Is the trade labor shortage international?

April 4, 2024 8:56 AM

In the US we have a pretty serious lack of qualified plumbers, electricians, carpenters, machinists, auto technicians, etc. For many people who own homes and cars, safe and sustainable maintainance is price -prohibitive. I am curious if this is a problem in similarly developed countries, and if so what the causes are. Personal experience, professional reporting, marxist/labor econ analysis and scholarly economic analysis are welcome.

In the US, I perceive the labor shortage to be fed by narratives perpetuates by colleges that white collar college education is necessary for stable finances, a lack of investment in workforce development/companies being unwilling or financially unable to train, and increase in disability due to the pandemic. I would behappy to read about alternate causes.

I am also interested in similar analysis of healthcare worker shortage, or other industries that involve skilled physical labor.

posted by Summers to Work & Money (28 answers total)

Same in Canada for trades. We have a shortage of that as well as healthcare workers (a lot of whom decamp to the US for better pay). I am not sure what drives it but people are just not interested in those jobs anymore even though they are well-paid and very important ones.
posted by Kitteh at 9:09 AM on April 4

Quick way to tell: does a country offer expedited work visas, or 'points' towards immigration if you are working in those areas? NZ and AU both provide points towards immigration if you are part of a skilled trade, or have experience with basic construction.

In health care, for nursing specifically, yeah, worldwide shortage.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:19 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]

I think you're asking, more generally, about Baumol's cost disease (wiki link and quote), "the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.[...] Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods [...]"
posted by 4th number at 9:25 AM on April 4 [7 favorites]

Big factors you didn't mention for the US are the decline of trade unions and community colleges, both of which were historically large producers of the skilled workers you're asking about.

In e.g. Europe, union 'density' varies from 83% in Sweden and 68% in Denmark to 10% in France, that might be a starting point for looking into how those memberships affect labor shortage in those sectors.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:28 AM on April 4 [4 favorites]

Looking at immigration priorities is a good signal indeed. For example, the list of construction related trades at the bottom of this page for British Columbia.
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:39 AM on April 4

Many people, especially women and folks near retirement, left the workforce (lost their jobs or quit, some to take care of kids forced home and haven't returned, partly because of the high cost of day care) during the pandemic and haven't returned. This might particularly impact nursing and other fields with a high percentage of women.

Many boomers are aging into retirement and leaving the trades.

We stopped letting so many people immigrate into the country and we don't make it easy for those who are here to work. This is the most bonkers part about Republican immigration policy: we have a labor shortage and people willing to work and we don't let them work.
posted by bluedaisy at 9:46 AM on April 4 [2 favorites]

people are just not interested in those jobs anymore even though they are well-paid and very important ones

They chew up the human body, both in the day-to-day physical labor involved and in the greater risks. People (generally not people actually doing such work in the present day!) think it's some kind of snobbery, but there were seven construction-related fatalities in NYC alone in 2023, whereas no one died (directly) of being a lawyer. Meanwhile, people who own non-unionized established trade businesses are happy to have their pick of work so they aren't investing in the pipelines as the unions did/do.
posted by praemunire at 9:46 AM on April 4 [13 favorites]

I perceive the labor shortage to be fed by narratives perpetuates by colleges that white collar college education is necessary for stable finances,

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'narratives', but look at this chart (for the US): Educational Composition of Each Wealth Decile (2022);

Unless you are a unicorn, you have to go to college to be in the top 30% of wealth deciles, and college degree increases your net worth by 3X vs no college degree. Trade schools grads are counted as 'no college degree' per the Census. Owning a business only increases your net worth by 2X.

So to put it more concrete, the most successful trade school graduates, who are probably business owners (but not college graduates), are that tiny red area (about 8% at 10th percentile, 10-14% at 7th & 8th percentile) which also includes inheritance failsons and daughers who didn't attend college. Some college + college grad dominates that.

That's why there is a trade school/tradesman imbalance. Those jobs just don't pay well compared to going to college, even if you are brilliant.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:51 AM on April 4 [4 favorites]

I guess it depends on what you mean by 'narratives', but look at this chart (for the US): Educational Composition of Each Wealth Decile (2022); [paragraph break snipped] Unless you are a unicorn, you have to go to college to be in the top 30% of wealth deciles, and college degree increases your net worth by 3X vs no college degree.

