One thing becomes clear when you stroll through a bustling data center outside of Chicago, past the server racks, cooling units, and tangled cables that run from floor to ceiling. A human is required to maintain everything in that building. not an analyst of spreadsheets. Not a quick engineer. An electrician. A plumber. An HVAC specialist with real expertise.
One such facility is run by Brandyn Frye. He is aware that there is an increasing need for his services. Contracts or competition don’t keep him up at night; rather, it’s the dwindling number of individuals capable of performing the manual labor that sustains his business. He says, “Everything in here needs service,” and he means it literally. The machines are not self-repairing.
In the meantime, another type of erosion is taking place in offices all over the nation. Routine white-collar work is being absorbed by AI tools at a rate that was hard to predict even three years ago. Software is increasingly handling tasks like data entry, customer service scripts, basic bookkeeping, and templated legal review. Once the first step on the professional ladder, entry-level office jobs are gradually disappearing. The ladder is wobbling but not broken yet.
It is difficult to overlook the difference between these two realities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are currently 400,000 unfilled skilled trade positions in the United States. According to Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, the number could get close to two million by 2033 due to a combination of younger people who were strongly encouraged to pursue office jobs and four-year degrees and retiring workers. The long-standing cultural perception that blue-collar work was somehow inferior may have contributed more to this disparity than any recent policy change.
The labor shortage truly perplexes Dan Brown, an HVAC technician who works in the same Chicago data center. In his world, a skilled technician can make over $150,000 annually without having to worry about student loan debt, years of unpaid internships, or whether AI will take over your job description by Thursday. “The trades kind of got neglected,” he states, “so now there’s a void that needs to be filled.” He doesn’t feel resentment over it. He seemed to have almost anticipated it.
At least not yet, mass unemployment is not the result of the larger shift in office work. It’s more subdued. The entry-level, repetitive, and standardized are being undermined by AI. Roles such as schedulers, routine customer support agents, transcriptionists, junior document reviewers, and basic coders who handle boilerplate tasks are gradually declining. Businesses are employing fewer workers to complete tasks that AI can now complete more quickly and affordably. Some economists refer to this as the “broken ladder” problem, which means that young professionals may find it difficult to obtain the entry points that earlier generations took for granted.
There is no such issue with the trades. Kevin Fishback, an electrician who works at the Chicago facility as well, observes that his local union is actively hiring young apprentices, providing health care, pensions, and a clear career path that many office workers would be genuinely envious of at the moment. “They come into the trades and they got insurance, they got health care, they got a pension,” he claims. That’s a big deal in a time when employer benefits seem to be getting harder to come by.
Perception and reality continue to be seriously out of sync. The data does not support the cultural baggage associated with skilled trades. A generation that was brought up on the promise of office prestige is gradually coming to terms with a labor market where that prestige is being silently and effectively automated away. Whether the attitude change will occur quickly enough to close the gap is still up in the air. However, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that, one apprenticeship program at a time, the nation is making amends for a protracted, costly error.
