Jeff Haanen

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Craftsmanship & Manual LaborWork

Let There Be Light: How Karla Nugent Is Transforming the Trades

“Come, let me show you around.”

As we rise from the conference table, Karla Nugent—cofounder of Weifield Group Contracting, a commercial electrical company in Denver—leads me into the pre-fabrication shop. Coils, wires, and electrical boxes are being assembled for installation. The only woman in the room of more than a dozen men, Nugent introduces me to employee Justin Hales.

“Electrical work is art,” Hales, an electrician’s apprentice, tells me. “Two years ago, they put me on the platform at Union Station. I would lay out the floors, locate everything, like a switch or outlet on the wall.

“When you turn your pipes, make them uniform—that’s art.” He pauses. “It probably goes unnoticed to the average person, but we see it. We take pride in our work.”

Nugent co-founded Weifield in 2002 alongside three business partners. Since then, the company has grown to 250 employees and has emerged at the forefront of electrical construction. For example, Weifield was behind the Net Zero, a LEED-Platinum research facility at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. It’s one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world, operating solely on power generated at the building site.

Denver’s business community took notice of Nugent because of her philanthropy. As leader of sales, marketing, and human resources, she’s created a culture of generosity at Weifield. The company donates to more than 30 nonprofits in the city, including organizations that support women, veterans, at-risk youth, and the urban poor. Employees join in the generosity as well, taking bike rides to raise money for MS and building houses for Habitat for Humanity on company time.

In 2014, Nugent won the Denver Business Journals Corporate Citizen of the Year Award as well as the award for Outstanding Woman in Business for architects, engineers, and construction.

But light began to flood into Weifield when, several years ago, Nugent decided to bring the community’s needs into the company. After seeing growing income inequality in Denver, she created the Weifield Group apprenticeship program.

Becoming an Apprentice

Scott Ammon, a journeyman electrician at Weifield Group, joined the Army after high school. After serving in Desert Storm and four years in the Middle East, he worked for 11 years in the US Postal Service. “I’d actually been suffering from PTSD while I was there,” Ammon tells me. As a result, he “jumped into a pretty bad coke and meth addiction.” To get treatment, Ammon spent two years at the Stout Street Foundation, an alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility.

During rehab, Ammon heard about an opening for an electrical apprentice at Weifield. The four-year program trains employees in a pre-fabrication process (preparing electrical materials for on-site installation) while paying for their education to become state-certified journeymen electricians.

“I was really nervous when [Nugent] interviewed me because I was in treatment at the time,” Ammon says, figuring he’d be passed over because of his struggle with substance abuse. “But she looked me straight in the eyes and just nodded her head.”

When he got the offer, despite his rocky past, “That made me feel so good,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘From now on, they’ve got my full dedication.’”

In Colorado, 49 percent of all jobs are known as “middle-skill jobs”—one of 11 sectors requiring a GED but not a four-year college degree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that in 20 years, 47 percent of all US jobs will still be middle-skilled, since building, plumbing, and wiring cities cannot be outsourced. But Colorado has struggled to find enough skilled tradesmen to keep up with the meteoric pace of Denver’s population growth.

So in addition to leading statewide workforce initiatives like Build Colorado and Skills to Compete, Nugent began reaching out to their charity partners—Denver Rescue Mission, Peer One, Stout Street Foundation—to find more electricians.

When they started the apprenticeship, they had low expectations. “If we get a 25 percent stick [employee retention] rate, we’ll be happy,” Nugent recalls thinking upon launching the program. “Now we’re in our fifth year. I just ran the statistics the other day. We’re at an 85 percent stick rate. They’re ready to work. They’re excited.”

The three keys to success, says apprentice program manager Brad Boswell, are attendance, attitude, and the ability to learn mechanical skills. “If they can do those things, I can make them into an electrician.” Some apprentices who have become journeymen have—in four years—gone from homelessness or addiction to making upwards of $50,000 per year.

After one of the many Weifield fundraisers for a community partner, a teary-eyed mother approached Nugent. “You gave my son a chance,” she said. “He was on his last leg. Nobody believed in him. But you did.”

A Conduit of Hope

“I pray that people see the good we’re trying to accomplish here through the workplace,” Nugent says.

Nugent’s Christian faith began in fourth grade, when she would hop on a Sunday school bus every week to attend church. Though nurtured by church and youth ministries, it was her mother, Rosemarie Craig, an executive at United Airlines and single mother, who gave Nugent a work ethic and vision for the good that business could do in the lives of others.

