Blue-collar revenge: The things AI can't do are making a comeback
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AI is supposed to displace millions of workers in the coming years — but when your toilet won't flush at 2am, you're not going to call ChatGPT.
Why it matters: The reshaping of the American economy promises to offer a kind of revenge for the blue-collar laborer, as white-collar workers become largely dispensable, but the need for skilled trades only grows.
The big picture: Companies are already boasting of saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year by using AI instead of humans. The stock market rewards are too enticing for the C-suite to ignore.
- But ask those same executives who's going to run the wiring for their data centers, or who's putting the roof on the building, and just how well those skilled technicians are getting paid.
- It's become a key Trump administration economic talking point: Blue-collar wages are rising faster now than at the start of any other administration going back to Nixon.
Driving the news: A recent Microsoft paper analyzing the most "AI-proof" jobs generated a list of the work most and least vulnerable to the rise of the LLM.
- The 40 most-vulnerable jobs (translators, historians, sales reps, etc.), basically all of them office work, employ about 11 million people.
- The 40 least-vulnerable jobs (dredge operators, roofers, etc.), just about all of them manual labor, employ around 5.5 million.
- All those extra folks have to go somewhere.
What they're saying: "We've been telling kids for 15 years to code. 'Learn to code!' we said. Yeah, well, AI's coming for the coders. They're not coming for the welders. They're not coming for the plumbers. They're not coming for the steamfitters or the pipe fitters or the HVACs. They're not coming for the electricians," Mike Rowe, the TV host and skilled-trades philanthropist, said at Sen. Dave McCormick's (R-Pa.) AI summit last month.
- "There is a clear and present freak-out going on right now," Rowe said, as everyone from politicians to CEOs recognizes just how badly they need tradespeople to keep the economy running.
Yes, but: While the AI boom will create lots of jobs for skilled trades, eventually there'll be less demand to build more data centers, which may in turn sap demand for those tradespeople too.
The intrigue: There's already a labor shortage in many of these blue-collar professions, one that AI will, ironically, only make worse (think the electricians for the data centers, for example). Factories alone are short about 450,000 people a month, per the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).
- "We're really talking about high-tech, 21st century, rewarding, well-paying jobs," Jay Timmons, the CEO of the NAM, tells Axios. "Manufacturers are really embracing what's coming, and they accept the responsibility."
Training is the answer, but that will require a large-scale, national effort — not just for up-and-coming students, but for mid-career folks forced into a pivot.
- "Everybody needs these roles, they're high-security roles," says Carolyn Lee, president of the NAM-affiliated Manufacturing Institute.
- She points, for example, to a program already in 16 states to train maintenance technicians to keep factories running — precisely the kind of job people like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have said are the future of the workforce.
- Students in an early cohort of that program, on average, were earning $95,000 a year within five years of graduating.
- One of the challenges, Timmons notes, is selling that to people who may not understand how lucrative these careers can be: "You have an economy-wide perception problem."
The bottom line: Next time you have to call the plumber, you might want to ask if they're hiring.
