The Inco Superstack looms above Sudbury, Ontario. At 1,250 feet, Inco is the tallest chimney in the Western Hemisphere, a decommissioned monument to a time when life revolved around the massive nickel and copper deposits found beneath this mining town by railway workers two centuries ago. Its weathered concrete is a historical beacon, reminding all of Sudbury’s blue-collar roots.
Anchored in the stony Canadian Shield about four hours north of Toronto, Sudbury is a gritty town, a survivor of recessions with a history of trade unionism whose economic destiny is closely tied to commodity prices. Construction crews in orange and yellow safety vests rotate through the lunch rush at the local hamburger joint. The town paper, The Sudbury Star, tells the story of a stubbly teenage maintenance worker who recently died on the job.
“When I was younger, the idea was you want to get in with Falconbridge, or Vale, or Glencore,” Eric Boulay said, rattling off the mining companies that are household names in the city. “Those are the jobs you want to attain.” Boulay is the president of Mine Mill & Smelter Workers’ Union/Unifor Local 598 and has worked for over a decade as an electrician in Sudbury’s mines.
However, he got mixed messages as a student in the ’90s. He felt the university pitch was “programmed” into students, flavored with a bias against hands-on work: They should aim, they were told, for something higher, instead of scraping their knuckles to make a living.
“When I was in high school, we never talked about trades, right? It was: university or college,” Boulay said. (In Canada, the latter generally refers to vocational training.) “Those are your two choices, and figure it out. So I did go to college.”
Gen Z still hears a similar message in Canada and elsewhere.
According to a July 2024 survey by Jobber, a company that provides software services to small businesses, more than three quarters (76 percent) of recent graduates and high school students in America believed there was a stigma associated with going to a vocational school compared to getting a four-year college degree. The report also found that nearly half of respondents saw blue-collar work portrayed negatively in the media, and just 17 percent had been taught about the benefits of “vocational training.”
Many Canadians feel the same. One survey of 400 construction workers across Toronto’s sprawling metropolitan area found that 96 percent believed a lingering bias against hands-on work was driving a shortage of residential builders. Even for those interested, it’s hard to navigate the non-university path: Researchers in Ontario, the largest Canadian province by population, overwhelmingly found a lack of awareness about careers and apprenticeships in the trades among interested parents and children.
The stigma against blue-collar work, however, seems to be fading.
People are increasingly skeptical of the college-to-career pipeline, which often leaves students saddled with debt and dubiously employable degrees. Only a quarter of Americans in 2024 thought a four-year diploma was extremely or very important for getting a good job, Pew found (just 22 percent said it’s worth taking on debt).
“It’s definitely having a resurgence,” Boulay said. “The thing I’ve noticed the most is a lot of my friends actually with young adult children just getting out of high school are actually pursuing the trades. You’re seeing that a lot more than before.”
Blue-collar employees have seen an uptick in earnings growth but, when adjusted for inflation, still have not surpassed the relative buying power of their 1973 peers. Researchers still find an earnings premium for university graduates, but the gap could be shrinking for Gen Xers and younger cohorts.
Still, Boulay sees blue-collar jobs as a pathway to economic security in a time of growing unease. “In the trades, normally, once you get your license, that’s your ticket. You’re gonna work for as long as you want to, and there’ll be work out there for you.”
Ravi Majeti is one of those young men ditching the college bandwagon and trying his hand at a trade. He was studying engineering at the University of Louisville in Kentucky when he came home to Chicago for the summer break and ran into an old friend at the gym. The friend was a second-year electrical apprentice with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), a global group with nearly a million members, and had just bought his first vehicle—three of them, actually.
“A 2021 Ford Explorer. Brand. New! He just bought a brand new Harley Davidson and a brand new ATV, and I started looking at it for myself,” Majeti said. “I’m the type of person, once I kind of find something out, I go all in and I look it up.”
Their chance meeting, a few months before COVID lockdowns, planted a seed in his mind. Majeti spoke with a neighbor in the union who was a lineman, and the conversation further encouraged Majeti to explore a new vocation.
“I’ve always wanted to work with my hands and make a difference,” Majeti said. “Engineering would’ve provided that, but with the trades, it’s a more hands-on approach. You get to see firsthand the impact that you’re having when you turn over that product.”
Majeti applied for an apprenticeship with IBEW Local 134 near Chicago, took the aptitude test, and got in. The frenetic swirl of his first job site was “wild.” He spent those days on a high-rise apartment building, working with “electricians, carpenters, iron workers, in particular rod busters working with steel and rebar.”
He started in January 2023 and hasn’t looked back.
“Nowadays, everybody’s looking at college like it’s the end-all be-all,” he said. “But, fortunately for myself, I’m not afraid of having to grab myself by my belt buckle and anchor myself in: Like, let’s take this head on.”
Nicholas Eberstadt wishes there were more guys like Majeti filling the vast blue-collar employment gap.
