Welding Class Teaches Life and Economic Lessons

This year I took a welding class as an elective at Dixon High School. I took it mainly so I could learn the basics of industrial work so I could help out more at my dad’s farm, Nishimura Farming. It seems like people don’t realize the value of trade work these days, so here is a list of the five lessons I learned or re-discovered about life, work, the job market, and business:

5.       Cross-train so you can have a back-up plan. I always thought that if I wanted to have a successful career, I needed to dive head-first into whatever I wanted to do in order to have the experience and know-how to do a good job. While that is partially true, learning the art (or science, depending on the way you look at it) of welding helped me take a look at the reasons people are losing their jobs and being forced to lose their savings. Most of the people we see on tv are middle aged corporate workers who have spent half of their lives working at the same company in the same job, and when people lost their corporate jobs, they had no back-up plan. They probably thought they were set for life, yet the idea of working with their hands shocked them, so they were either unwilling or unprepared to work in a trade industry. Now that I am learning how to weld, I have a skill that I will be able to fall-back on if I ever find myself in a position where I can’t find work in my primary industry.

4.    Nothing feels better than starting and finishing a project in a short amount of time. When I first started to learn to weld, I worked on a project with my dad that turned several pieces of scrap into a lawn ornament over 3 days. I know that for such a small project, and the amount of time I poured into it, there’s no excuse for it taking 3 whole days, however I'm proud of it anyway. I ended up giving it to my mom as a Christmas present and it was something truly unique that she could say I made for her. It felt good to create something from start to finish and to be able watch it all come together.

3.    Take raw materials or something worthless and give it value. It felt great to see something that was nothing but a pile of scrap turn into something valuable and, if I don’t say so myself, beautiful. Trade work means being able to create a product for immediate or labor trade. This is the purest definition of wealth creation, by creating something out of things that were previously worthless means that there is more value in the economy. In this sense, all economists should have a hobby in which they can sell their work and increase wealth for whatever country they live in.

2.    Working with your hands is nothing to be ashamed of. Seeing all of the different techniques and various little alterations one can make within arc and gas welding showed me that welding really is an art. Not everyone can do it with ease, in fact, very few can. There are too many college graduates and not enough skilled workers in the market meaning welders, truck drivers, carpenters and mechanics will have higher wages than ever in the next few decades. Not to mention that less and less kids are returning to their parents’ professions and instead leaving the industrial or niche sectors, leaving no one to replace them.

1.    America needs more manufacturing. As I mentioned before, America has a trade worker deficiency. This is mainly because education has become so heavily subsidized by our government that every kid thinks they want to be a corporate worker who gets a fat paycheck for being a small cog in a much larger machine. However the lack of manufacturing has diminished the amount of goods coming out of America and made us a solely service-based economy. If we want to see a more balanced economy that produces goods instead of exclusively trading securities and services that others create, we need to focus education on these valuable vocational skills.