I'm not sure I'm reading that chart the same way you are. Most of the people in the top decile have degrees, but 20% do not. That's not much of a unicorn. Second decile about 35%, third decile about half. By my back of the envelope calculations that's about 1/3 of the top 30% of wealth deciles. No unicorn there-- as Trump's election taught us, something with a 30% chance of happening is definitely a thing that can happen. I would guess that a non-trivial proportion of those people are in skilled trades.

Maybe it's my white-collar over-educated bias, but I would think one thing that keeps people out of the skilled trades is that many of them are hard on the body. Even the ones that seem less "dirty-job"-ish often involve bending down or crawling into spaces, carrying heavy things, some involve being out in various kinds of weather. Even if you're a person who likes to work with your hands or do physical labour, you might give some thought to what kind of state you want to be in at 50 or 60 or 60 and hunched over from your bad back and over-worked arms might not be the answer. I've seen a lot of older people whose bodies have been destroyed by physical labour and honestly I'm a little surprised to see young people I know who have seen the same opt for trades. They're opting for the trades for the money and the quick money (why spend money on university and then get an entry level job when I can make big bucks now or in a year?), but I do think it will age them before their time. I suspect there are plenty of young people make the same calculation I would make.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:25 AM on April 4 [4 favorites]

Re: the US shortage, trade unions were significantly weakened when Reagan "resolved" the 1981 PATCO strike by firing 11K air-traffic controllers. At that time, about one in five American workers were union members; now it's one in 10. The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week (The Intercept, 2021)
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:25 AM on April 4 [8 favorites]

I worked summers during college on a small concrete forms crew, pouring house foundations. There were a couple of us students, and a couple of lifers. Nonunion. These jobs are... just fucking hard. Everyone should do this kind of work for a while in their lives. You're starting every day at 7am, working in the hot sun, carrying heavy things, bashing your fingers with hammers, and getting home at 4pm sunburnt and covered in nasty dust. Repeat ad infinitum. It sucked in a 20-year-old body, and I can only imagine how it would feel in a 45-year-old body. You can't read Metafilter at work. You can't take a half hour and stare out the window. There's no air conditioning, ever.

The knowledge that my friend and I would be finishing college and getting away from that, while the other guys on the crew were not, was sort of monstrous and unspeakable between us. It made me very grateful for the opportunities I had, and also calibrated my scale for what hard work really means.
posted by hovey at 10:34 AM on April 4 [22 favorites]

My most financially successful friend (who didn't go into tech) is an electrician, so I think it's still a good career path for a lot of people.

I think those trade professions also shot themselves in the foot by being so unfriendly to women and people of color for so long. If you want to come up in a skilled trade, you have to apprentice, which generally involves working closely with one person or with a group of people who know more than you at first, and if you're a woman and they're men... that is not generally a fun or good or, often, safe dynamic. When a man is chill and just shows me how to do something the same way he would another man, I can learn it, but that's not really the norm. I remember reading an article where a woman was trying to get certified as a long-haul trucker and was forced to keep training with a man who egregiously harassed her. I'd have had to really loved plumbing or electrical work or carpentry to sign up for the torrent of harassment and gaslighting I'd have gotten every single day, at every job site, forever. Not to mention girls frequently don't enjoy the kind of casual childhood instruction that sets you up for success there.

It's not my area of expertise but I imagine there are pretty similar issues facing non-white folks, not that they haven't excelled in the trades, but there are definitely barriers.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 10:40 AM on April 4 [13 favorites]

It's very easy to get an entry-level job doing general labor, but it generally won't pay well. It will easily be comparable to working at a Starbucks, which has its own downsides but is much less stressful on the body.

It's much more difficult to get the training required for higher-paying, more technical jobs in the trades. For example, in my state, to become a plumber requires either trade school (which you'll be paying for) or a securing an position as an apprentice - and there are too few of those, given the decline of trade unions, which has been mentioned already. Private companies do not really invest in training their employees to the same extent as they used to, and this is true in the trades as it is everywhere.

