Appreciate you highlighting the need for unions. Hopefully the skilled trades shortage persists indefinitely, otherwise they’d be treated just as you mentioned: disposable and interchangeable. The scarcity is the only thing protecting these folks at the moment.
What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.
Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.
Construction unions do great across European countries.
Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".
There is a reason why security measures that put the workers life at risk are almost nonexistent on countries where unions hardly have a presence.
No helmets, no eye protection, no masks when dealing with chemicals, bending metal bars with bare hands, no protection shoes, hopping into a ladder alone,....
>Construction unions do great across European countries.
Do not know about your country - but over here the construction sites are full of people who couldn't even write the word union (mostly Asian countries like Philippines, Nepal, etc.)
Germany, and yes if I go to southern countries, Portugal my home country, alongside the other ones, there is a certain flexibility between the law, unions, and what actually happens at the construction site, unless someone does a complaint to the respective goverment authority responsible for checking worker conditions.
I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.
Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.
I mean what happens is skilled workers from poorer countries (Croatia in my case) move to richer EU countries, then we have nobody to perform construction - and now we have issued work Visas for 5% of the population basically. And you see newspaper stories of these people basically being treated like slave labor (crammed in small apartments, completely dependent on the visa provider, often abused). Just a few days ago there was another story about an immigrant worker being raped by her employer - also an immigrant that was just done serving his previous rape sentence. And plenty of stories of these people not being paid for months, documents being held, etc.
The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.
I wish NYC could suck out cheaper construction labour from the likes of Missisippi, maybe Second Avenue Subway could actually be built on time and on budget in that case. Right now, expensive local labour has the city by the balls
> Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".
What a nonsense thing to say. This is not an opinion most people, and certainly not most economists, would agree with. It's a foundational pillar of regulated free markets.
Moreover in this instance, construction companies are not some sprawling international megacorps, they're locally oowned and operated.
A pillar of free-market models, sure. But economics is built on a stack of spherical-cow assumptions that don’t really hold up in the real world.
Of course an employee theoretically has total freedom to leave an abusive employer and go somewhere else. But do they have time to search for jobs while working full-time? What if their employer makes them work mandatory overtime? If they don’t have time to search while working, can they afford to be unemployed for a few months? What if their employer threatens them or discourages other employers in the area from hiring them?
It would be great if competition made unions unnecessary, but it doesn’t.
> What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.
Trade unions tend to have a large focus on training and skill building. Yes they make firing people harder but the flip side of unions can be increasing the average quality such that firing due to quality or skill is less often necessary.
If I have need 10 people and I have a choice between two looks. Pool A is harder to fire and costs more but has a 95% competence rate. Pool B is easy to fire and costs less but has a 70% competence rate.
Setting any contractual rules aside I’m going g to find myself firing from pool B more often, and it is easy to attribute all of that to the rules that make A harder to fire. They are easier to fire (component of variance), they are more likely to be bad (component 2), and because they are easier to fire in going to be more likely to fire than coach for quality (component 3).
Scarcity also creates automation and efficiency pressure. You either get more of that human resource, or you make it so you use less of it, productivity increases also allow for the resources used to make more money without increasing project costs. This is also a very boom/bust industry, so the 2008 bust washed a lot of people out, especially juniors who would be experienced seniors today. A union is not going to protect labor from a building bust, they will stop hiring and the pipeline stalls.
There is a housing shortage of between 3.5M and 12M units; there will be no bust for at least the next decade, as housing production rate dropped substantially after the 2008 global financial crisis and did not recover.
(typically, union workers go on unemployment during slow periods; this includes electrical linemen/journeymen, automotive, pipe fitters, etc based on first hand conversations with union tradespeople in my examples)
U.S. Housing Shortage: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: that you called out states "While the United States does indeed have a national shortage of affordable housing, every state and city's path to addressing it is relatively unique, and the tools and tactics used to create badly needed new housing supply will have to be tailored."
This is a gross understatement of the issue. The problem is voters. No one will vote in more housing, housing benefits for others or more affordable housing. Because the people who vote own homes and go into the voting booth and protect their own interests and assets: https://www.route-fifty.com/management/2022/08/problem-homeo... . There isnt a law about having to be a landholder to vote but there is a very strong correlation between the two.
Planing and zoning is hyper local, hyper political and very active. This is why mixed use zoning is harder to find, you can't run a garage out of your garage. The is why the "missing middle" is a thing in America. This is why "corporate ownership" of housing wont get fixed (it is a hyper local issue and the people who would show up to vote against it are the same ones whos property prices are being propped up by it).
There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way.
I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rebuilding-construction-tr...