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Why America has so few carpenters

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Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#101

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rdtwo wrote: post #3

Like every other profession with a supposed shortage the pay and work conditions suck. And guess what shortage… It’s like there is a shortage of people willing to pick fruit at 10$ an hour and live in terrible conditions while exposed to harsh chemicals. No shit you need to pay people a whole lot more money

How much will you pay for that fruit? Because that will limit how much the farmer can pay the fruit pickers.

Automation is the key to getting out of this trap: just build robots to pick the fruit and problem solved. I expect that is the only other way out of all our labor problems except for maybe the child care crisis (licensing boards are adamant about staffing requirements per kid even if that isn’t affordable).

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#102

Post by 1123581321 »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #94

Another part of it is the social programming. If you're an uneducated poor white male, it's easy to see a path into construction. If you're an uneducated poor black male, going into construction might as well be becoming an astronaut. Or to flip that around, imagine being an uneducated poor white male in Cleveland, Ohio and suddenly believing you could easily be a successful rapper. If your family, friends, neighborh…

Is that an intentional MGK reference?

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#103

Post by seanmcdirmid »

masonic wrote: post #97
Spooky23 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it works is you have a subcontractor pay an immigrant under the table and get it done. The US clamped down on Mexican border crossings. Guess what? There’s no labor. Who would have thunk it.

>The US clamped down on Mexican border crossings. Now , the border is more porous than ever. There's plenty of labor -- go to any home improvement store parking lot. And that's just the illegal labor -- boost wages and you could recapture legal workers. But for now, go to any construction site in California, and you'll hear only Spanish spoken between the carpenters, roofers, etc. and their supervision.

Those people were around in 2020 (outside Home Depot here in Seattle) but are all gone now. I guess they are all just really busy rather than being deported or something.

I wouldn’t assume all or even most labor on constructions sites are illegal immigrants just because they speak Spanish, if only because the USA has a lot of legal first-gen Hispanic immigrants.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#104

Post by laingc »

chrisdave wrote: post #91
ftyers wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So maybe those jobs shouldn't be done? It doesn't sound like a complete disaster ...

Or maybe having them done by people who are willing to do them would be good.

That’s exactly right. There’s no market-clearing price because of regulatory distortion. You’re free to like or dislike that as a policy, but it is clear that it removes the information value of the price signal.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#105

Post by prox »

bigpeopleareold wrote: post #99

My father was a independent carpenter and it took a toll on him. He had to do it if he was going to be able to get by while young and still living with his parents (my grandfather was also a carpenter.) It was a life of toil: plenty of injuries, probably maybe preventable if he managed safety a bit, lost fingers in an table saw accident (while working in construction during the late 60s on new NYC housing project dev…

I like that you mention patience. Carpentry takes patience, you need to pace yourself, and you need to adopt safety behaviors, that will get you through the day. If I watch my family work, they all do things slowly and paced. “Measure twice, cut once.”

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#106

Post by wardedVibe »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #63
wardedVibe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers complaining about "not enough x" mean "I'm not willing to pay the market rate for x". Like, its a free market, up your price... or do you think basic economics don't apply to labor too? I'm surprised this article doesn't examine why companies aren't upping their pay.

Same thing with housing. There is no housing shortage, there are just people who aren't willing to pay the market rate for housing. Up your price that you are willing to pay and you will have housing. If you can't pay the market rate for housing, do not be surprised when you do not have housing. Basic economics.

Local zoning means that the supply of housing is artificially constrained far below what would be an efficient use of land. Are you suggesting that labor has similar constraints in carpentry, or just being glib?

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#107

Post by throwaway049 »

closeparen wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".

Yes, and figuring out how to get orders of magnitude more housing production at dramatically lower prices is one of the most socially and morally important problems in the world today.

Is construction labor really a big factor in the final selling or rental price of a home?

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#108

Post by brabel »

laingc wrote: post #46
billfruit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or US government can start to issue large number of temporary "fruit picker" visas.

New Zealand does exactly this, and I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, it seems easy to say that if you don’t have enough workers, you’ve got to raise your price - it’s a free market, right? Except it’s not. NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP) and this means that being un- or under-employed is a viable option. On the other hand, the jobs also bring in a lot of money for the isl…

Sweden also. Berries and mushroom are picked almost exclusively by foreign workers. The government even had to open an exception to COVID restrictions to allow those workers to come in and to their job, as otherwise a whole harvest season could've been lost as there's no way swedes would do the job themselves.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#109

Post by lotsofpulp »

imustbeevil wrote: post #55
coldtea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are not upping pay, because it's not profitable. They could raise their prices too. When they say "it's not profitable" they mean "we would like to have workers at low pay, but still enjoy selling at low prices".

The market is efficient. You raise prices and pay workers more -> Fewer people are willing to purchase at that price -> You make less profit -> You don't make enough profit to pay people more. It's a complex problem. You could make the same market argument as: if it was profitable to charge more and pay workers more, why doesn't anyone just start a company that does that and outcompete the others?

Supply and demand are always in flux, and the repeated attempts to match these is what causes market efficiency. It is frequently possible that prices are not keeping up with supply and demand, and there exists arbitrage opportunity that requires people knowledgeable about the market to act on.

Re: Why America has so few carpenters

#110

Post by [deleted] »

georgeoliver wrote: post #28

You can make a living as a carpenter, and the work is often glorious, but like lots of industries wealth is often built on the exploitation of labor. Unions have been gutted over the last 100 years, so if you want to run an honest business and earn a good income you need to do high-end work. But who are you working for? The upper classes. Of course these lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. are not specifically to blame…

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