Also, those "great" wages that plumbers supposedly earn really only kick in after the journeyman stage. It's a good living if you get to the master plumber stage and build a successful business, but I will remind you the job will involve a lot of literal shit.

Becoming an electrician is even more demanding.

So culturally, we're in a position where working class people who have typically gone into the trades find it more difficult to get established and build a career because of the upfront investment in time and money. Whereas the middle class still looks at college, both because that's what's in their cultural orbit but also because the trades aren't actually a clear winner here because the path to success is still long and hard. Success is still very much based on "it depends."

It's just not the case that there are a lot of well-paying jobs in the trades that are just sitting empty and waiting for you or me to walk into them. That's kind of the myth, which is used to blame liberal college kids for their employment woes - silly snobs, they should have just learned a trade, right? But the truth is that the ladder has been also pulled up for the everyday general laborer.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:45 AM on April 4 [12 favorites]

Also, I will say as a woman in the trades: Men really love to explain things to you, but they're much less enthusiastic about letting you take over a task to get the necessary practice at it. It is much harder to break out into the subordinate helper role because they simply do not trust that you are (or could become) competent. This is something that very much can affect your career trajectory.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:55 AM on April 4 [17 favorites]

They chew up the human body, both in the day-to-day physical labor involved and in the greater risks.

Just to make that point clearer, look at the results of this study of men in Finland, all of whom were completely healthy in early adulthood:

"Mean total life expectancy was highest among executives and managers (73.2 (95% confidence interval (CI): 70.3, 76.1) years), next highest in clerical (white collar) workers (72.0 (70.0, 74.1) years), and lowest in unskilled blue collar workers (63.65 (61.1, 66.2) years). Skilled workers and farmers were intermediate. For the occupationally active life expectancy estimates, a similar gradient was observed: highest for executives (61.9 (60.7, 63.1) years) and lowest for the unskilled (52.2 (50.2, 54.2) years). The ratio of occupationally active life expectancy to total life expectancy was highest for executives (85%) and lowest for farmers (81%) and unskilled workers (82%)." (Source)

That is to say, white collar workers live longer lives than skilled and unskilled workers, and a higher percentage of their life is spent free of physical disability - and this is in a nation with universal healthcare.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:00 AM on April 4 [5 favorites]

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has done a lot of research on this issue. His foundation offers scholarships to vocational type educations. Here he is last night on New Nation. Here he is on **ahem** Fox Business talking about trade school and Gen Z. Here he is on CNBC talking about the recent Wall Street Journal article about Gen Z gravitating to the trades as the college for everyone is losing its appeal with the job market and the extreme cost of a college education. Here is a link to the WSJ article, but I do not have a subscription so have not read the entire article. (Here is a link to the article that gets around the paywall.)
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:13 AM on April 4 [4 favorites]

What NibblyFang said is a huge cause. Trades are extremely brutally racist towards people of color, and most trades people won't bring them on as apprentices. Job corp does an OK job of serving as an entry for them.
posted by SyraCarol at 11:31 AM on April 4 [4 favorites]

I worked as a driver/warehouse/laborer for a construction company for 4-1/2 years. It was pretty brutal. In the winter we worked 6-5 M-F plus whatever they needed on Saturday, in the summer that became 5-5. Working construction in Arizona means you're going to be out in severe heat a lot. You're lifting lots of heavy stuff, you're moving things up and down stairs, you're working in dusty areas, and you work through the aches and pains because otherwise you don't get paid. Our company would hire workers as apprentices (we did drop ceilings) for a couple of more dollars per hour than us drivers made. For that, they typically but not always got 40 hours a week. They had to buy their own tools and they had to have their own vehicle that was capable of hauling a 6 foot scaffold - no exceptions. The highest paid journeymen made double what a starting apprentice made. I saw a few guys who stuck around after coming on as apprentices but most of them decided "nope, I'm out." The work was hard and didn't pay all that well at all. I could have moved over to apprentice there but I decided I didn't want that mess, and also I figured out pretty quick that I was not good at doing that kind of work anyways.