Today, she is a pillar of support to many employees who come from broken homes. “People start gravitating to you because they see you’re stable and sound, but they don’t realize that it’s your faith.” She’s also become an ethics gauge at her company for everybody from executives facing tough decisions on high-profile projects to apprentices contemplating divorce.

Nugent believes being a woman in a male-majority industry allows her to have conversations that many men couldn’t. “I have meetings with developers, executives, and other owners and usually guide it to some sort of eternal piece,” she says. “Most guys would just talk projects and numbers. But I can pull off that conversation because I’m a woman. It’s my challenge; it’s kind of fun.”

Through these conversations, two of her business partners have become Christians.

“I could live in a little bubble, in my comfortable Christian community,” Nugent says, “but here I [reach] a little bit of everybody, people I normally wouldn’t share life with. I hear their stories and help them find a home.

“Our buildings are really cool, but at the end of the day, it’s about the people. Jesus gave us community to serve each other.”

Rhythms of Rest

Nugent’s husband, Jack, owns an auto transportation company, is a NASCAR driver, and hunts on the weekends. As they raise their two children and excel in their professions, I expected to find a trace of exhaustion in her voice from the demands of work, life, and family.

Instead, Nugent shared with me a set of simple rhythms of rest, prayer, and dedication to her calling to be a wife, mother, and business leader.

As one of Denver’s most networked women, she turns off her phone every Sunday. “It can wait until Monday,” Nugent says. Her emails are brief, her social media presence is minimal, and she takes vacations with her family over the summers.

And when she considers a less busy life, she simply prays for direction. “Every time I pray about it, I say, ‘God, maybe I’m not supposed to be here. Am I supposed to do something else?’ But each time, God brings in a new relationship with somebody who’s having a tough time. For now, God wants me here.”

She also is committed to both her husband and two kids as well as her “work family.” “I’m on the front end of this ship, closing deals,” she says. “And if we don’t win deals, we can’t provide for all the families here. And so I balance that with, ‘I’d like to be home for dinner.’”

“As a woman in this industry, it’s easy to be soft. I’m not the construction guy’s guy. But I can be totally different because I’m a woman.”

“She really cares about us,” says Justin Hales.

And as Nugent quietly transforms the trades in Denver, the work of her hands is giving light to a new generation of electricians.

This article first appeared in Christianity Today, the first in a new column entitled “The Work of Our Hands.” I’m writing this column with HOPE International’s Chris Horst, with whom I’ve written about about manual labor and have contributed to This Is Our City. The article first appeared under the title “Light for Electricians: How Christians Bring Hope to Business.” 

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Craftsmanship & Manual LaborWork

Want an Affordable Home? Thank a Craftsman

 

What is causing soaring home prices in Denver right now? This is the question on many would-be buyers’ minds. In June, the average home price in Denver was $366,419 — the highest in Colorado state history.

The Denver City Council has spent significant time trying to find solutions to the shortage of affordable housing. (Recently, The Denver Post reported that Mayor Michael Hancock wants to raise $15 million a year to subsidize projects as part of a much larger plan.) But how did we get here?

My wife and I asked our real estate agent, Trish Hopkins of RE/MAX, the same question. As we sat down to coffee, expressing our woeful prospects of ever finding a house we could afford, Hopkins said at least one problem is obvious. Inventory. She told us the average number of houses on the market for the Denver area is around 12,000 at any given time. Right now, it’s less than 3,500. With Colorado’s population boom, it just comes down to math.

So why don’t we just build more houses?

I recently asked that question to the CEO of Shea Homes, Chetter Latcham. He shared my bewilderment at the historic prices, but added that he has nearly 100 houses just waiting to be built. There simply aren’t enough people to build them. 

The shortage of skilled manual labor in Colorado has been a challenge for some time. The Denver Business Journal wrote about it nearly a year ago. Yet the shortage of skilled tradesmen is not limited to Colorado. Manpower Group reported in 2014 that skilled labor jobs are among the hardest to fill internationally. In 2013, Forbes reported that the skills gap will worsen as nearly one-third of all tradesmen are 55 and over and will retire without nearly enough young craftsman to take their places.

Workers are certainly moving to Denver, but not to become plumbers, electricians or contractors. A Brookings Institution study showed that from 2010-2013, Denver attracted the second most young adults (25-34-year-olds) of any American city (just behind Houston, and tied with San Francisco). Great, right? Well, it looks like most young adults would rather work in other industries. The Colorado Home Builders Association sees this and has tried to combat the labor shortage with a new training program for young tradesmen.

