Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Chris BEYONDI has made a pretty nice life for himself. He has a stable, fulfilling job with great benefits, a family he can support with a salary, and.
I have a quarter of a million dollars in retirement. And most of the people that I graduated from high school with don't have a quarter of anything in retirement.
So what's the story behind his success? It all came down to one decision. Chris says he became a plumber.
The work is satisfying. I can drive through two states and a major city and point out all the things that I helped build or even design. Plumbing may not have been my dream job, but it is not a job I hate. It's a job I enjoy immensely.
Now he works as a trainer for people looking to join his union, but with each passing year, he's noticing a decline in young people hoping to enter the field, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that as more and more baby boomers are set to retire, the shortage of plumbers, along with pipefitters and steamfitters, is only predicted to worsen.
The official data points to an average of forty two six hundred vacancies a year over the coming decade.
That's my colleague Endacurran, who covers the US economy for Bloomberg. He's looked at the numbers and recently started wondering where have all the young plumbers gone. It's a labor problem that could impact everything from America's infrastructure to its economy. Today on the show The Mighty and Misunderstood American Plumber and why the fate of this corner of the labor market matters so much? From Bloomberg News, this is the big take. I'm Sarah Holder. So you cover the US economy,
you're covering labor shortages. I'm assuming in lots of industries. What motivated you to explore the situation in the plumbing industry.
Well, it's one of the parts of the economy that's so critical to everything around us. And when you speak to business people, when you speak to companies, they make the point that there just aren't enough young people at learning the skilled trades anymore. So that that could be plumbing, that could be being an electrician, that could be whatever it is that involves your hands. And the point is
these are critical to make in the economy. Work plumbing goes to the core of so much of what we do every day, from having clean drinking water through to getting homes and construction projects finished on time.
And you recently visited a school training young plumbers outside of DC. Can you tell us about that visit?
It was really interesting. So I went to two plumbing schools. One of the schools I went to was offering for the first time a pre apprenticeship program. This was in Arundel and Maryland to get young people involved on a career path for plumbing. The thing is they had eighteen places on offer, but they only received three applicants. And I stood in the lab, a very well equipped modern laboratory with the instructor three gathered around the bench, but
all the other benches were emptying out. And it speaks to the idea that young kids aren't necessarily looking at this as a polential career path at the moment.
And why were there all those empty seats? What are some of the barriers to entry to complete the schooling and become a plumber.
So speaking to the people in the industry, there seems to be a stigma around becoming a plumber. Young people considered to be tough, dirty work. They're not really excited by the prospect of fixing toilets all day long. But when you speak to the plumbers, the educators, and those in practicing the trade, they say, there's so much more to it than that. It's not all about lying in your back with a wrench all day. The work can be varied.
Chrispyondy, the plumber turned trainer, actually told us about a visit he recently made to a middle school where he tried to counter these misconceptions about his job.
Went to a middle school, and I said, who knows
what a plumber does? And a young lady stood up instead of plumber cleaned toilets, And so I was able to run through a slide show and say, this is what we were in this part of the Smithsonian, and we built as part of the National Zoo, and things that not just a kid would enjoy, but anybody would enjoy seeing those pictures of something that's not there, and that is suddenly an exhibit at the Zoo, or an improved exhibit at the Smithsonian or the Washington Monument after
the earthquake needing repairs. So those kind of things are relatable to anybody, but it's important for us to make clear that what we do is not what people think we do.
The work can be satisfying to see a project being completed, to see a problem being resolved, So it's rewarding in that respect, and it's also financially rewarding. I mean, you get a good salary. Obviously, the salary depends where you are around the country, like every industry, but the salaries can be well paid and offers pretty stable and plumbing.
Can you give us a sense of the scale of the shortage and what it might translate into in terms of overall losses in the industry.
There is one estimate out there that it costs the economy about thirty three billion in twenty twenty two. In other words, the country will be short of about five hundred and fifty thousand plumbers by twenty twenty seven. So those are not immaterial figures for the US at a time of course, when workers shortages are being sort of
blamed for part of the inflation story. Given what's been happening wage pressures over the past few years, it's not insignificant, and I think that's why there's a big push on now from these construction groups and from others that the government and state governments and education authorities need to do more to encourage more young people to try and get into skilled trades and offset somebody's pressures.
But as you mentioned, plumbers are not the only skilled labors that the country is lacking. Construction, electricity workers. We're seeing shortages in those industries as well well, So you're right.