A friend's husband is a plumber. He has all the work he ever wants and can be picky. He's taught his kid as he was growing up, and this kid turns out to have amazing mechanical aptitude. By 15 he was already rebuilding cars, custom welding, plumbing, you name it. By 17 he was driving a big Dodge Ram with a 24 foot trailer because he was actually using that to haul things around. This kid will never have to look far for work. Another friend is an electrician, and so is his brother, his other brother does HVAC, and they're making good money.

I've been the low paid laborer, I've seen the high-paid journeymen and everywhere in-between. You can make a lot of money in the trades. The problem is, as people have already mentioned upthread, lack of training opportunities. The problem with women and minorities not getting opportunities is also real - these exclusions severely limit the talent pool. I've seen a few women on job sites and they can often be the strong outspoken type, because they have no choice. They have to advocate for themselves. They also have to be twice as good to get the same opportunities. I've seen a lot of workers that came here from Mexico who are very mechanically apt, but they end up usually getting the laborer jobs. With training, they could be excellent tradespeople.
posted by azpenguin at 12:08 PM on April 4 [2 favorites]

Completely anecdotal, but here in rural Argentina there is a huge shortage of skilled labourers. The guy I use for plumbing and gas is about 35. He says he is the youngest person he knows who is in the trades (roughly plumbing, gas, electricity, carpenter). He says that the younger people he speaks to don't want to work for themselves, they want to clock in and clock out and let someblddy else have the worries of owning a business. There is so little competition that one has to hire one of the few people available, and this inevitably can result in shoddy work and a "take it or leave it" attitude.
Seriously, if you are a skilled and conscientious young person (or old person!) with these skills, from anywhere in the world, you could do worse than come here, even with the absolutely shambolic state of the economy. You would never, ever lack for work.
And don't get me started on painters.
posted by conifer at 12:27 PM on April 4 [1 favorite]

A major reason for this is that manufacturing has been massively offshored over the last couple of decades. Naturally that's meant fewer trade jobs in manufacturing. Lots of former manufacturing folks have had to find other things to do, or have retired and not been replaced in the workforce, and young people have been encouraged to train for white collar jobs because those jobs began to dominate the economy.
However - just recently, some of that manufacturing has started coming back ("reshoring"), due to various geopolitical forces, such as trouble in the Red Sea, and the rising cost of labour in countries we've been outsourcing to. So there's an increase in demand for skilled trades.

It's natural for the supply of skilled labour to significantly lag demand. It takes potential workers a long time to notice the trend, and to have enough confidence in it to commit to a training program. And it takes a significant time to ramp up training programs, since you have to find and train trainers during a time of labour shortage. Then, of course, there's the retirement of all the Boomers, and the recent increases in people off work due to disability, reducing the workforce across the board - so ultimately it's not surprising there's a Situation!

The UK is facing the exact same Situation, for many of the same reasons.

On the other side of it, we're seeing a big increase in offshoring of white collar jobs, which is depressing wages in areas like IT and might make it a bit more attractive for some people to retrain.
posted by quacks like a duck at 12:30 PM on April 4 [2 favorites]

In my old field I was adjacent to many of the construction trades (heavy construction; I was on the engineering side of it). There were some really great folks, and a fair number of massive, massive assholes. The trades can stop whining about worker shortages as soon as they pay people a decent wage at the outset (if you're being outbid by McDonalds you got a fucking problem sport), as soon as the foremen stop screaming sexist/racist obscenities every ten seconds, and as soon as they stop being massively bigoted shitheads with MAGA banners on stupidly oversized trucks.

I cannot tell you how many times people would catch flak for DEI efforts (to, y'know, increase the available pool of workers?) from the same idiot that was whining about how he couldn't hire anyone for his heavy weldment line. Same jackhole who expected you to weld inside a huge tub girder, surrounded by danger, for less than a kid doing McDonalds drivethru.

...like I mean really, lemme see the trade organizations get down on their fuckin' knees on stage and beg forgiveness, apologize for their various shitty attitudes, suspend any member found being a racist shithead, and lick the boot of the first woman or minority to get up there on stage with them.