Now the labor shortage is growing into an economic problem. Many millennials and transplants of other generations are priced out of the Denver home market. Without more affordable housing — and without more skilled laborers to build those houses — Colorado’s economy can’t continue to attract high quality talent to sustain long-term growth. And, we risk losing talented young workers to more affordable places like the Midwest.

The Root of the Problem

So, if Denver desperately needs houses that can be built by skilled tradesmen who are paid a good wage, then why the persistent shortage of manual laborers?

I have a theory: We’ve devalued the American Craftsman. I’ve written about this for Christianity Today (“The Work of Their Hands”) and the academic journal The City (“How We Lost the Craftsman”). Still, to date we’ve underemphasized how deeply biased our educational systems are against the trades.

Pursuing a four-year liberal arts degree has become not only the norm, but essentially the definition of the purpose of education. David Coleman, a former McKinsey & Company consultant, president of the College Board, and one of the architects of Common Core, has said that he intends to “help the [Common Core] movement towards agreement that college- and career-readiness is the goal of K−12 education in this country.” The strong implication is: go to a four year college or we’ve failed to prepare you for a good life.

A Different Kind of Intelligence 

I recently had dinner with my friend Jim DeWeese, a small electrical contractor here in Denver. He’s thriving: His business is growing, and he has recently hired his first employee. But when we spoke he shared with a tinge of shame in his voice that it took nearly a decade for him to get through community college. And it was difficult the whole time. He isn’t a classroom and lecture learner. He is gifted to work with his hands.

But culturally, we don’t value the intelligence and skill of those who work with their hands. Consider this passage from Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod in his short story “Closing Down for Summer,” where a miner reflects on his dirty, yet beautiful, work:

“That they might journey down with me in the dripping cage to the shaft’s bottom or walk the eerie tunnels of the drifts that end in walls of staring stone. And that they might see how articulate we are in the accomplishment of what we do. That they might appreciate the perfection of our drilling and the calculations of our angles and the measuring of our powder, and that they might understand that what we know through eye and ear and touch is of a finer quality than any information garnered by the most sophisticated of mining engineers with all their elaborate equipment.”

DeWeese, like this miner, exhibits a skill and intelligence that is displayed at the intersection between mind and hand; it is intuitive and spacial. They both have been called to be craftsmen. Why do people like Jim feel compelled to apologize to take up the work of a craftsman?

Why, when our crumbling American infrastructure is longing for craftsman, have we shamed the pursuit of “vocational school” or a career in the trades as second rate? When we live in a culture where lattes are served up by English lit majors on federal assistance, why have we failed to realize that craftsmanship is not only a good way to make a competitive income, but it’s a noble way of life? 

The Remedy

Maybe a better question is: What will motivate more young men and women to go into the trades? 

There have been a few efforts to address this issue, such as Build Colorado and Skills to Compete, two Colorado initiatives designed to fill the skilled labor shortage. But most efforts fall short. Many only address compensation: Choose the trades because you can make more money than your college-educated peers. But this approach has limited results. After all, people are not motivated only by money, as Daniel Pink tell us. (His thesis is that people are ultimately motivated by mastery, autonomy and purpose.)

As Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore professor, wrote in a recent New York Times article, “The truth is that we are not money-driven by nature. Studies show that people are less likely to help load a couch into a van when you offer a small payment than when you don’t, because the offer of pay makes their task a commercial transaction rather than a favor to another human being.” Research proves that people want their work to be more than an hours for dollars transaction — they seek the chance to be creative, to do their work with excellence and to serve a greater purpose in the world.

Humanities 101

To provide enough tradesmen for America’s economy, we need more than numeric arguments. We need the humanities. To influence more young people to take up a career in the trades, I believe we need to elevate three aspects of the trades: intelligence, beauty and vocation. 

1. We’ve overlooked the intelligence of the skilled tradesmen, assuming that office jobs are where intellect thrives. Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, argues we’ve seen the laborer “muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hands and brain.” In contrast, Rose sees the lightening-fast decisions of a waitress, the complex spatial mathematics of a carpenter and the aesthetic dexterity of the hair stylist as work to be praised and respected.

2. A vision of craftsmanship is directly connected to beauty. Before the industrial revolution, a city’s artists and its tradesmen were often the same thing: Each made structures for both  utility and beauty. The medieval guilds had high standards. Weavers, painters, metalsmiths, bakers, butchers, soapmakers and leatherworkers contributed not just to the local economy, but also to a city’s social fabric. Those who proved technical competence in the trades often entered the social elite. Rightly so — they contributed significantly to the well-being and beauty of a city.

