‘I can make how much money to unclog a toilet?’ She was living in her mom's attic before becoming a union plumber earning nearly $200 an hour

Her parents had worked for decades to own that home, and a botched job they didn’t even know about was costing them the comfort of it. That’s what first pointed her toward the trade. Then she found out what plumbers actually earn, and that sealed it, she told The Cut.

“I can make how much money to unclog a toilet? I’ll take it.” At that point, the choice more or less made itself.

Nine years later, she’s a journeyman plumber with Plumbers Local Union No. 1 in New York. She met her wife on the job, they have a daughter and her pay-and-benefits package is about $200 an hour. She’s also part of a bigger shift — women leaving dead-end jobs for union trades that pay the kind of money that used to require a degree.

That $200 figure comes with a catch, though, and the catch is the useful part.

Two women, two cities, the same move

Deborah spent her 20s bouncing between jobs — sales, customer service, a driving school — and none of them really stuck. What changed things was an ad on a bus for Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), a free New York program that has been steering women into the building trades since 1978. She got in and started as a first-year apprentice: class at night, job sites during the day, relearning trades math next to teenagers who found it easy. She hadn’t sat in a math class in 10 years.

The same story was happening in other cities. In Chicago, Cristina Barillas-McEntee, now 55, took a similar path years earlier. Back in 1998, she was working as a makeup artist until a friend nudged her toward the plumbers’ union. The catch was the pay, about $9 an hour for the five years of her apprenticeship.

She did it anyway. “This is a sacrifice you make for the larger end goal,” she told CNBC. Now she makes $56 an hour, with health, dental, vision care and a pension all running through the union, and she’s planning to retire at 60.

It’s the same bet both times: take the pain now, collect later. And more women are making it. There are still only about 3% of U.S. plumbers, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data reported by CNBC, but times are changing. Two decades ago, women made up 1.9% of U.S. electricians. Today they’re 3.5%.

What ‘nearly $200 an hour’ really means

This is the catch. Deborah says the journeyman rate at her local is going up to about $76 an hour this summer. That’s the money she actually gets paid.

The rest, more than $100 an hour, is what the union puts toward her 401(k), health insurance, dental and pension. When you add it all up, it’s close to $200 an hour. So the headline number is true, but most of it isn’t money she can spend right now. About $76 is, and the rest covers things most people pay for out of their own paychecks.

This isn’t only happening in New York. In Chicago, NPR went to a plumbers union training center where a qualified union plumber makes about $60 an hour with benefits. The median plumber in the U.S., for instance, makes $62,970 a year.

Why a clogged pipe beats a desk job right now

Timing matters. Deborah and Cristina both went into plumbing years before artificial intelligence started cutting into office work, but that choice looks a lot smarter now than it did then. You can’t offshore a burst pipe, and no chatbot is going to solder a joint. The work also isn’t slowing down. BLS expects plumbing jobs to grow 4% through 2034, with about 44,000 openings a year.

Then there’s the debt. Deborah and Cristina finished training owing nothing, because the apprenticeship paid them while they learned. College usually doesn’t work that way. Americans now owe over $1.6 trillion in student loans across nearly 43 million borrowers. Two 35-year-olds can earn the same salary but still be in very different situations. One has been paying off student loans for years; the other never had any.

What this means for your money

The appeal is real. You earn while you learn, you skip tuition, and you get a pension and health coverage that many office workers either don’t get or pay more for on their own.