Dirty Jobs and Honest Work, Why Pop Culture Rarely Celebrates the Trades

Name a movie hero who fixes your plumbing. Go ahead, I will wait. A detective, sure. A lawyer, a surgeon, a billionaire in a suit made of armor, a teacher who inspires a classroom, a spy who survives a car chase through a market. But a hero whose heroism consists of showing up at your house at six in the morning with a pipe wrench, diagnosing a problem you could not diagnose, and fixing it so your family can take a shower? That man has been a punchline for decades. In the movies, the plumber is the guy whose trousers slip.

Folks, I want you to notice something. Your house runs on those people. Your lights, your water, your heat, your roads, your food, all of it is built, wired, welded, hauled and harvested by men and women whose work you almost never see in a story. And I want to argue that the silence is not an accident, it is not harmless, and it is costing the country more than most of what we spend our time worrying about.

The claim, stated plainly

Here is the thesis. Entertainment teaches young people which lives are worth wanting. For a long time, the screen has taught that the good life is a desk job with a view and a degree from a name-brand school, and that skilled manual work is what you fall back on if the plan fails. That message is false, it is unfair to the people who do the work, and a culture that believes it gets fewer of them.

I need to be careful about what I am claiming. I am not citing a ratings study, and I will not invent one. There is no precise measure of how often the trades appear as aspirational on screen. What I am claiming is a broad pattern that anyone can test by flipping channels, and an argument about what that pattern teaches. The reader is invited to check the pattern against his own memory.

The show that tried something different

In 2005 the Discovery Channel premiered Dirty Jobs, hosted by Mike Rowe. The format was simple and, at the time, almost radical. Each episode, Rowe would spend a day apprenticing to someone with an unglamorous, difficult and often disgusting job: sewer inspector, septic tank cleaner, bat-guano collector, hot-tar roofer, and so on. He would fail at the task, usually, and learn why the people who did it every day were good at it. The show ran for years and became a hit.

Why does that matter? Because it did something almost nobody else on television was doing. It treated those workers as experts. They were not victims, not comic relief, not examples of what happens if you skip college. They were people with skills, pride and often a good living, who knew things Rowe did not. The humor came from the host's incompetence, and the dignity went to the worker. That is the correct way around.

Rowe went on to become a public advocate for skilled work. He founded a foundation, mikeroweWORKS, in 2008 to support scholarships for people who train in the trades, and he testified before a Senate committee on the subject. His public argument, which I think is the strongest part of his work, is that the country has spent years telling young people that a four-year degree is the only respectable road, and has left a great many jobs without enough people to fill them. You do not need to agree with every point he has made to see that the show he made gave the trades something they were short of: a spotlight.

What came before

It is worth remembering that the screen was not always like this. Older films and shows were full of working men, and treated their work as a source of identity and pride.

• The Honeymooners, from 1955, centered on Ralph Kramden, a city bus driver, and Ed Norton, who worked in the sewer. They were not rich, and the show took them seriously as a husband and a friend.
• On the Waterfront (1954) put longshoremen at the center of a drama about dignity and corruption. The working men were the story.
• Norma Rae (1979) put a textile worker at the heart of a film about standing up for herself.
• Flashdance (1983) made a welder its heroine.
• All in the Family featured a man who worked on a loading dock and drove a cab, and the show treated his world as real.

Not all of these were flattering, and some were about labor disputes rather than the craft itself. But the point stands: for a long stretch, a person who worked with his hands could be the lead in the picture.

Then came a shift. As the culture took up the idea that the road to a good life ran through a four-year campus, the stories stopped being about work and started being about careers of a certain kind. The leads became investigators, executives, doctors, lawyers, tech founders and the occasional chef. The blue-collar father became the figure of fun described elsewhere on this blog, in From Father Knows Best to the Bumbling Sitcom Dad, What TV Taught About Fathers, and the skilled trades became background scenery.

Why the silence matters

Let me lay out the argument in numbered steps, because the logic matters more than the anecdotes.

1. Young people absorb what a culture respects. A teenager deciding what to do with his life does not consult a labor-market table. He looks at what the people around him admire. If the stories he watches, the teachers who guide him and the family at the dinner table all point toward one path, he takes it.
2. The trades are real careers, with real pay and real demand. I am not going to quote a wage figure that I cannot source here. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Occupational Outlook Handbook, with pay and job-growth figures for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC technicians and dozens of other skilled occupations, and anyone can check them. The reader should do so before accepting anyone's claim, mine included.
3. A shortage of workers is a cost to everyone. When there are too few skilled tradespeople, homes cost more to build, repairs take longer, and projects the country wants, from housing to factories to power lines, wait for hands. A shortage of electricians is a shortage of electricity.
4. So the silence is expensive. If the culture makes skilled work look like a consolation prize, fewer capable young people choose it, and the whole country pays for it.

