The Building Trades: An Opportunity Uniquely Suited to Agorism.

Today, the skills gap is wider than it’s ever been. The cost of college tuition has soared faster than the cost of food, energy, real estate, and health care. Student loan debt is the second highest consumer debt category in the United States with more than 44 million borrowers who collectively owe more than $1.5 trillion. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 7 million jobs available across the country, the majority of which don’t require a four-year degree.

—– Mike Rowe (Host of Dirty Jobs, and advocate for the trades)

We Have A Problem

In the US and Canada, the average age of those in the building trades is hovering around 50 years old. This indicates that younger folks are not going into the trades at a rate equal to that of those who are retiring. Who can blame them? For decades people in the trades have been mocked for being uneducated. Parents will point to tradespeople and tell their kids, “Go to college so you don’t have to do that!” The story has been if you want a good income you need to have a college degree. That is becoming increasingly false as time passes and the lack of tradespeople has led to higher demand. It is not hard to find trades paying six figure salaries now.

The demand for people who can build the structures we all rely on for day-to-day life provides an opportunity for good income for anyone who is willing to learn a trade, do what they say they will do, and show up on time. Those are the keys to success in any given trade. If that seems simple, even too simple, well it is, though it should not be. The sad fact is that since the trades have been looked down on for so long, the people in the trades may not have chosen it as much as fallen into it by accident. They often lack passion, dedication, or appreciation of how to treat customers and do business. There is enough money to be made that there is little pressure for them to change.

Before I get angry comments, allow me to clarify a few things. There are great tradespeople out there. I have had the pleasure of working with some over the last twenty-plus years. And yes, I went the college and graduate school route, but for the last few decades I myself have also been working in the trades. There is nothing inherent about the trades that is deserving of the ridicule that I and far too many tradespeople have experienced.  There is great pride to be had in a job well done, and with the knowledge of how to do these jobs. Make no mistake, these are skills that takes an education, just not a college degree.

A Uniquely Agorist Opportunity
With seven million jobs going unfilled, there is a great opportunity here for any young person considering a career. But for the young agorist, this opportunity may be even greater in that he or she may be able not only to have a great and profitable career but to promote the ideals of agorism at the same time. The trades lend themselves to agorism perhaps better than any other field. The trades are already one of the most popular grey market fields. The jobs are frequently cash jobs, undocumented labor is readily available, there is such demand that close inspection of how you run your business by customers and suppliers is rare, and given the broad areas that the trades cover there are many varied opportunities to promote agorist ideals.

The above ideas largely don’t need further explanation. Doing jobs off the books is obvious and anyone who has been by a job site in much of the US in the last several decades sees that most often the primary language spoken on site is Spanish. If you live in border areas, particularly the southern border of the US, you may well have a pool of people ready and willing to work. Some you may have to teach, but others you will find are already at the master level, though they lack local licenses. I’ve watched roofing crews and tilers rock out jobs in no time at all, at a very high quality. I did not ask, but I have every reason to believe that none of them were official citizens of the US.

However, these are not the only opportunities for the practicing agorist.

The agorist could run an above-board business simply charging less to minimize the taxes that go to the state. It is possible to run your business using contract labor and other resources to reduce the amount of taxation you have to legally pay, though this shifts the burden to the contract laborer.  But, of course, there are other avenues and opportunities for those who decide the benefit is worth the risk. This approach will all but guarantee that you will never be short of work.

You can offer cash and cryptocurrency discounts as a means of bringing in income that is unseen by tax collectors. You must still take precautions and make certain that you are not leaving yourself open to being caught, and of course you will have to examine all of your own options and evaluate the risks. Exactly how you handle that side of things will require you to find creative solutions. There is no one simple answer of which I am aware.

Talk to your clients and find instances for barter. I know of a case where the labor side of an exterior house painting job was traded for air miles used for a first-class ticket to China! No cash or check traded hands and the client who was not an agorist was thrilled to find a use for his abundant air miles to save himself thousands on the cost of the job. In another case, staining and sealing a fence was traded for repairs on a vehicle. As there was no paperwork, there was no opportunity for the state to get a record of the voluntary exchange of services. If you think you see an opportunity, ask. You might just be surprised at the positive response even from those you know are not agorists. We all like saving money and exchanges like this are seldom frowned on by even the devout statist.

