures that Tyler is quoting are about right.
I don’t know where that web site that Joan was quoting was getting its information from but I don’t think you can get a decent laborer for 10 bucks an hour anymore even in America. Granted, for light work such as house cleaning people might get that little, but I think you would find that even that has gone way up from what they use to pay maids.
I read in the Wall Street Journal not to long ago that in southern California they had trouble getting “no experience required” laborers to work in landscaping for 15 dollars an hour. Laborers with experience were getting 20 to 30 in landscaping. I hate to think of what the masons have to pay their laborers down there.
I live in a relatively economically depressed area compared to southern California; but even in my area only new kids who you are not sure about are paid 10 bucks an hour. Siblings of mine who are not old enough to drive get 7 dollars an hour to rake leaves. If you got any kind of a track recorded, you should get 15 at least even in my depressed area.
Given the fact that in the old days you would pay any inexperienced kid practically nothing, I think you could argue that even 10 bucks an hour is a vast improvement in real terms.
If I was going to question the figures that Tyler was quoting I would question how you define equivalent skills. I think that a good argument could be made that Journeyman Masons and Carpenters in the middle ages had a lot more skill that the tradesman of today. But then, I know that the laborers back then worked way harder than most of the kids that get hired today†¦†¦
Well I highly doubt that this is true, given that most jobs are being outsourced these days to the third worlds specifically so that the employers can pay lower wages. This may have held true till the 1970′s, but I don’t think you can say that this is true anymore.
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