Letters to the Editor
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Doesn't seem such a great job to me.
A little research turns up lineman.edu, the site for Northwest Lineman College. Here's what I see:
1. Utilities stopped training their own lineman, and now expect prospective lineman to enroll in lineman college on their own.
2. NLC charges $7717.50 for a four month course.
3. 14% of graduates don't get a job in the field after 3 years of looking.
4. They don't address how many people are unable to complete the program, but they say power companies stopped training their own lineman because success rates of just 20% to 40% were common.
5. "Graduates who limit themselves to work only in their hometown
significantly limit employment opportunities."
6. If normal full time (40 hours/week) pay is $53000, and overtime is double pay, it seems you're only making the peak wage if you work 75 hour weeks.
7. Apparently when you get your first job, you enter an apprentice program, and the salary is quite a bit lower than the article states. Seems like it takes around 4 years of experience to reach the $53000 level.
I'd be sympathetic to the power companies if they hired lineman and paid for their training, and if the starting salaries weren't as low as $12/hour. It seems to me that there are a lot of jobs more attractive, and given the low unemployment rate, it doesn't seem like the power companies are really trying that hard to recruit people. As Dean Baker has remarked about similar "labor shortages", maybe the real problem is the power companies aren't willing to compete for potential employees.