“I was like, ‘What? Blacksmith!?’ I couldn’t believe it.” “One day, I was just scrolling through the city’s website, and I saw a blacksmith,” Gawel recalls. In fact, he stumbled onto this job because he found the job title just as incongruous - just as curious - as Joel did. Until he came to work for the city, Luke Gawel would not have counted himself among this ancient and dying breed, although the work he did in previous jobs was quite similar to what he now does for the city. Following another thirty years of decline, the BLS found that three-quarters of those jobs were gone too, and it stopped counting. Census Bureau counted 235,804.įorty years later, in 1950, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that fewer than one in five of those jobs remained. peaked about a hundred years ago, when the U.S. The number of full-time blacksmiths in the U.S. Given that the city’s “blacksmiths” clearly spend the vast majority of their time welding, why not dispense with calling them such? After all, the number of workers employed as blacksmiths is clearly on the downswing. The overtime numbers are insane: more than $65,000 just for February 2015. In the winter, the city adds 333 salt spreaders and snow plows to the fleet - what Gawel’s boss calls “wear items” - and twenty full-time blacksmiths isn’t enough. With a city fleet that includes 477 garbage trucks, 203 fire engines, 101 street sweepers, and 122 ambulances, Gawel and his colleagues have plenty to do. “At the end,” he says, “we do save the city a lotta money.” If you can’t repair these big, basic parts, you’d have to junk the whole vehicle. This is a small job, but Gawel spends a lot of time on bigger ones: replacing the sides of trucks, the floors, the big mechanical elements in back of a garbage truck that smush the trash. “You can fry an egg on it, but - you let it cool off, throw some paint on it, and that’s it.” “It’s probably a little warm to touch,” Gawel admits. “You can hang on it.”Įxcept: Grease on the bottom of the newly-welded step is on fire. He grinds off some paint and grime, and sets up his MIG welder. The whole scene seems ancient, or at least old-fashioned. Maybe the light in this image comes from the furnace flame, since blacksmithing thrived for millennia before electric lights.
The word “blacksmith” conjures up an image of glowing-hot metal getting pulled from a big furnace and pounded into some usable shape - maybe a horseshoe - on an anvil. I noticed that Chicago has 20 blacksmiths! What do they do?
The city just released their budget and employee info on the open data portal. “Like, did my eyes deceive me?”Ī couple of mouse-clicks later, he found out how many blacksmiths the city employs. “I was just scrolling through, and I saw ‘blacksmith,’” he recalls. When the City of Chicago published its payroll data, he thought it would be fun to look and see what was there. Our questioner, Joel, describes himself as a nerdy, curious guy who likes playing with data. To stay up to date on the stories that matter. WBEZ brings you unbiased news and information.
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