[Adraghast]

The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.

[bluedino]

Get a job with the local power company, or one of their contractors. You will have to work in bad weather, after storms, and travel a little bit.

The average salary for a journeyman lineman in Michigan is $161,000 per year

[stonogo]

No it isn't. You cherry-picked that single report, which was based on 76 turbotax returns. I suspect their data is wrong or corrupted, because making $160k as a journeyman lineman is only achievable with a decade experience and a truckload of overtime. Look around a bit further, or talk to actual linemen or unions, and you'll see the average salary for a lineman is about a hundred thousand dollars a year less than that.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/journeyman-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/DTE-Energy-Journeyman-Linem... https://www.linemancentral.com/states/michigan

[bluedino]

Read some Reddit posts where people ask linemen how much they make. People reply with over $200k.

[stonogo]

I don't feel the need to read Reddit, since I worked as a lineman for several years. It's possible to make bank in all kinds of trades, but that is absolutely not the norm, or even the average.

[Tokkemon]

Yeah, because that's more reliable data.

[AngryData]

Tradesmen are some of the first people to inflate their actual wage because otherwise they not only have a "lower class" career, but they are also not doing as well as everyone else and it makes them feel like shit.

I would not accept their personal anecdotes over documented tax returns.

[hotpotamus]

Have you considered that they may not be telling the truth?

[bluedino]

I know a lot of linemen and they do pretty well. $70k would be zero overtime.

Do you think they don't earn 30-40 per hour and have the ability to make tons of overtime?

The power company pays office workers time and a half to do "line watch" where they just park by a downed power line with a light on their roof until a crew shows up to fix it.