What happened to skilled craft?

If an 18-year-old asked my advice right now, I'd encourage them to go to trade school

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell!

I can count on one hand the number of millennials in my circle who work in skilled craft jobs. The crafts themselves range from cocktail bartending to plumbing to masonry, but these professionals share one thing in common: they can’t keep up with demand for their work. They all hustle for extraordinarily long hours and share a passion for great quality. They all get the satisfaction of having made something with their hands at the end of the day. And none of them have to worry that AI is coming for their jobs.

Meanwhile, in the boomer generation, I know a broader range of artisans: a textile restorationist, a painter/carpenter, an upholsterer, an art restorationist, a plasterer, a furniture restorationist, and more. To my knowledge, at least two are retired and one more is deceased. Those individuals left their workshops and client rosters without anyone to take up the mantle, and the others who are nearing retirement are likely in the same position.

For years, I heard my parents lament that they could find fewer and fewer craftspeople who knew how to work on their less-than-100-year-old house; we’re not talking about some ancient pile here.

And now, being in the position of homeowner myself, I feel their pain. Except our house is 300 years old—now we are talking about finding people who can work on an ancient pile! You would think France had more craftspeople to go around, and maybe there are, but there’s also way more demand and a less friendly environment for small business ownership and growth.

We can’t get the plumber to return our calls because he’s so busy running from one plumbing emergency to another that he doesn’t have time for proactive projects. We send the furniture restorationist a steady stream of tables and chairs (and pay through the nose) because we’re so afraid he’ll retire and the next person will be even less available and more expensive!

Same with the masonry: we have easily several miles of stone walls on our property in France which are made of a relatively soft limestone that needs rebuilt every 100 years or so. My husband and I can learn to DIY a lot of things: wallpapering, finishing floors, even laying tile and upholstering furniture. But masonry is such hard, skilled work that we would have to complete a years-long apprenticeship to be able to rebuild our own garden walls. Like with electrical work and plumbing, we genuinely need an expert on the job.

The walls they are a-crumblin’!

Building craft is far from the only high-demand hands-on skill. Our friend who’s a pastry chef can take and leave jobs at will both in France and the U.S. And companies like Soane Britain are investing in keeping UK craft alive by literally sponsoring apprenticeship programs at the workshops they depend on for their interior design products.

So… what happened? Why is there so much more demand than supply of skilled labor? Based on the Google search I did before beginning to write, I’m not the only one asking this question.

One hypothesis,

as suggested by Soane’s Lulu Lytle on the Business of Home podcast, is that many of these craftspeople, especially from older generations, simply do not recognize the enormous value—and rarity—of their skills.

If you’re a basketweaver, I mean, “underwater basketweaving” was literally a punchline about useless college majors when I was completing my higher education. Instead, we were all encouraged to pursue such useful degrees as English literature.

Look, I loved my English major and I’m glad I did it, but if I had studied basketweaving instead, I would have job security for life. Have you seen what a rattan table costs these days?

But, at least when I was a teen and I suspect long before that, studying a trade was seen as lower status in a world that valued white collar jobs. The word “professional” even has a connotation of doctors, lawyers, and finance guys—as if the person who expertly wires your house for electricity is any less of a skilled professional than the person who expertly sets a broken bone.

There was essentially a class of people who worked in trades and a class of people who hired them, and never the twain shall meet. I believe this led to craftspeople not realizing that their skills are just as valuable as the advice of a good lawyer—and parents not encouraging the next generation to learn the same trade and join their business.

So, leading from that, hypothesis number two

is not a hot take: a college degree was seen as the ticket to success and prosperity.

Of course, the thing no one realized is that unless you came from an already prosperous family, taking out loans to go to college would leave you tens of thousands of dollars in debt and often lacking a clear career path—while a trade apprenticeship would leave you with a marketable skill and perhaps even the chance to earn some money while you learned on the job.

Hypothesis number three

is that while the supply-demand pinch has become more acute in recent decades, the disruption of the artisan system of labor goes all the way back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Before that, “the artisan class was divided into three subgroups. At the highest level were self-employed master craftspeople. They were assisted by skilled journeymen, who owned their own tools but lacked the capital to set up their own shops, and by apprentices, teenaged boys who typically served a three-year term in exchange for training in a craft.”

Master craftspeople used to be responsible for making a product from start to finish, such as writing, typesetting, and printing a newspaper. As different stages of production began to be split up and divided among multiple people, specialization and productivity increased—but at the expense of the employer assuming responsibility for the employee. The older way “was replaced by a new conception of labor as a commodity that could be acquired or disposed of according to the laws of supply and demand.”

We all pretty much know what happened after that. Outsourcing, offshoring, policy decisions that are unfriendly to manufacturing, corporations getting greedy and mass-producing products that are designed to break so you need a new one in a few years—or pricing things so that the only reasonable decision is to buy new instead of fix. (My dad recently went to buy a new battery for a leaf blower, only to find that buying a whole new leaf blower packaged with the battery was $100 cheaper than the battery alone. He did not want to throw out his perfectly good leaf blower! But the manufacturer forced the decision on him.)

Hand-crafted products, to the degree that they still exist, are priced at a point that excludes all but the wealthy because artisans live in the same high-cost world we all do. And hand-crafted services have long, long waiting lists (like our French plumber, mentioned above).

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Today, the UK Heritage Crafts Association maintains a ‘red list’ of endangered crafts, much like the list of global endangered species. (The closest American equivalent to this organization is probably the American Craft Council, which “fosters livelihoods and ways of living grounded in the artful work of the human hand, creating a more joyful, humane, and regenerative world” and is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.)

One of the benefits of the red list is that the HCA knows where to focus its efforts to promote and resuscitate endangered crafts. Country Living Magazine tells the story of the revitalization of the Sussex Trug, an elegant and practical style of basket, thanks to some smart marketing efforts. But crafts like wooden boat making and musical bow making are still on the endangered list.

The red list just covers crafts that may be considered luxury—although, tell that to a violinist who needs a bow—but skills that literally make our infrastructure function are struggling, too. Engineering. Building. Manufacturing.

And at the same time as it’s harder to hire out help when something breaks in your car or your house, fewer people have the tinkering skills to get to the source of the problem and fix it themselves. (I cannot overstate the value of having a handy husband.)

But tinkering and DIYing is a topic for another day.

I’m unfortunately not here today to offer a solution to a problem that’s been developing for centuries, lol. But as the new direction of this newsletter takes shape, we’ll have more conversations like this one. And I’ll elevate some people and organizations fighting the good fight and share ways you can support the important—even patriotic—role of craft in our society.

I’ll leave you with a 2008 review of a book called The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. If you click one link in this newsletter, let it be this one. I wholeheartedly agree with the author that “the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind.”

An excerpt from the article:

For it is Sennett’s contention that “nearly anyone can become a good craftsman” and that “learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” This line of thought depends, among other things, upon the Enlightenment assumption that craft abilities are innate and widely distributed, and that, when rightly stimulated and trained, they allow craftsmen to become knowledgeable public persons.

And what is it that such persons know? They know how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop); how to work not against resistant forces but with them (as did the engineers who first drilled tunnels beneath the Thames); how to complete their tasks using “minimum force” (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables); how to meet people and things with sympathetic imagination (as does the glassblower whose “corporeal anticipation” lets her stay one step ahead of the molten glass); and above all they know how to play, for it is in play that we find “the origin of the dialogue the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass.”

Please let me know what you think of all this! I certainly have more thoughts and would love to discuss with you in the comments.

And with that, I hope you play this week. And maybe even make something with your hands. Talk to you Friday with this week’s recommendations!

xx Jane