Eberstadt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about the issue in his 2016 book, Men Without Work, documenting the declining economic ambitions of “prime working age” American men. The United States has become “home to an immense army of jobless men no longer even looking for work,” Eberstadt wrote at the time. More than 7 million men between ages 25 and 54 had dropped out of the workforce, resulting in a national work rate for men that was “slightly lower than it had been in 1940”—that is, when America was emerging from the Great Depression.
Little has changed in the decade since Eberstadt wrote his book, which was re-released in 2022 to reflect post-pandemic work trends. “There hasn’t really been a turnaround. There hasn’t been an appreciable improvement,” Eberstadt told The Dispatch.
Lots of low-hanging fruit could help young men today, Eberstadt believes. Some examples ripe for the taking are vocational jobs.
“You can make a pretty good living without having to go to college,” Eberstadt said, pointing to fields like welding and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). “There’s a really bad mismatch between a lot of American public secondary education and the job market. Some of our labor unions are very good at it. Some of them have got apprentice programs and training programs.”
Boulay, the Sudbury union executive, ended up going to trade school to be an electronic technician. Getting his foot in the door was difficult: He needed experience to pitch himself, but the only way to get it was to be on the job. A machinist friend encouraged him to get an apprenticeship, an option he didn’t even know existed. A cousin eventually got him through the door at an electrical company. He’s now spent nearly two decades working in the field and can’t see himself doing anything else.
“A lot of the time you start with either a blank canvas or a piece of equipment that’s not working and at the end of the day, you’ve built something that’s performing a task, or lighting up someone’s life basically, or you fix something and you can physically see it in front of you,” he said.
Nickel City, as Sudbury is known, is a hub for hauling. Pit stops with 18-wheelers and truckers in sleeper cabins dot the landscape, backing up traffic as they carry creature comforts through towns like Espanola, Blind River, and Wawa.
One resource critical to the economy of these communities is timber. Northern Ontario is blanketed with forests of balsam, pine, spruce, and birch—and part of Steve Cheiner’s job is to manage those forests.
“I call it gardening,” he jokes. Cheiner gets contracts—“prescriptions,” as he calls them—from the government and forest managers to cut back tree overgrowth to help rehabilitate slumping native species and prevent wildfires. “You do good for the forest,” Cheiner said. “It’s stuff that has to be done and sometimes it’s stuff that no one else wants to do.”
Cheiner lives about an hour’s drive east of Sudbury just above North Bay, another small town in rural Ontario. “My family has a long history in logging dating back to 1890 in this area. We’ve always had a hand in forestry somewhere,” he said, squeezing in a call with The Dispatch before heading “to the bush” where reception is patchy and the bugs bad.
Cheiner’s job started off as simply fulfilling that “family legacy.” But he soon realized there was good money to be made. The only shortcoming is the seasonal constraints: The harsh Canadian winter caps the business cycle between May and early November.
A big part of Cheiner’s mission is mentoring forestry students. He doesn’t buy into the stereotype that Gen Z isn’t cut out for roughing it and finds himself surrounded by bright kids with good grades.
“I have to explain to them and say, ‘Hey, this is hard work, but I’m gonna pay you.’ That’s kind of the nutshell there,” he said. “If you work hard enough, you’re making $60 to $80 an hour. So these kids, I’m cutting checks for $4,000 every two weeks.”
Not only is that good money for a summer job, but he routinely hears from former employees about how the experience opened opportunities for them later in life. “It’s a solid stepping stone,” Cheiner said. “As soon as you put brush cutting on a résumé, your employer’s gonna say you’re not afraid to work.”
But the game is a young man’s. Cheiner has a few 50- and 60-year-olds working for him, but as he nears his sixth decade, he confesses: “My body’s not the same.” As a result, he’s focused more on management.
Others The Dispatch spoke to for this story mentioned the toll manual labor can take. Boulay had a few close calls during his apprenticeship and would’ve been electrocuted by a malfunctioning work vehicle if his colleague hadn’t saved his life.
Blue-collar jobs have become a lot safer in recent years, according to construction researcher Billy Hare, whose father worked on roofs. “I’ve got some memories of him coming home from work when I was a child after being injured, falling from a height. Badly injured,” Hare, a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, said.
Inspired by those memories, Hare studies the concept of “construction ill health,” or the aftereffects that come from accidents or prolonged chemical exposure. “Ill health happens in silence and people deteriorate and eventually it’s difficult to gather the data,” he said. “They just disappear.”
Majeti expressed a similar idea, noting the wear and tear of physical labor on the body as a hidden tax paid by workers like him. “There’s something about getting up out of bed in the morning at 4 a.m., and you’re going outside and working in the elements and being exposed to hazards,” he said. “A lot of people take those things for granted. Until you are given the opportunity to be there, you really don’t think twice about it. The convenience of society today.”
Boulay noted that the dangers of physical work are highly dependent on the type of work being done. But he reiterated that despite any risk, he finds his work meaningful. “You are helping to produce critical minerals that are required in everything people have come to depend on for daily life,” he told The Dispatch.
Majeti echoed that sentiment: “At the end of the day, we all get up out of bed to try our damnedest to go to work, and provide for our families.”