There are many rural areas of the country that lack building codes or are very lax on building codes. These provide an opportunity to avoid the onerous government regulations. Such areas can allow the general contractor to explore many different types of building so that he or she is always learning and keeping the work interesting. You need not just build houses; why not metal buildings? Barns? Pole Barns? Sheds and other structures? You may even be able to convince clients to jump up to modern technological advances by simply crunching the numbers. Rural areas are a lot more interesting and diverse than many believe.

Important Considerations

When working in the trades make certain you know how to do the job right. Anything less than stellar will make the message of agorism fail, and your reputation will suffer. The trades often require great trust from the client, a trust we must not break. The more that they trust us in our jobs the more open they will be to our ideas.

An easy approach is to just follow code, though often this is far from the best approach. To understand why this is, we need to understand how codes are written. Most often, codes are written by trade unions seeking to protect themselves and their privileges granted by the state, or by manufacturers seeking to have their product used universally. The remaining cases are written by mindless bureaucrats who have never spent a day working in the trades. Regulations and codes are simply not written by experts with safety and quality in mind. Once you understand this you can feel much more comfortable about recommending actions outside of the codes very often far superior to what the codes require. It takes a year minimum to change the code regulations, and very often much longer. This means that often, especially in our tech age, innovation exceeds code which, contrary to reason, also violates code! In other words, even in the best-case argument for codes, the codes fail. As the trusted tradesperson, you are the single most important source of information for your client. Give them good information.

As agorists, we can demonstrate that the codes are unnecessary as well. By exceeding the quality demanded by codes, a fairly low bar in truth, we can prove that a reputation for quality goes further in determining if the end product will be of high quality than any building code ever could. You can build your own reputation while building the reputation of agorism in general.

Be honest. When you say you will do something, do it. If there are no unforeseen complications or additions to the work, do the work as described at the cost described. You may have to take a loss on a job or two that you bid poorly. Accept that as a learning opportunity and do better next time. If you change your bill to the client, you are breaking the contract, whether that is a signed contract or just a spoken agreement. Too many contractors will charge the client for their own mistake. Stand above them by doing the right thing.

Be on time. A great failing in the trades is that contractors especially are always running late. Don’t be that person. Show up at minimum 5 minutes early. Learn to think of being “on time” as being late. This buys you enormous good will from your clients.

Keep your quality high. Yes, there are jobs that have different levels of quality demanded, but if you can always do better than what is expected you will grow your reputation for quality, which will also help ensure that you are always in demand. By doing high quality work you are also making agorism and agorists look good.

Each of these pieces of advice apply to anyone working in the trades and would help anyone do quite well in the trades. Since we have an uphill battle as agorists, we need to excel at these to help make agorists stand out as the superior choice. By demonstrating our integrity and quality in our work practices, we open the door for consideration of our ideas about government and freedom. We can prove that it can work without involving coercion from the state.

Building Good Will

Aside from the direct goodwill we generate by doing quality work, being honest, and not wasting the client’s time, there are other ways we can build good will outside of the client-tradesman relationship.

Construction creates enormous amounts of waste. This most often goes in a large dumpster on site to be hauled away to the landfill. This provides the opportunity to appeal to the environmentalists and others by reducing the impact on our landfills. A few ways to handle this would be to:
– Talk to environmental groups. They are notorious advocates of laws forcing people to live as the environmentalist wants. That may seem to make them enemies of the agorist, but if we talk to them, invite them to come to our jobs and offer up advice on how we can reduce or reuse waste, we may be able to open the door a bit to the ideas of voluntary association instead of coercion. We cannot change the minds of our opponents if we do not talk to them and try to alleviate their concerns.
-Reach out to local gardening clubs. Offer up your scrap non-treated wood waste. You can save on disposal costs and build goodwill at the same time. It literally costs you nothing. The gardening clubs would be thrilled to have the compostable material that they will turn into plants.
– Electricians and plumbers, and anyone who works with metal, you could set aside all of the small scraps that you would otherwise discard. When you get say a 5-gallon bucket full, or 50 pounds of it, or whatever standard works for you, take the scrap to be recycled. This can put money back in your pocket, or perhaps better yet use this opportunity to help out a charity. Put the charity logo on your collection container and when you fill it and cash it in, take the cash to the charity to whom you have explained that you are turning trash into much needed cash to help those in need.

All in all, the trades present the best opportunity for the most people that we have seen since the dot com boom, if not the industrial revolution. Given how well the trades mesh with agorism, it behooves us as agorists to jump on this wagon and use it to the benefit of everyone involved and agorist ideas.