Calif. teens are ditching office jobs and making $100K before 21

It’s noon on a Thursday, but the day’s lunch break is already over and the cement building in Concord is once again full. Class is in session. A dozen students — most dressed in gray canvas button-downs and baseball caps — sit with rapt attention facing the whiteboard at the front of the room. But the topic of today’s lesson isn’t biology, math or literature. It’s how to fabricate drawings for pipe fitting.

The students here are apprentices with United Association Local 342, a union that trains and represents workers in the pipe trades industries. They’ll complete a five-year paid apprenticeship to graduate as journeymen — and expect to earn a union wage of $80.50 an hour. Trainees cite a desire to work with their hands and the competitive pay as reasons for pursuing a career in the skilled trades. But young adults entering the workforce are facing a new challenge that is increasing the attractiveness of blue-collar jobs: the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

Data from the Federal Reserve shows that among recent college graduates, the unemployment rates for majors once heralded as tickets to high-salary, high-status jobs like computer engineering and computer science were 7.5% and 6.1%, respectively. In contrast, construction services majors’ unemployment rate was just 0.7%.

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Experts say Silicon Valley’s AI models’ capabilities are encroaching on many entry-level white-collar jobs. The CEO of generative AI powerhouse Anthropic told Axios in May that AI could erase half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment to 10% to 20% in the next one to five years.

In order to secure a stable career insulated from AI job theft, many young people are turning to trade work. A May survey from Resume Builder of 1,434 Generation Z adults found that over a quarter of blue-collar Gen Z workers cited wanting jobs that were less likely to be replaced by AI as a reason for choosing their career paths. An August study from Zety of 1,000 Gen Z adults reported that 43% of respondents have changed or adjusted their career plans because of AI’s influence.

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Meanwhile, instructors at vocational schools and apprenticeships told SFGATE they’ve seen a boost in interest in their programs, and more students are beginning their training straight out of high school.

“I think since ChatGPT really started taking off, that kind of opened people’s eyes,” Jonathan Cronan, an HVAC and refrigeration instructor at San Jose Community College, said. “They were like, all right, this is here sooner than I thought it was going to be. I better pick a good career path.”

Microsoft predicted that the jobs facing the least threat from AI were overwhelmingly blue-collar, including plasters, roofers and pile drivers.

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But trade work has appeals far beyond being a safe haven from AI. Graduates from apprenticeships or community college programs enter the workforce with a fraction of the debt of a four-year college degree, or no debt at all. And most skilled industry jobs are represented by unions that guarantee medical benefits and competitive salaries.

Robert Chon, the outreach coordinator at the Electrical Training Alliance of Silicon Valley, said graduates of the apprenticeship program who join the local electricians’ union in Santa Clara earn a starting salary of $91 per hour. He estimates the training program’s acceptance rate to be 5%.

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“The benefits of a union career are unparalleled,” said Al Garcia, the training director for Local 342’s apprenticeship program. “A lot of people are retiring out of a union with good, solid pensions that they could retire on, plus a couple million dollars in a 401(k), so it’s pretty cool.”

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Journeymen graduating from Local 342 are uniquely positioned to thrive in the Bay Area; the region’s high concentration of universities, oil refineries, national laboratories and biopharmaceutical companies means a nearly constant demand for the union’s skills — necessary for everything from cooling the vegetables consumers’ buy at grocery stores to safely providing the medical gases used in hospitals like oxygen and nitrous oxide.

The need for workers, combined with high Bay Area wages, means the union has members travel from as far as Placerville, in El Dorado County, and near the Oregon border to become apprentices.

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To accommodate demand, Local 342 has expanded the size of its training program over the past decade, but Garcia estimates it is only able to accept 10% of applicants each year, and they’re getting younger.

“I do think there’s an uptick in folks coming right out of high school applying to the program,” he said.

Cronan said a recent influx of Gen Zers is lowering the average age of students in his program, too. And in the past two years, they’ve started to bring up AI as a reason for pursuing HVAC skills.