3. The vocation of the craftsman is not only noble, but Christians remember that Jesus himself was a tekton, a craftsman. Theology gives a new honor and dignity to doing the work that God Incarnate himself did for thirty years. In contrast to the Greeks, who saw manual work as the work of slaves (and mental work as the proper work of philosophers and the like), the first churches iassigned dignity to everyday work, an idea incomparable in the Roman world. They reasoned, if God himself is  the architect and builder of the heavenly city (Hebrews 11:10), should we, too, not be willing to do all kinds of work?

Work, in the Christian vision, is ultimately about serving God by loving your neighbor. And as it turns out, this moral vision is what motivates the work of people across industries. Again, Schwartz writes:

“We need to emphasize the ways in which an employee’s work makes other people’s lives at least a little bit better (and, of course, to make sure that it actually does make people’s lives a little bit better). The phone solicitor is enabling a deserving student to go to a great school. The hospital janitor is easing the pain and suffering of patients and their families. The fast-food worker is lifting some of the burden from a harried parent.”

What we think about work matters to individual workers and whole networks of workers — that is companies and  the economy. And the answers to our questions about affordable housing can be found in our best thinking about motivation, work and purpose.

Photo credit: Where have all the home builders gone? 

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Craftsmanship & Manual LaborWork

How We Lost the Craftsman

 

It was a crisp, winter morning and I stood outside Manual High School, traditionally one of Denver’s lowest performing schools. Along with twelve other seminary students on an urban ministry site visit, we listened to our professor. “Manual is one of Denver’s oldest institutions,” he said, pointing to the brick edifice. “It opened in 1896, and was named Manual because it was originally intended as a vocational school to train students for manual labor.”

We quietly shook our heads in disbelief. How could educators have such low expectations for their students? Didn’t the founders believe all students could go to college? So great was our 21st century disdain for manual labor that we naturally connected Manual High School’s low academic performance with its original intent: preparing students for the manual trades.

Americans today devalue manual labor with an almost righteous indignation. We can see it in our economy, in our schools, in our entertainment, and even in the church. And it’s causing all sorts of problems. Let’s take these one by one:

Economy. Consider these statistics. The average age of today’s tradesperson is 56, with an average of 5-15 years until retirement. As skilled laborers retire in masses, America will need an estimated 10 million new skilled tradesmen by 2020 (such as a pipefitters, masons, carpenters, or high-skilled factory workers). But even today, an estimated 600,000 jobs in the skilled trades are unfilled, while 83% of companies report a moderate to serious shortage in skilled laborers. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek have all recognized the huge shortage we have of skilled laborers.

Schools. Across the US, as the need for skilled laborers has increased, the number of classes in “tech ed” – traditionally known as “shop class” – have all but disappeared. For example, in Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, only three remaining schools have any kind of “tech ed” programs – of a district of over 84,000 students. And in Denver Public Schools, there are only two shop classes remaining – and one of them is currently selling all their equipment to local buyers. As high schools prepare youth to be “knowledge workers,” they unload lathes, table saws, and other “vocational ed” equipment in droves.

The assumption that every student should go to a four your liberal arts college has almost become sacrosanct for urban, suburban and rural students alike. Going to a two-year trade school is seen as a path for “average” to underperforming students.  As educator Mike Rose has said in his book The Mind at Work about the cultural image of the tradesmen: “We are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hands and brain.” Real thinking, our schools have taught us, happens in the office, not the shop.  And today have a veritable mountain of student debt – an estimated $1.2 trillion in the US alone – and the lowest labor participation rate since 1978.

Culture. Even in entertainment, we’ve persistently devalued trade schools and community colleges. NBC’s satirical TV show “Community,” portrays American community colleges (which train many skilled tradesmen, among other professions) as the pit of the academic world. The show takes place at Greendale Community College, where “Straight A’s” are “Accessibility, Affordability, Air Conditioning, Awesome New Friends, and A lot of fun.” Perhaps community college is “a lot of fun,” but such merciless mocking finds its way into the future plans of high school students – plans to avoid trade schools and community college at all costs.

Church. In the past 5-10 years, there’s been a renewed interest among protestants in the topic of work. Three years ago Christianity Today launched the This Is Our City project, which profiled evangelicals working in various industries for “the common good” of their city. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has launched a “Center for Faith and Work.” Gabe Lyons’ Q Cities convenes conferences of culturally-minded evangelicals who work in industries like art, media or education. Conferences, books, and seminars on God and work have multiplied, and evangelicals in finance, business, technology, art, science and nonprofits have received renewed attention. But one sector has largely been overlooked: skilled manual labor.

