Men's Liberation

I can't speak to the general problem, but I can tell you why I left construction and manual labour more generally.

A lot of the work is still as damaging to the body as it was in 1930.

Toxic coworkers enabled and even encouraged by psychopathic supervisors.

Safety is not only not built in to procedures, but actively mocked and even deliberately worked around, even when doing so slows things down.

And all that for less than double minimum wage for experienced workers when it used to be easily triple minimum wage to start.

Spending 5 minutes on Google shows that the number of construction workers is at all time highs.

It's just that a hot economy requires even more labour.

My 2 cents, the economy could use a rebalancing by raising wages and reducing profits a bit.

If salaries of construction workers get raised from $40K to $50K, then the number of openings will go down and the remaining workers can focus on the more important work while getting a better wage.

Each generation tells the next that college is needed even more these days, unless you want to be a trash collector or construction worker. That, along with the getting worse pay and body damaging labor, adds up fast.

All of the workers shortages always come down to the same things. Money for the workers which have been sacrificed for the business to be as profitable as other businesses. I know that for something like construction this can only be done by skimping on quality or screwing over workers.

Maybe they need to get paid more.

Most companies pay pretty good where I am. The issue is the culture, as someone else pointed out. Especially in Residential...

As far as "It's hard on the body", it really isn't, if the management, and your co-workers support a safe environment, and provide what you need. Again, that comes down to the culture.

This is one of the many reasons why Unions should be priority fucking one, in any workplace.

No one seems to be paying attention to the fact that technology has added a lot of new career fields over the last few decades.

If you add a new career field like software engineer or fiber optics service technician and your work force stays relatively the same size then you will divide up your workforce over a greater number of professions. Leaving less workers to be carpenters, plumbers and electricians.

Please consider updating the post URL to link to the actual content providers: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1158576556/where-did-the-workers-go-construction-jobs-are-plentiful-but-workers-are-scarce