Post COVID job market

The post-COVID job market has offered very different topography than we’ve traversed in times past, at least in my (not so limited) recollection. The professional job market (stuff which requires advanced degrees, specialized certifications, hazing and fraternal-order secret handshakes) has offered its own specific challenges. Non-fleet peers mention bidding wars over salaries, demands for remote work, front-loaded leave and alternate work schedules, all before the applicant even considers a job offer. It is also evident that the retail/service sector is experiencing issues too; you'll find you wait longer in drive-thru lines, pharmacies and banks now limit hours and you encounter sporadic store closures due to short staffing. But Post Covid Employment Syndrome (PCES) has also landed in commercial garages.

But Municipal fleet operations (except for those rare cities that outsource all of their maintenance) pivot their core operations around tradespeople. While it takes management to run workflow processes and strategies, the core work that keeps a fleet rolling is done by technicians. Locating people to fill empty slots has become extremely difficult in the PCES world, and it’s not as if it was easy in the first place. The pool of mechanics in America has been shrinking decade over decade. Recently it has declined faster than my personal interest in watching another dystopian movie or tuning in the evening news (oh wait, those two are pretty much the same!). Credible sources estimate current domestic technician shortage at approximately 800,000 people, and the decline is picking up speed.

Long, long ago (around 2000-2003), I and several other local fleet operators were invited to attend a hiring fair hosted by a local community college’s automotive program. This program was (and is) recognized in the area as “the” regional college program if you are interested in working in the automotive trades. Back then the program director explained to me that his course enrollment was dropping every year, while the college’s IT program enrollment was rising. He observed “the IT path requires similar analytical skills, but the work is in an air-conditioned room, and you go home clean every day”.

20-odd years later the situation is only worse, but not for the same reasons. High School students (and their parents) seemingly drank the scholastic Kool-Aid; the heavily marketed assertion that a degree is the only option available that holds any hope for life success (in due time of course, after paying back the $80-200K debt). Sadly, this choice has become so unquestioned that it is now virtually national doctrine and demanded by the business sector, even for tasks which really require no such thing to perform. And this doctrine shows no regard for the fact that a modern society still needs real people to do physical things; not all work is only cerebral (I would like to see Artificial Intelligence replace a timing-belt on say, a Honda Passport).

And now people that established themselves in trades years back are retiring out of them at a staggering rate (late model boomers/early model Gen-Xers), and despite vehicle manufacturers continually touting improvements, machinery still breaks routinely. All trades are facing serious service gaps due to too many vacancies. Yeah – universities have had their fun… at the expense of worried graduates now trying to break into a workforce glutted by other graduates with similar degrees. 

It also appears younger wanna-be mechanics have a very different world view than legacy employees (hah!) have. To them, “job commitment” is a quaint term from another place and time (OK, fair). Technicians are more than happy to leave a job for an additional $3.00-5.00/hour offered somewhere up the street. There seems to be no point in discussing benefits or retirement plans either. These techs are young and indestructible, so they have zero interest in thinking about retirement yet, nor do they see value in a good medical plan (for now).

I was raised not knowing any real family history, but do remember never knowing real need; life was simpler then. Entertainment was self-generated and subject to zero scrutiny as long as the police didn’t call and you were back home for dinner at dusk. Meals were simple, usually a 1-skillet version of a “goulash”, a beef stew or potato soup with little else on the table. Dining-out was carry-out, infrequent and appreciated; typically, from simple burger joints with names like “Sandy’s” or “Burger Den” (bonus points for anyone remembering those!). Not until well into my adult years did I put together any real family history.

My dad grew up in a household with an estranged father, and after high school he ended up working to support the household (he started his middle brother through college, in fact, until both were inducted into the Army). He apparently made an unspoken promise that his own family wouldn’t endure that pressure, and we didn’t. After discharge from the Army (during the Korean “police action”), he worked his rear off in auto manufacturing and made  his way up through assembly line QC. From there (with only his high school education, effort and innate skills), he elbowed his way into civil service procurement, eventually managing a civilian unit of the Army buying helicopter parts.

On mom’s side I am only one generation removed from sharecroppers. Borderline literacy and backwards N’s chased my grandfather all his life (due to dyslexia and a 3^rd grade education), but he was still motivated to get out of sharecropping and do better for his family. During the depression, he routinely commuted for hours from the Ozarks to Kansas City to build lake cabins for more affluent folks with money to spend. One client (a General Motors manager) noted his skills and got him a job as a millwright for GM’s Fisher Bodies division. As a result, Mom’s childhood was lived in a household where if you needed something, you grew it, fixed it or built it yourself, or you didn’t really need it in the first place. This joint legacy I was entrusted with helped me develop practical skills, self-reliance and eventually directed my own career through the trades into management. Similar stories used to be very-very common in automotive professions (only the names were changed to protect the guilty), but not so much anymore. 

