Sep 12, 2026
A signing bonus is a great feeling. A check lands, you’ve got a little breathing room, and the shop that handed it to you looks generous.
Now do the math on the rest of the career.
A bonus is a one-time number. Union scale, a pension, and employer-paid healthcare are numbers that compound for thirty years. Five thousand dollars up front looks a lot smaller next to three decades of higher hourly pay, a retirement account that actually grows, and health coverage you’re not paying for out of every check. Pull out a calculator and the bonus stops looking like a head start. It looks like bait.
There’s a reason some shops pay big and pay it early. The bonus is cheaper than the raise, the pension, and the benefits they’re not giving you. It’s a way to compete for your signature without competing for your future.
Ask the plumbers who’ve been at those shops five years. Many are earning close to what they started at, with no certification to show for it and no retirement worth the name. The bonus is long gone. The ceiling is still there.
Union work runs the other direction. The money starts steady and climbs as you certify and advance. The pension and healthcare are part of the deal, not a maybe. You trade a splashy first check for a career that pays you more the longer you’re in it.
For homeowners, this is worth knowing too. The shop that lures plumbers with bonuses and burns through them is the same shop sending a rotating cast of undertrained techs to your door. Low retention on their side becomes low quality on yours.
Sep 10, 2026
There’s a reason the plumber under your sink matters more than the fixture above it. A water heater is a water heater. The person installing it is the difference between a job that lasts twenty years and a callback next spring.
Union plumbers are the most trained people in the trade, and it isn’t close. Before a union plumber ever runs a line in your home, they’ve come through a multi-year apprenticeship with classroom hours, supervised field hours, and testing at every step. The training doesn’t stop when the apprenticeship ends. Journeymen keep certifying on new codes, new products, and new systems for the length of their careers.
That matters to two very different people.
If you own a home, it means the person we send has been vetted by more than a job interview. They’ve earned real certification and hold a St. Louis County plumbing license, so the work meets local code and passes inspection. You’re not gambling on someone who watched a few videos and bought a van.
If you’re a plumber reading this, it means something else. The union is where you stop being disposable. You get paid to learn a real trade, you earn a certification nobody can take away from you, and you build toward journeyman, foreman, and beyond. Every year you get sharper, and your paycheck reflects it.
At Kokesh, we hire union-trained plumbers on purpose. That doesn’t make us the most expensive shop in town.
Plenty of non-union shops price their work off union scale. They charge the union rate and pay their plumbers well under it, with thinner benefits and no real training behind the number. You end up paying close to the same either way. What changes is where the money goes: into the certification and licensing of the person working in your home, or into someone’s margin.
We put it into the plumber. That’s the whole reason the person we send is worth having in your house, and it’s the reason the people who work here are treated like professionals instead of warm bodies.