Trade jobs have also become popular among those with bachelor’s degrees. The Resume Builder survey found that 37% of Gen Z adults working in blue-collar fields had four-year degrees. One of them is Ellen Lahey.

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As a child, Lahey, 24, wanted to be a park ranger. So she attended UC Santa Barbara and earned a degree in earth science. But when she began her job hunt, career fairs only seemed to offer continuing in academia or going into consulting, neither of which piqued her interest. She then worried about working in the park system without any practical skills if she found herself in trouble in an isolated area.

That’s when her dad, a lifelong mechanic, suggested an alternative that offered good pay and a promise of security: welding. Now, Lahey is pursuing an associate degree in the discipline at Chabot College.

“Everyone needs a welder,” Lahey said. “The job’s not going to leave anytime soon.”

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Her view isn’t unique among college-educated young adults.

College graduates typically earn higher wages and fare better during economic recessions than those with just a high school diploma. Those with a four-year degree also report having more friends and being more active in their communities than those without. But as tuition costs climb, AI may be changing the calculus.

Prospective students flock to forums like Reddit to debate which college majors will be safest from AI’s steady march onward. But the Zety study reported that 63% of Gen Zers don’t think a college degree will protect them from AI-related job loss at all.

A 2023 study by OpenAI, the powerhouse behind ChatGPT, concluded that the jobs where AI could best perform were those held by graduates with a four-year degree. The company said only 4% of jobs could not be done by AI at all — including jobs like carpentry and roofing.

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Now, even that might be changing.

“I would say that AI is in blue-collar, too, and it’s really fast growing. Automation is the fastest trend that’s happening, and it’s happening really, really rapidly,” said Liisa Pine Schoonmaker, one of Lahey’s welding instructors at Chabot College.

Automation of routine welds on production lines — like a car manufacturer, for example — was normal long before the rise of AI. But now a new technology has entered the industry: collaborative robots, or cobots for short.

These machines can be taught to mimic human welds and then use AI to monitor weld quality and shift parameters like voltage or speed in real time. The cobots have already begun production performing high-volume and repetitive welds, but the technology still lags behind humans in artistic quality and problem-solving ability.

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“Students might be surprised how much technology is coming into the world of welding,” said Dave Vetrano, one of Schoonmaker’s colleagues at Chabot. “But they are right that the vast majority of this could be a lot slower to be replaced than entry-level white-collar jobs.”

Vetrano thinks the integration of more automation into the field could be a good thing. Welding work can be inherently risky for employees when welds need to be done on hazardous projects like deep-sea pipelines, nuclear plants or oil refineries. Sending a robot to do those jobs reduces liability for contractors and keeps humans out of harm’s way.

Products are also being developed for electricians that can use AI to analyze and plan more efficient electric grids and troubleshoot during installations.

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“We always believed that our jobs were just too intricate for a robot to do. I think that will always be true to a certain extent,” Chon said. “But … there’s a recognition that some of what we do could actually be displaced by AI married to robotics.”

Despite the advancements, those in the field seem confident AI won’t be replacing their jobs in the imminent future.

“It’s going to be very hard for robots to do what humans do, at least for another 10 to 15 years, until they’re going up on rooftops and crawling under houses,” Cronan said.

For veteran trade workers, that means AI is unlikely to supplant their roles for the rest of their careers. That may not be true for Gen Z workers just entering their industries. But that doesn’t scare Lahey, who is set to graduate with her associate degree in welding from Chabot in the spring.

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“The use of AI, that’s something that we can work together on if it has to be done. The technology is always advancing,” she said. “And it’ll be fun.”

For now, the AI boom has actually been good for business for many of the trades.

“One of the reasons work is really good is we’re building tons of AI data centers both in San Jose and in Santa Clara right now,” Chon said.

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Though the construction means a payday today, he’s wary of the data centers’ implications down the line for workers in other industries.

“We’re conflicted in our work, because we know that in building data centers, we’re developing technology that will eventually replace workers and possibly including ourselves someday,” Chon said. “So it’s kind of a strange place to be.”