Welder-Basic 1st Shift
Location
Chicago, IL
Wage
$25/hr
Employment Type
Full-time
Posted on September 8, 2026
Location
Chicago, IL
Wage
$25/hr
Employment Type
Full-time
Posted on September 8, 2026
At S&C Electric Company, a 100% employee-owned company, we empower our people by providing pathways to a long-term career in manufacturing roles that build equipment for the power grid. The Welder-Basic position involves performing various welding tasks to assemble metal structures and parts while adhering to safety protocols and ensuring high-quality production.
At roughly $25/hr, this posting comes in about 31% below the $36/hr median for welding jobs in Chicago, IL, where the middle half runs $27–$45/hr across 89 postings with published pay. Put another way, it pays more than about 15% of the comparable postings we have wage data for. That gap is worth raising directly — in a market this size there is normally room to negotiate toward the median, particularly if you already hold the certifications the posting asks for.
We're tracking 108 other active welding openings in Chicago, IL right now, from 60 different employers. 43 of them were added in the last week. Across Illinois as a whole we're tracking 373 other active welding openings from 233 employers. A metro this active generally means you have real leverage — employers here are competing for the same welders. Browse every welding job in Chicago, or widen the search to Illinois.
S&C Electric Company currently has 17 other openings live in Illinois, which is usually a sign of either steady growth or steady turnover — worth asking which in the interview.
The most active employers in Illinois at the moment, by number of open welding reqs, are S&C Electric Company (17), Gerber Collision & Glass (14), and Staff on Site (13). Volume like that usually means either a genuine expansion or a staffing agency working several client sites — worth knowing which before you apply.
Within Illinois, the best-paying metros we track by median hourly rate are Downers Grove at $46/hr, Chicago at $36/hr, and Addison at $32/hr. Chicago is among them.
This posting calls for MIG. MIG (GMAW) feeds a continuous wire electrode through a shielding-gas nozzle. It lays down metal fast and is forgiving on clean material, which is why it dominates production and light fabrication work.
Pay figures are medians computed from live postings in the Welding Pros index, not from survey data, and they move as employers post. Welder-Basic 1st Shift figures were last recalculated when this page was built.