Safety is our number one priority. Not efficiency.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive IMO.
When you have to re-anchor your safety harness to move 5 feet it's kind of difficult to maintain efficiency.
The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
221–230 of 426 posts
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is one of the major impacts. My experience (family in construction) is that day labor / undocumented workers often don't have construction skills, and so have to be trained on the job, and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track. Over time, these folks become skilled, and generally end up running crews. It's very commonplace to find the more…
My experience (in the Bay Area) has been that regardless of country of origin, construction work is insanely inefficient. Lots of administrative bs, lots of made up rules, lack of communication between trades, tons of "not my job" attitude.
The Bay Area is whole other beast. Y'all have turned NIMBYism and obstructionism into an art form. That's not how it works in the rest of the country.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Undocumented" is the current preferred euphemism for "illegal immigrant".
Interestingly enough many (with no claims to majority/minority numbers) "illegal"/migrant workers do have "documents" from what I've seen working in agriculture. The documents are sufficient if you don't look too closely or are not the business owner - speaking from my own experience. These may be cases where the workers are paying taxes etc.
Not sure what kind of documents you are referring to. The I-9 form is very clear about what documents are acceptable. It is not difficult to understand if someone is legally able to work or not.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#224Corruption was a massive problem in USA industry as well as slowdowns due to legal red tape. My guess is incompetent government is at the root of the problem. The more you scale red tape, the harder it is to do anything. Look at the California high speed rail. Corrupt governments make far more money by slowing down a project and using it as a washing machine to extract rents. Getting large public projects to misspend…
Please don't ignore that most of these regulations exist because builders will do whatever they can to profit as much as possible, generally to the disadvantage of the buyer that is typically ignorant of the risks of a home.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive IMO.
When you have to re-anchor your safety harness to move 5 feet it's kind of difficult to maintain efficiency.
When you have to close the site and scrape someone's brains up it's really difficult to maintain efficiency.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example of inferior material?
I can: - Vinyl windows compared to old growth wood windows from 100 years ago. - Vinyl siding compared to cedar shakes. - Extremely poor wood quality in the lower end 2x4 and 2x6 lumber. - Sheathing that's essentially cardboard in really cheap builds. - Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes. Thing is there were really badly built homes 100 years ago and they just aren't standing any longer. We do get a but…
Most of the contractors who like to talk about the good old days are simply spreading FUD. New homes will hold up better a hundred years from now, and have a much lower chance of catching on fire, collapsing in an earthquake, and are less harmful to the planet since they use a fraction of the energy.
- Old windows from 100 years ago were single pane. I grew up with them. My bedroom was freezing cold in the winter and roasting in the summer. And they couldn't seal so they leaked water which rotted out the window frame. Not exactly a great example of old homes lasting longer.
- Cedar shake is a fire hazard. Yeah, we don't build houses like that because a century ago entire towns would light up like a match. It was a regular occurrence.
- New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
- New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
- Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood. Dogs can't scratch it, you can drop a cast iron pan on it, it's waterproof. If you want to instead spend money on hardwood there's nothing stopping you, but LVP looks great and is easy to replace.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way. Most of the value of housing in expensive areas is the land itself, not the cost of the building.
You are wrong. For instance in Southern California the cost to build new house is around $350 per sqft. Building 2000 sqft house is around $700K. House like that may sell for around 1 million. So that would be 70% construction and 30% land.
> House like that may sell for around 1 million.
Sure it wouldn't go for closer to $1.5M?
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#228I wonder how Chinese compare, I bet they doubled.
Probably hard to say because you can't trust any answers from the propaganda machine.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#229In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
I don't think this is due to illegal aliens, without which our construction industry would be in even worse shape, but rather that there have been massive declines in the competence of domestic workers across the board, and this has been hidden by outsourcing, importing skilled workers, and technological growth (e.g. have machines do things that domestic workers cannot), so that you see productivity declines in those areas where you cannot outsource and you cannot pay extreme wage premiums to attract people with basic reasoning skills.
You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.
Re: The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector
#230Safety is our number one priority. Not efficiency.
Feel-good rallying cries like this make for cheap virtue points but are completely meaningless in a reality where pretty much nothing is a binary choice with a low number of variables. For example, it's easy to sit in an air-conditioned office and say "thou shalt not overload the trucks" but when you actually drag your ass to somewhere you can observe the conditions in which the per-load work is being done it becomes…
Being that braking distance will increase around 250ft at 65mph I would say it makes a pretty massive difference. That is unless you want to limit the 120k LB truck to 55mph which causes its own issues.