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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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There's a lot of people in the construction trades. Construction tends to follow a boom-and-bust cycle where one month there will be lots of unemployed construction workers, the next there's a labor shortage, but that's different than having a very few people in the trades.

Lower end construction trades are full of hard drug users with what their bosses refer to as 'crackhead tendencies', you can get white Americans to do those jobs for market rate(which is like $17/hr starting these days), but illegals do it better, faster, cheaper, and more consistently.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

My understanding is that most people doing construction in the US, especially in the low-paid jobs, are people born in Mexico or Central America. Some came her legally, some illegally, some... who knows. The "boom and bust" is often solved by those people moving back and forth across the border. It's not going to be solved by raising wages slightly so that a recently laid-off code monkey takes a job hanging drywall.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

I don't have a research agency backing me. The department of labor says there's about 8.5 million in construction and extraction, plus another million in construction managers. 2.2 million of those are construction laborers. But they don't break it down by where they're born.

As for drywallers specifically, the DoL expects demand to grow at about the average for all occupations.

Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.

In fact, an increase of 3.5 million over a base of 9.5 million WOULD constitute a massive increase the number of construction workers. But there's also the men "not in the workforce" to be considered; prime-age male LFPR is 90% compared to 97.5% in 1955.

I can build a house top to bottom -- I'd actually be kind of happy to do so rather than bullshit SD work, but the money isn't good enough. Am I "in the trades"?

If you're going out there regularly, building houses as fast as possible for competitive market prices, then yes you're in the trades.

If you're just doing it as a hobby for yourself then no, because that doesn't affect the overall market. It would be the same if some carpenter or plumber wanted to dabble in SD in his free time.

I used to do that -- it's not as though I've forgotten how! If there were a massive boom (perhaps induced by stopping the cheap labour) that made the money more tenable, I could do it again.

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