James K.A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, recently wrote, “Do people show up to your ‘faith & work’ events in coveralls? With dirt under their nails? No? Then whose ‘work’ are we talking about?” Though surely not everybody in the modern economy will have “dirt under their nails” after a day’s work, he makes a good point: where are the examples plumbers, landscapers, carpenters, and electricians among this renewed interest in vocation? And more broadly, where are the examples of craftsman and “blue collar” workers who are intentionally living out their vocations in and through their trade? Are executives and professionals the only ones privileged enough to wed meaning with work?

All of this is strange for at least two reasons. First, we all depend on the work of craftsmen every single day. Whether it’s your HVAC repairman, plumber, or electrician, heat, clean water and even light flow as a direct result of their work. The work of the trades is of the utmost importance for nearly every aspect of modern life.

But as a Christian myself, this cultural situation strikes me as even more strange. After all, the Bible is replete with craftsmen – masons, goldsmiths, gem cutters, potters and weavers. The Bible even states that the first person explicitly filled with the Holy Spirit is Bezalel, whom God filled “with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts,” (Ex. 31:3-5). And, lest we forget, Jesus was a tekton, translated literally as “craftsman” or “one who works with his hands” (Mk. 6:3).

What has gone wrong here? How is it that we came to devalue the craftsman, to the detriment of our economy, schools, churches and culture? To find answers, we need to look to history.

Losing the Craftsman

Such a disdain for the trades was not always so. In the mid-nineteenth century, craftsmen were an integral part of the professional and scientific community. For example, the Mechanics Institutes of Britain had over 200,000 members, which hosted lectures that satisfied the intellectual curiosity of millwrights, metal workers, mechanics and other tradesmen with evening lectures by professors and scientists.

Likewise, in the 1884 book The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt relates his experience of making carriage wheels from lumber. Previously a school teacher with literary ambitions, Sturt was enraptured with the challenges of shaping timber with hand tools: “Knots here, shakes there, rind-galls, waney edges, thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman’s ingenuity every few minutes.”

Manual labor was not only integral to scientific discovery, it attracted many of the best minds of its day. In the 18th and 19th century, some of history’s finest scientists – Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), James Watt (1736-1819), Samuel Crompton (1753-1827)– were also craftsmen who built what they designed, and knew no separation between working with the hands and the mind.

Yet the forces of industrialization were changing the skilled trades. Even as early as The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith marveled at the efficiencies of the factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head…Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day.” The division of labor could produce more pins in a day between ten people than one person alone could produce in a lifetime.

Although the factory had been around for generations, the automation of work took on a new dimension in 1911, when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. As Matthew Crawford has pointed out, Taylor’s work focused on gathering the knowledge of craftsmen, organizing it into high efficiency processes, and then re-distributing that work to laborers as small parts of a larger whole. After extensive time and motion studies, Taylor was able to design processes, overseen by management, which allowed employers to cut labor costs by standardizing much manual labor. According to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department.” Thus the previous harmony of craftsmen and thinker, skilled labor and scientist, began a long process of separation. A “white-collar” labor force of planners and “blue-collar” mass of workers began to emerge.

The positive side of mass manufacturing was unprecedented wealth creation. In 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line was able to double worker wages and still produce cars more cheaply than his competitors, allowing thousands to afford an upgrade from a carriage to a Model T. Yet the negative side of automation was the monotonous routines for workers, which, according to Ford’s biographer, meant “every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.” Skilled craftsmen would simply walk off the line, with a sour taste for work that made them feel like machines themselves.

(Perhaps business philosopher Peter Drucker was right: “Machines work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task…[But] the human being…is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relation perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses and mind, is engaged in the work.”)

At the turn of the 20th century, engaging work seemed like it was being lost in the cogs of industry – and in the mean time, craft knowledge was bowing to mechanical processes.

In the days when Teddy Roosevelt was preaching the virtues of the strenuous life to East Coast elites, many felt education needed to change to ensure the survival of craft knowledge. Only 4 years after Ford’s assembly line, the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training. Yet because the bill established separate state boards for vocational education, it had the unintended effect of separating the trades from a liberal arts curriculum. General education would be focused on the liberal arts (college), and vocational education would focus on specific job skills (trade schools).