Across construction more broadly, there are shortages of hundreds of thousands of workers in that sector. And when you speak to the people involved in construction, they are screaming out for either more skills training or better allocation of existing labor, or on the other hand, of course they want to speed up legal migration. But plumbing is pretty important because plumbing are the people that you go to to get
the water flowing. You know, if there's ever a natural disaster, one of the first things that gets impacted is clean drinking water. One of the first sets of workers that you need are plumbers. So that's why they are so critical to the shortages in the construction industry.
After the break, how a shortage of trained plumbers could potentially delay the green energy transition and what the industry is trying to do to shore up its rinks for the future. We're back. I've been speaking with Bloomberg's and the Current about the struggle to recruit younger workers into the plumbing profession. He says it affects wider swaths of the economy than you might initially think.
First of all, the plumber shortage at the moment is being cited as an issue in terms of projects being completed and completed on time. If you cannot get the workers, you cannot get the plumbers, then the construction work cannot be done on time and it will become more expensive. Costs will be overblown. That's a common complaint. So that's a kind of a day to day on the construction side.
If we have a section of the economy continuing to demand very high fees, we'll let those feed through to broader services inflation, and that does keep alive the idea that inflation will remain sticky in certain parts of the economy, even if the FED has to bring down into trates.
On the other side of the economy, we have this big structural change going on at the moment for cleaner, greener energy, for more sustainable energy, but I think when we speak about the green energy transition, we probably think about solar panels, we think about electric cars. We probably don't think enough about the water aspect of it, the irrigation aspect of it, and the role of plumbers are
going to have to plan it. So the green energy transition has that its core, smarter homes, more energy efficient homes, water efficient homes, smarter irrigation, sustainable practices, smarter water heaters for example, all of this, and all of that goes to plumbing at the core of it, and we're going to need young people who both know how to design and implement these new environmentally sustainable plumbing practices or else governments and all of us will not meet the green
targets that are being set for us.
Besides super Mario, are there any positive role models for aspiring young plumbers.
That's a very interesting point. Actually, I think super Mario is probably out there as number one. When I went out to that school in Lanham, I will say there was an old vintage poster that I mentioned in the article.
Was a vintage poster on the wall I was quite struck by from many decades ago, and it had a It was a plumber in and overalls with a wrench in his hand, standing on top of a globe with a crowd of admiring onlookers looking up to him, and the tagline on that was the plumber protects the health of the nation. So that's not quite super Mario, but that poster was in there to inspire the young students who go into that school that a job and plumbing
isn't just a good job and well paid. We're also contributing towards the economic health of the nation.
And when it comes to motivating young people to go into the trade. Chris Beyondy, who he heard from earlier, is working on it as the training director for a plumbing apprenticeship committee in Washington, d C. The trains over two hundred and fifty apprentices a year. He says he actually uses the fact that so many older plumbers are retiring as a motivator for people considering the industry.
I use it as a pitch point because the shortage means that my job is not going anywhere as a plumber, my job's not going anywhere. As a trainer of plumbers, it's not going anywhere. Job security is happening because of the shortage, but I would rather I don't want that to be the endgame. It can't be the endgame because things that need to keep working are going to stop
working and there won't be someone to fix it. There are things that need to be built properly are not going to be built properly or not be built at all because of the shortage. And it's all the trades. They're all suffering.
What do you say to young people considering the field?
That is hard and it can get messy. But what I tell them is that if they want a career where they can enjoy what they do, or they will work hard, but they will actually get paid to work hard, and that they will make enough money so that they do not have to worry about paying for their children's college, They do not have to worry about what retirement looks like,
they don't have to live check to check. And it sometimes takes a few years after high school for people to appreciate every single one of those things.
What do you like best about your job?
Okay, so what I like best about the job I have now, which is training director for our program, is I get to offer people the experience or their version of the experience that I had. We work heavily with teachers and with counselors so that we are creating advocates in the school systems. I mean, it's our job to protect the health of the nation, but we need folks to advocate for us. Otherwise we're going to keep seeing the shortage, and it's a shortage that grows every year.
We're not closing that gap unless we start bringing in more people.
Thanks for listening to the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Today's episode was produced by Alex Ubia and Thomas lou It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Caitlin Kenney. It was mixed by Veronica Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Naomi. Our senior producers are Naomi Shavin and Elizabeth Ponso. Nicolebeamsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is head of Podcasts. We'll be back with you on Monday.