Want Better Pay Than the Bosses? Get a Job in Elevator Repair

A manual-labor job may be physically exhausting, but in the construction industry, it can get you higher pay than management.

Elevator installers and repairers earn a median annual salary of $80,000, making the job the best-paid in construction, according to a new BuildZoom analysis of 2016 American Community Survey data. Supervisors of construction workers, the second highest-paid occupation in the data set, make a median income of $58,000.

Pay for elevator installers and repairers is nearly twice as much as the national median income of $40,150. And unlike some high-paying occupations that don’t require a college degree but are expected to shrink in demand over the next decade, jobs for elevator workers are expected to grow 12% from 2016 to 2026, Labor Department findings show.

High demand for elevator installers and repairers is driving their wages up, said Sasha David, author of the report from BuildZoom, a website for contractors.

“There’s a huge demand for office space [and] apartment building, and this is a profession that you have to go into with an apprenticeship—it’s not like you can just hire a bunch of elevator installers and repairers,” Ms. David said.

Permits for construction of multifamily units grew robustly for several years after bottoming out in 2009. They peaked in 2015, which means demand for elevator workers could taper off as the multifamily construction boom lulls.

New York City is one region in which multifamily building growth hasn’t resulted in rising demand for elevator-related jobs, said Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom.

“There are many more tall buildings in New York City than most other parts of the country, so there is probably a bigger set of people in these occupations, which makes it less sensitive to spikes in demand,” Mr. Romem said.

The job of an elevator repairer is physically strenuous work. Elevator installers and repairers “often work in cramped quarters inside crawl spaces and machine rooms,” a Labor Department occupational summary notes.

It is one of few jobs that pays at least $75,000 on average and typically requires only a high-school diploma, according to Labor Department rankings. Other high-paying gigs that don’t require a college education include nuclear power reactor operators and supervisors of police and detectives.

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from Real Time Economics http://ift.tt/2HfUkNg