> Scotty Wristen, the owner of WE Electric in Abilene, lost five workers to the data centers. He can only afford to pay employees $20 an hour.
Data centers being able to pay more is only part of it, $20/hr is a ridiculous wage for an electrician.
My union electricians in a metro area of 3M make $57/hr in wages and around $43 in fringe benefits and they’re receiving a 4% raise on Friday. We have plenty of electricians here since they’re compensated well.
profdevloper•1h ago
Sounds like he needs to be out of business
zdragnar•1h ago
Abilene is nothing like a metro area of 3 million people.
$20/hour is a bit low, but union journeymen were making $33/hour in San Antonio, so I don't know that $20 is too extreme.
quickthrowman•56m ago
$33/hr seems low, but considering the median income in my metro area ($100k) is 55-60% higher than San Antonio ($65k), it about lines up with the higher journeyman wage here compared to the median income of just under $100k. I thought Texas had higher wages than that overall, guess I was wrong.
$20/hr for a non-union residential electrician isn’t unreasonable then, strangely enough.
lotsofpulp•33m ago
Some people need higher pay to offset the opportunity costs of living in a very rural area.
fred_is_fred•1h ago
Scotty probably loves capitalism until it affects him personally.
sosodev•1h ago
Does anybody have more insight into the demand for electricians during data center construction? This article is really light on the details. I was researching it recently and got the impression that the majority of electricians hired during DC construction are much more specialized than the average residential electrician. It also seems like large data center construction typically demands a magnitude of several hundred electricians during the peak of construction. Which to me sounds like a lot less demand for the average electrician than some of the news outlets have been claiming.
quickthrowman•51m ago
If someone has an electrical license, they’re allowed to work as an electrician on a project. As long as there are enough experienced commercial electricians around to tell the residential guys what to do, it would be OK, there’s a ton of work on these projects that doesn’t require much or any thinking.
downrightmike•50m ago
They probably fly the best guys in anyways.
This is likely just Homebuilders passing the blame for not building more/finishing work while rates and materials are too high.
anikom15•48m ago
That’s not necessary. There’s nothing particularly fancy about data center power that warrants it.
garbawarb•11m ago
Nice to see these data centers are paying their electricians well. That should make salaries more competitive all around.
quickthrowman•1h ago
Data centers being able to pay more is only part of it, $20/hr is a ridiculous wage for an electrician.
My union electricians in a metro area of 3M make $57/hr in wages and around $43 in fringe benefits and they’re receiving a 4% raise on Friday. We have plenty of electricians here since they’re compensated well.
profdevloper•1h ago
zdragnar•1h ago
$20/hour is a bit low, but union journeymen were making $33/hour in San Antonio, so I don't know that $20 is too extreme.
quickthrowman•56m ago
$20/hr for a non-union residential electrician isn’t unreasonable then, strangely enough.
lotsofpulp•33m ago
fred_is_fred•1h ago