The advent of shop class began to track all “blue collar” work – whether the high skilled tradesmen or the low skilled assembly line worker – into a single category. Over time, shop class meant children of “white collar” workers could make a bird feeder or toy car in shop class, but they had little remaining skills of the craftsmen, which for centuries had been passed on through a process of apprenticeship.

We feel the lingering effects of this division between “vocational ed” and a liberal arts education today. Most of those who graduate with degrees in film studies, sociology, or even mathematics or physics haven’t the foggiest idea how to actually fix a car engine, build a table, or wire a light fixture.

Yet the greater effect is the enormous economic problem we now have before us – there are literally millions of “dirty jobs,” as Mike Rowe, the former host of the Discovery Channel Show, would call them. But swathes of young people would would never consider a career in plumbing or construction, despite evidence that these jobs both pay well and are here to stay. Computers and technology have certainly changed our labor force (and will continue to change the economy, as a recent article in The Economist convincingly argues), but they will never change the fact that we live in a physical world – and we will always need physical things because we are physical beings. We will always depend fundamentally on the physical goods – whether made or repaired – that are the unique domain of the craftsman.

Signs of Hope

What is to be done about this problem? Although this is a monumental challenge, we can do at least two things. First, praise examples of excellent craftsmanship – from chefs and jewelers to masons and electricians –  that arise from above the criticism and display an ethic of skill, beauty and manual intelligence in their work.

For example, every four years, France hosts the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF) competition. One event features a fierce three-day competition between 16 international pastry chefs jockeying for the blue, white and red striped collar that signifies culinary excellence. Chefs are judged on artistry – the visual appearance of the desserts, buffets and, for example, sugar sculptures – taste – entries have very specific size and ingredient specifications – and work – how clean and efficiently the chefs work; including spotless aprons, no waste (exact planning is required), immaculate kitchens. Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, producers of the documentary “Kings of Pastry” said in an interview , “The idea of recognizing excellence in manual trades and elevating them to a status equal to intellectual or academic fields is what is uniquely important about the MOF Competition” (emphasis mine).  Indeed, Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, when translated, is “Best Craftsman in France,” a title won only by the finest chefs exhibiting the highest levels of skill and manual intelligence. And France’s competition isn’t just limited to chefs; there are also competitions for stonemasonry, plumbing, tailoring, weaving, cabinetmaking, soldering, glassblowing, diamond-working, and a host of other trades.

In America, Tad Landis Meyers, a photographer, recently published Portraits of the American Craftsman – a stunningly beautiful photo journal of the work of a “lost generation of craftsman.” Scotty Bob Carlson of Silverton, Colorado makes hand-crafted skis; Nell Ann McBroom of Nocona, Texas cuts, dies and sews baseball gloves; Steinway and Sons Pianos in Long Island New York makes pianos “designed to last not just for years, but for generations.” Meyers’ five year journey of photographing American craftsmen has revealed an almost forgotten way of life, defined by careful skill, mastery of the physical world, and satisfying work. Brett Hull of Hull Historical Millwork in Fort Worth Texas says, “The simplicity of the clean lines or the intricacy of the detail are exciting to me. It’s something that just fills my soul.”

But praising excellent craftsmanship can also be more commonplace. Drop a laudatory comment to the construction worker who’s laying pavement; marvel at a gang of conduit that winds itself above light fixtures; choose to buy a table that will last not for years but generations. The simple act of recognition is powerful.

But second, and most importantly, encourage more young people to go to trade school. That’s what more people are doing around Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They recently announced a $2.5 million dollar grant to expand training programs for high-wage, high-demand manufacturing jobs. And with a a 95 percent job placement rate, minimal student debt, and jobs like an industrial apprentice that can start at $60,000 with full benefits, more students are taking a look at choosing trade school over a 4 year college degree.

I’m not encouraging more young people to be vocational mercenaries (go get the quick money!), but for those students who nod off in British literature (God forbid) but come alive when rebuilding an engine, we must acknowledge that some people are designed to be builders – and that’s okay.  It may even get them a better job than their peers who end up as debt ridden, college-educated baristas who can make a mean latte, but find trouble getting into a career.

The craftsman lives on – yet still in the corners culture more enamored with the virtual world than the physical world. But for the sake of our economy, schools, culture and even our churches, we would profit to once again appreciate our culture’s makers and fixers – the craftsmen.

Photo: American Craftsman Project

This essay first appeared in The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University. Also, Chris Horst and myself have a feature essaying coming out in Christianity Today this summer on the topic of craftsmanship and the gospel.

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