DEI Liberates Blue-Collar America!
Sean Ring

Two months ago, I made the case that DEI was—ironically—the best thing that ever happened to white guys. The week after, I elaborated after a subscriber wrote in with a genuine concern.

I follow up now because Zero Hedge dropped a bombshell, reporting that America desperately needs half a million highly skilled workers just to keep basic national functions running.

For too long, America has constructed a strange mythology around the college degree, DEI bureaucracy, and credentialism. To hell with apprenticeships and on-the-job training! Let colleges give you the theory behind your work, and then you can be “desk-ready” when a company hires you.

Parents spent decades insisting that the only respectable career path was a vague “office job” in a cubicle, conveniently omitting the lifetime of diversity seminars that came with it.

Meanwhile, the people who actually keep civilization functioning—electricians, welders, linemen, machinists, mechanics, heavy equipment operators, HVAC technicians, and plant workers—were quietly retiring, with no one to replace them.

DEI didn’t notice because the entire DEI ecosystem produces exactly one thing: more DEI. It produces consultants, coordinators, assistant vice provosts for feelings management, and armies of people whose entire skill set consists of talking about work rather than doing it.

DEI was never designed to produce someone capable of fixing a turbine, rebuilding a transformer, installing an HVAC system, or keeping a refinery from blowing sky-high.

That’s how we reached today’s crisis. The shortage of tradesmen in the U.S. is now in the hundreds of thousands, with manufacturing alone predicted to face an underemployment gap of over 2 million workers by 2030 unless current trends change. This is a structural catastrophe years in the making, directly resulting from an elite (and, to be fair, upper middle class, as well) consensus that treated blue-collar labor as an embarrassing secret. The consequences of this attitude are now clearly visible.

Meanwhile, wages in the trades have soared. Companies are fighting over electricians like NFL teams fight over star quarterbacks. Data centers—those monstrous buildings that power AI—are scrambling to find anyone who understands cooling systems. Construction firms are begging for pipefitters and welders. The trades have gone from being the quiet backbone of America to being the single hottest labor market in the country.

Mike Rowe Was Right

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Mike Rowe said all of this a decade ago. He claimed we were pushing kids into pointless degrees, bankrupting them before age 22, and starving the real economy of talent. He warned about the skilled-labor shortage long before the think tanks bothered to run the numbers. And for his trouble, he was dismissed as a crank by the very literati that now publish hand-wringing op-eds about “the shocking decline of vocational interest.”

Rowe wasn’t anti-education. He was anti-stupidity. And sending millions of kids into debt for soft skills, grievance studies, or corporate HR ladders qualifies as stupidity of the highest order.

Not Just Recession Proof!

There’s another truth we need to say plainly, even though it makes the professional class uncomfortable: the trades are DEI-proof. Identity categories don’t judge a welder. The steel either holds or it fails. An electrician either wires the building correctly or the building burns. A machinist either hits the tolerances or the part doesn’t fit. In the trades, nature enforces the standards. Physics performs the evaluation. Reality conducts the performance review.

No committee can issue a variance on gravity. No consultant can waive the electrical code. No HR department can “reimagine” hydraulic pressure. When the world runs on objective outcomes, all the ideological baggage gets thrown out the window. Competence wins. Accountability wins. Reality wins. And the trades, unlike the credential mills, are built entirely on those foundations.

A Brand New Day

That’s why today’s teenagers should rethink their futures. If I were 18 again—with the same allergy to debt I have now—I’d run toward the trades. The math is overwhelming. A kid who learns a skilled trade starts earning in his late teens or early twenties, builds capital early, and avoids the soul-destroying burden of student loans. By the time his college friends are moving back home to figure out “what they want to do with their lives,” he’s got five years of experience and real coin in his bank account.

On top of that, the work can’t be outsourced overseas or automated away. AI can write poems about electricity, but it can’t install a single outlet. Robots don’t climb ladders, crawl through attics, fix industrial machinery, or weld bridges. The real world still runs on hands, tools, skill, and sweat.

And most importantly, trade work offers what college rarely delivers: pride. Heck, a builder who helped rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was given the rare honor of marrying his fiancée there. Quel honneur!

When you finish any job, you see the result. A building stands because of you. A power system runs because of you. A factory stays online because you kept it alive. Compare that to another day of curating Slack threads.

Parents and grandparents need to stop repeating the mantra that every kid needs a degree. It’s nonsense. What every kid needs is a skill. College gives you debt; a trade gives you a life.

Wrap Up

DEI sold us the fantasy that America’s problem was “representation.” But the real crisis is much simpler: not enough people know how to do essential work. We don’t have a representation shortage—we have a competence shortage. And no amount of seminars or slogans will fix it.

The good news is that the pendulum is swinging back. America is finally recognizing the worth of skilled labor. Earning a significant income early in life is superior to the endless pursuit of academic degrees.

So once again, I implore you: get your kids into trade schools and watch them blossom. The cubicle farm will soon be a data center anyway.

 

My story starts in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, where I grew up. My childhood was idyllic. I never thought I'd leave the Heights. Well, maybe just for college. When I was searching for colleges, I only looked within a hundred miles or so. I wound up going to Villanova. I stayed there for four years and earned — their word, not mine — a finance degree with a minor in political science. After that, I went to work on Wall Street. I had a menial job at Paine Webber to start, but then I got my first real Wall Street job at Lehman Bros. (before its collapse, of course). I worked there in Global Corporate Equity Derivatives as an accountant, believe it or not. Honestly, I hated the job back then. I didn't know how spreadsheets worked — yes, even with a finance degree. (Now I'm a Microsoft Excel nut. I think it’s one of the most extraordinary things ever invented.) After that, I moved to Credit Suisse, who sent me to London — the center of global operations for banking. I was young. Not only did I love the city for being a Candyland for alcoholics, but I also needed the international experience to cancel out my mediocre grade point average to get into a top 25 U.S. business school. Somehow, though, I stayed for a decade, until I discovered London Business School. There I earned a master’s (HA!) degree in finance. My next job was as a futures broker, which I utterly loathed. When I had enough, I took a year off — pub crawling around London and pissing away my bonus money. Then I figured out that I needed a new job. So I went to work for a company called 7city Learning, where all of the best finance trainers were working. I had no idea about any of that, but imagine walking into the 1927 Yankees locker room and being taught how to hit. I spent my time teaching all the traders exams, the graduate programs of the various big banks and then the CFA Level 1 review courses. Yes, that's the only level I've passed. I hate that exam. I never really wanted to run money anyway. In 2009, my boss asked me to move to Singapore to help build the business in Asia. Then I went to work for another financial training company where all of my friends had migrated. Around the time I was getting bored of Singapore, my old bank asked me to work at talent development for them in Hong Kong. Nearly three years later, I moved to the Philippines, where I started an EdTech startup called Finlingo. Along the way, I’ve racked up a ton of qualifications — I am a CAIA, FRM and CMT, amongst a few other things — but they don't mean anything. All that matters are my experience, my connections and my takes on things. So every day I'm going to do my snarky best to inform and entertain you.

 

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