Back to that auto-tech training we were discussing earlier: While being an auto-technician still isn’t a way to get rich quick, due to technician shortfall it can offer a skilled technician $35-45+/hr. If accurate and fast, he/she can routinely produce a 130-160% week in a flat-rate shop, and that works out to $12.5K/mo. (give or take) for anyone counting! That money requires you to be on your “A” game, but even at entry-level it is possible to step into a shop now at $5,100 - $7,000/mo. due to tech shortage, and this in a market where graduate engineers or lawyers might make $5,500 to $6,250/mo. As a bonus, techs usually sleep very soundly at night; Lawyers? not so much.  

All this to say: there is zero shame in callouses, cut knuckles or greasy fingernails. While it may be a dream job for only a few, it offers a realistic path to a solid living for those who pursue it.  And frankly, access to a decent livelihood without sacrificing your firstborn child (or selling your soul to some college chancellor) is no small thing these days. And, there are certain things AI will never touch.   

The loss

We had the distinct misfortune of having to bury an employee very recently. He was an exceptional mechanic with decades of experience working on heavy trucks and equipment and knew the types of failures we routinely see. We were his second career. He’d already retired from MoDOT fleet-maintenance before coming to us. He was a solid employee, always at his workstation on time, productive, a peacemaker in the shop and very competent in his work. And he was a cancer survivor… until he wasn’t.

We’ve had to bury employees before. During COVID we had two mechanics succumb to the virus. I don’t know if the vaccine would have saved them or not, but I do know they specifically chose to not be vaccinated. The one of the two I’d personally spoken to (prior to his hospitalization) spoke like an archetypal conspiracy theorist about the topic. I’m told that narrative was the same as the other mechanic, though I hadn’t spoken to him personally. In their cases they made conscious decisions and dealt with the (likely) consequences. More power to them; they lived their convictions.

With this more recent loss, that wasn’t how it played out at all. He and his family’s loss were through no conscious decision, but simply through the convergence of genetics and subsequent failure of the organism. For whatever reason his death impacted me more than I would have expected. Maybe it was his zeal and positive temperament, commitment to his craft or even his age (several years my junior). Whatever the reason, it stuck with me.

He was a career mechanic, and with that comes the continual urge to buy new tools to make shop life easier; a behavior fabled in song, story and folk-dance. As a courtesy to his family we transported his (very significant) collection of tools and tool-chests to his home, for his widow to do with as she saw fit. He had fathered two kids (a girl and a boy, in that order). Both were young(ish) adults, but neither appeared to have automotive interest, so his widow chose to liquidate.

Round one was a tool garage sale, which was catered to the mechanics he’d worked with over the years (MoDOT Fleet and our organization). I went early with my oldest son in-tow. There I found out that what he’d kept at work only represented a microcosm of his total tool commitment. Table after table and box after box of tools were laid out in the garage and basement, along with a full woodshop, plumbing and electrical section, each with their unique tools present too. Most of these tools were in complete sets and were top-notch stuff. It was also evident he’d made redundancy a goal, as there were 2-each of many things, likely to have comparable sets of at home and at work.

After a full walk-through I realized I was looking at about a $200-250K+ collection which he’d amassed over 40-odd career years. I also realized they could never recover anything approaching that amount, and I was humbled. All that effort, all those tools and he would never be able to turn these wrenches in anger again, or benefit his family… I bought a 3/8” drive deep-well impact set, thanked the family and my son and I went to breakfast.

What did all this mean to me? I’m still sorting through that. There was always virtually nothing I couldn’t repair if it involved mechanics, electrical/electronics, hydraulics or plumbing, so it could have been me looking back at my own career and reminiscing. I still do my own work, though with the transition into management I’d already pared down my own tool collection long-long ago. Or maybe I simply became painfully aware I have way less time ahead of me than behind me, and it doesn’t particularly make sense to make my family jump through these hoops that his family was jumping through.

I’d already been making some effort to downsize (like shop tools mentioned above), but the deeper I dig, the bigger this project gets. Not mechanics tools, but virtually anything else I’d embraced as a hobby over several decades of life: gear used in music performance, film and digital photography, electrical/electronics, fine-art painting supplies and even collectable pocket watches (yeah, don’t ask). I’m not thinking I’ll get another sixty-odd  years to walk the earth, so when did I propose to use all this stuff again?

Some of the big music gear went first. We played loud in the 1980’s, and the gear grew to accommodate the need. I still play casually today (bassist), but now it is virtually a “plug into the house system and play” situation. iPads on your stand for in-ear monitor mix and DI out for the front-of-house to do their magic. I run a little tiny cabinet as a stage monitor. All that big gear went to a bassist in his 20’s that was a self-described punk/funk/alternative fusion musician. His eyes lit up after he plugged in, turned up, worked the bass over and caused another minor earthquake in Asia somewhere, so I cut him a deal on the whole package to get it gone. You go boy. I hope your back can hold out for the long haul.

With that one sale I managed to right-size only one (of about ten) of my major hobbies. I am afraid that I will need to speed this process along, or one day there’ll be someone like me walking through my estate sale, on the verge of an existential crisis, just like I am going through now.