That is the argument. It is not complicated. It does not blame anyone for going to college, and I would not want to. It says that the trades should be on the menu, presented with respect, and that the screen has mostly left them off.

The Founding view of work

You will find this attitude in the earliest days of the Republic. The Founders did not look down on people who worked with their hands. Benjamin Franklin was a printer who remained proud of the trade all his life. George Washington was a working farmer who spent a great deal of his time managing the land. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, praised those who labor in the earth as the most valuable citizens of a state, and he meant it as a statement about the moral foundation of a republic.

The idea behind it is the one the country was built on: that a free people's strength comes from people who produce things, who own their own labor and who answer to no one but their customers. A republic of independent farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers has a spine. A republic in which the only honorable work is the work done at a desk has a different one.

The government has recognized this, too. The Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant colleges explicitly to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 provided federal support for vocational education. The tradition of valuing practical skill is as old as the republic's schools.

The steelman

A thoughtful skeptic will say: you are describing a market, not a conspiracy. Television follows what audiences want to watch, and audiences want stories about glamour, danger and high stakes. A show about a pipe fitter would need a plot that holds, and there is nothing wrong with people choosing to watch detectives. Besides, college graduates, on average, still earn more over a lifetime than people without a degree, and parents are not wrong to want their children to have that advantage. Telling teenagers to go to trade school is easy advice for those who are not the ones taking the risk.

That is a serious argument and part of it is right. Drama needs stakes, and nobody is entitled to a particular kind of story. Many people benefit from higher education, and a person who wants to be a physician has to go.

The answer

First, notice that the skeptic's argument is about drama, not about respect. Nobody is asking for a sitcom about torque specifications. We are asking for the ordinary decency of portraying skilled workers as competent, necessary and admired, rather than as people who did not get into the right school. A show can be about a murder investigation and still have an electrician who is the smartest person in the room.

Second, Dirty Jobs refutes the idea that audiences do not want to see this. It ran for years because people enjoyed seeing competent people do hard things. There is an audience, and it is not small.

Third, the argument about averages is true and beside the point. An average is not a destiny. A student who is good with his hands, likes solving problems on site and wants to be his own boss may do very well as an electrician or a welder, and may start earning years before his classmates and without the debt. The question is whether he is encouraged to see that as a first choice or whispered to see it as a fallback. And I would add that a plumber who owns his own business is an employer, a taxpayer and a pillar of his town. That is not a consolation prize in any sense of the word.

Fourth, I will not pretend the choice is free of risk, for anyone. Every path has risks. But a culture that supports only one of them is leaving people behind.

What a respectful culture would do

• Show it. Writers and producers can put skilled workers in stories as capable, thoughtful and proud, and not only as the person who arrives to fix the thing the main character broke.
• Teach it. Schools can present apprenticeships and trade programs as one of the real options on the table, and say so out loud. A counselor who can describe what an apprenticeship pays, how long it takes and what a journeyman can do afterward is giving a student information, and information is not a lesser form of advice than a college brochure. See Country Music Still Sings About Work, Faith and Flag, and It Is No Accident for a corner of the culture that never stopped honoring workers, and Late Night Comedy Stopped Punching at Power and Started Lecturing for what happens when comedy forgets who its audience is.
• Say it at home. Parents have more influence than any television network. Tell your children the truth: that a person who can build, fix and grow things is never useless.
• Pay it forward. Hire a local tradesperson, pay promptly and say thank you. Respect starts with how we treat the people we hire.

And if you want to see how entertainment's choices shape what the public admires, the post on It's a Wonderful Life Is the Most Conservative Film Hollywood Ever Made looks at a film that put a small-town builder of homes at the center of a Christmas classic, and Movies That Love America Still Sell Tickets, and Hollywood Keeps Forgetting asks why the studios keep forgetting what audiences reward.

A final thought, in the spirit of the show that started this. Somewhere tonight a person is standing in a basement with a flashlight in his teeth, working on a problem you will never know you had. By tomorrow morning your life will work a little better because of it, and you will not give him a thought. That is the definition of honest work, and the least a culture can do is give it a nod.

The case in brief

1. Entertainment teaches young people which lives are worth wanting, and the screen has mostly shown the good life as a desk job, not a skilled trade.
2. Dirty Jobs (Discovery, 2005) proved that audiences will watch competent people do hard work, and gave tradespeople the dignity of expertise.
3. Older films and series, from On the Waterfront to The Honeymooners, treated working men and women as leads, so the current silence is a choice, not a law of nature.
4. Skilled trades are real careers, and a shortage of workers is a cost to every family; the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the pay and demand figures for anyone to check.
5. The Founders honored producers and craftsmen, and a culture that respects work gets more of it.

What you can do: look up one skilled trade in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, read the pay and outlook, and share it with a young person you know.