Joe Rogan blasts North American culture for 'demonizing' blue-collar work

Cost to pursue white collar vs blue collar careers

To try and appreciate the difference between the pursuit of white collar versis blue collar careers, it's best to consider the cost and time spent on schooling along with the average earnings.

To illustrate, let's compare the pursuit of a law degree versus the becoming an electrician.

You need to buy into a legal career

Even subsidized, post-secondary education comes with a hefty price tag in Canada. For instance, if you chose to pursue a law degree, you'd have to:

• Pay an average of $7,000 per year, for four years, for an undergraduate degree
• Plus, three years of law school, at an average cost of $20,000 per year

Just in school fees, alone, a person pursuing a law degree would need to set aside $88,000. Tack on fees for the LSAT, bar exam and Law Society registration to living costs associated with almost a decade of schooling, and that upfront cost to establish your career can easily reach six figures.

According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual pay for a lawyer in Ontario is just over $113,500, as of August 2024. While salaries do increase with experience, average annual earnings appear to stablize before $200,000 (unless you chose a legal profession that can maximize that hourly rate, like corporate law).

That means in the first 10 years of person's pursuit to become a lawyer, they'll spend at least $88,000 and earn just over $340,500.

Time is money: The short road to becoming an electrician

On the flipside, you can train to become an electrician in as little as 12 weeks or as long as nine months. Expect to pay about $5,000 to $10,000 for this in-class training. After this initial education you are then required to gain experience and knowledge through hands-on apprenticeship training.

For instance, Ontario trainees are required to complete 9,000 hours of apprenticeship, which includes 8,160 hours of on-the-job training and 840 in-class hours of electrician training. But you get paid to learn.

The average wage of a union electrician apprentice in Ontario is $20 an hour; this means an electrician apprentice can expect to be paid between $46,000 and $51,000 per year, depending on the place of work. The most sought after (or luckiest) apprentices can land apprentice jobs at union shops that pay even more — bumping up that annual training wage to six figures, or more.

And this only the apprentice stage. Once you’ve moved from apprentice to journeyman (and then onto red seal/master electrician), your earning potential increases. Most electricians can expect to earn $60,000 to low six figures throughout their career.

To put this in perspective, in the first 10 years of pursuing an electrician trade, you'll spend about $6,000 in tuition and earn over $541,500, on the low end. (Note: This assumes annual earnings of $46,000 for four years plus annual earnings of $65,000 for 5.5 years).

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The time is right to get into trades

Is Joe Rogan onto something? Based on this simple analysis, the electrician comes out ahead — earning 46% more in the first 10 years.

Then there's the supply and demand factor. These days, fewer people are entering the trades and yet, in the next decade approximately 700,000 are set to retire (of the 4 million active trades people), according to Employment and Social Development Canada. This dwindling supply of tradespeople is already being felt.

"It used to be $70 or $80 for somebody to come to your house [and fix] your dishwasher; now you're going to pay double that," explains Mandy Rennehan, founder and CEO of construction company Freshco, which specializes in building retail stores, during a CBC interview.

While the higher costs may be bad news for consumers, it's a signal that money isn't always in white collar careers. As Redditor Rustbucket_enjoyer says: “There are so many good trades in Canada dying for fresh blood. I don’t just mean the “well known” ones like carpenter, plumber, electrician etc, but literally everything. Sprinkler fitters, locksmiths, millwrights, boilermakers, instrumentation mechanics. Look around. So many great choices.”

— with files from Leslie Kennedy and Jing Pan

Sources

1. The Joe Rogan Experience: (November 2023)

2. ZipRecruiter: Union apprentice data (Aug 2024)

3. ZipRecruiter: Journeyman electrician data (Aug 2024)

4. Government of Canada: Government launches Calls for Proposals to remove barriers and get more apprentices certified in the skilled trades (August 2021)

5. CBC: Shortage of skilled tradespeople is hitting all Canadians in the pocketbook, economists say (April 2024)