THEN I will maybe help the trades find people. I am not joking. I want to see them beg, because they deserve to bow and scrape for a little while.
posted by aramaic at 1:21 PM on April 4 [4 favorites]

I know multiple trans people who have attempted to go the electrician route and not been accepted into their local apprenticeship programs despite being qualified in every way. Trades hold a lot of the responsibility here for being hostile environments still today for many groups of people.
posted by augustimagination at 2:28 PM on April 4 [5 favorites]

Nice to see others here reflect my own experience wrt...um, culture. I worked adjacent to a lot of electricians for a few years, and even thought about becoming an electrician myself. I never seriously pursued it due to the fact that a small but consistent proportion of electricians I encountered were the embodied essence of toxic masculinity itself, and no amount of pay or benefits could ever motivate me to sign up to work with people like that for the rest of my career.
posted by gueneverey at 6:45 PM on April 4 [2 favorites]

I suspect labor shortages of any kind will vary from country to country pretty widely, for reasons that will be unique to each.

In the US, The_Vegetables has it right. The average college graduate will have a higher wage ceiling than any non college tradesperson. Additionally, trades continue to have lower status, perhaps always will, and tend to be more physical. Though the characterization of being excessively physically taxing seems to be popular, that maybe somewhat misleading. General laborers may be trades adjacent, but there is typically a distinction to be made by tradespeople themselves.

My trade (machinist/metal fabrication) has been fairly well in demand in my part of the country (Southern CA) for a very long time. In contrast, demand for machine operators has waned as many of the core sectors (aerospace/automotive/heavy manufacturing) has moved to other States/countries. Getting into my trade also seems to be different here than it had been traditionally in older manufacturing centers in the Midwest/East coast. Here, many got into the trade via trade school and on the job. Formal apprenticeship programs seem to have been rare here, basically nonexistent. This is a trade that, as far as I know, has never had a widely accepted credential/licensing system.

As far as I can tell, women have never been a significant portion of the trade here, except maybe during the war years. My observation is that young women with an interest in the trade will typically aim higher at mechanical engineering, which is a pretty adjacent field that has many more perks all around. The trade here is fairly minority friendly. It would be pretty hard to get labor of any kind that isn't Latin American or Asian, and sometimes immigrant. And finally, the trade skews old. I'm 57, and in a lot of shops in L.A., I'd be the young guy.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:23 PM on April 4 [5 favorites]

Poland's famous for exporting our construction workers and tradespeople, and part of that I think is a general respect for those jobs as necessary and a good outlet for creative non-scholarly (and yes, usually male) youths. These skills are considered attractive and most guys especially have a smattering of higher-than-diy knowledge learned from a relative in the trades. Building your own house is still a dream outside the city (and for first-generation city dwellers), and that means at least partly with your own hands.

We've been lucky immigration wise that as our tradespeople leave west, we have an eastern influx of Ukrainians from long before the war filling the same niches. It's a typical "ex-metropolis and ex-colony" dynamic that's often not identified as such because of the geographic proximity and closely related language and culture. Quite frankly we'd be screwed without it in both construction-adjacent trades and in care and nursing and low-prestige retail.

I've also noted a fair amount of UK returnees, in particular the summer has stopped being low season in interior renovation because it used to be people went to the UK to work. Anecdotally, the Brits are even more screwed by their recent immigration policy than Americans.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:16 PM on April 4 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks all, I appreciate your answers. I'm pretty familiar with the discrimination issues and physical toll because I'm a trans carpenter married to a trans auto tech hahaha. My wife just decided to leave technician work to pursue mechanical engineering, just like 2N2222 said.

Some great rabbit holes here but I'm still interested in more international perspective if folks have it to offer!
posted by Summers at 4:26 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Where I live, in Canada, yes it definitely is.

They keep telling the kids that they should try vocational training at the community college, and the government keeps announcing that sending the kids into trades is the way to solve the employment problems and they even make more spaces in the schools available so more people can take trades. It sounds good. People vote for the politicians that talk this way, especially people who worry about young people needing work or can't get an electrician.

The problem comes after you finish your first semester of courses. You need to take on the job training. And that just isn't available.

It's not available for several reasons. One is that there is a shortage of qualified trades people available to accept apprentices. Supervising the inexperienced workers takes a lot of time and effort. This means that if you can find a plumber or an electrician to train you, they are likely to only take on a couple of apprentices at most. There are far more students coming out of the community college than masters of the trades who can supervise them. And then there is the fact that the trades are seasonal work - that means that suitable masters are probably going to Alberta or some boom location to work for a hefty chunk of the year because the wages are higher and only coming back to my city during the off season. So if you get an apprenticeship position you won't actually get the hours you need within the time you are supposed to - instead of eight months training, you might get two.

And then finally, the trades are a closed deal. Wages are high and the people who already have work in them want it that way. To keep it that way they want there to be a shortage of workers. They'd be screwed and their incomes would be really bad if there were hundreds of available workers with certificates. The way the economy is, of course, everyone needing work done would be shopping around to find someone who would do it for less. So the people who can train workers on the job have no motivation to train more people even though the community college is more than happy to enroll as many as they can get, and enlarge their program to get more.

The end result is that most people here that take the trades courses borrow money to do so - and it is now about the same amount of money as a less expensive university - and then can't find the on the job training, so they end up with the student loan debt and alternate between working to get more hours towards their certification, or doing some other work entirely just to make an income. It may be a two year course, but finishing it in two years and getting certified often turns out to be impossible or take a decade.

Nursing has a similar pattern. Often if you take the LPN course you end up not making enough to pay off your student loans for several years, so you never get around to taking any specialty courses because you are working five twelve hour shifts a week just to keep up with the loan payments. And of course as well as only getting to work casual and often having to run around a lot to different locations, the conditions are often not much fun - night shifts, under-staffing, lack of supplies, unhappy patients... The average salary is $54,000 per year - but to get that you have to take on the work that pays premium and work a lot of extra long shifts. Even then you still won't make that kind of money until you have been working long enough to get several raises. Meanwhile you need a car because the hours you get don't work with public transit. The cost of living, commuting and paying of your student loans means that you are living quite close to the bone - it's not what someone ambitious would call a career. It's basically menial.

All those kids who aren't going into trades are often the smart ones, who thought it would be a good idea, but then they talked to someone who was doing it. It has been suggested that unless you know where you are going to make partner before you apply for law school you are better off not applying at all. The trades that require apprenticeship and journeyperson programs are similar. Unless you know your Uncle Joe will take you on as an apprentice and give you the hours, you are taking a pretty big gamble committing to the program.

For some people it's the hazing that you get in that milieu. It's really easy to find yourself working with other people who have seniority and certification and who will make the job hell for you because someone made it hell for them twenty five years ago. God help you if you look like prey because you aren't a close cultural match to them. You can tell women to go into trades, but the first time they open their tool box to find that someone has pissed in it, they may start to think that forty-five years of this are not going to be worth it.

Speaking of pissing, that can be a recurring problem for women - often there is nowhere to pee while you are doing jobs at people's houses unless you take a quick run to a coffee shop between jobs. The guys just piss in the bushes, or into an old coffee cup, in the privacy of the work truck. There may be a porta potty at the worksite, but you can't just go down to the ground from the sixth floor to go use it. And the guys are just pissing over the side and trying to hit anyone they see down there, and snickering.

And last of all there is the the fact that these are usually very physically demanding professions, with a very high rate of people who end up having to drop out of the program because they either can't manage it physically, or because they take an injury and become disabled. Roofing, for example is one of the three most deadly occupations in the US. About 55 out of 100,000 are killed outright. It's so easy to end up with a bad knee so you can't climb ladders but can't really prove the injury was the result of the job, or a brain injury, but you can't prove that you are even disabled. But the main injuries that roofers get are hand and finger injuries from cutting materials and back injuries from carrying them. There are an awful lot of people who start training in the trades and realise that if they continue in that line of work they are going to end up too disabled to work at all, and go look for something else to do.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:07 PM on April 5 [4 favorites]

Europe, and especially Western Europe, is experiencing a similar shortage.
See this series of articles: https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/special_report/europes-quest-for-skills/?_ga=2.46375463.1087152223.1712306076-654392220.1712306076
In addition to the trades most cited the hospitality industry has been having a hard time recruiting since the pandemic.
posted by bluedora at 11:57 AM on April 6