News of the Day III

[pete]

That's with restricted immigration. You believe if we allow 100k migrants in at once, that they are going to find work easily? No way, not if we are talking about legal migration and especially once $15 minimum wage becomes a reality. At the very least, there will need to be a system to relocate them and programs for skill training.

If you knew the scarcity of tradesmen in the construction industry, for instance, you'd be less skeptical.

[pete]

A letter to the editor in the Sarasota Herald Tribune asked the question, "how will we feed all these additional illegal aliens when we can't feed our own people?" Besides, the fact that the we can't feed our own people is a lie, I have a better question: "How will we feed our own people when, according to the government, 50% of all the workers in the agricultural sector are illegals? Between the fields and the meet packing plants, its probably hard to find an American citizen actually doing work,

When Georgia passed a pretty invasive law against illegal immigrant labor about, gosh, 10 years ago now, farmers literally couldn't harvest all the crops they planted because they didn't have the workforce.

[Donnie D]

Meat packing plants. Gees.

[Donnie D]

Sidney Powell is saying that all of the Trump voters who believed her claims about voter fraud are stupid. She is asking for the Dominion lawsuit to be dismissed because no reasonable person could possibly believe that the claims she made about Dominion and Venezuela were factual. I guess that would include Trump himself.

[RSchmitz]

If you knew the scarcity of tradesmen in the construction industry, for instance, you'd be less skeptical.

That’s why I mentioned that they would need skill training. If we release the dam the vast majority of additional migrants will be unskilled labor. I know we need skilled labor badly, it’s the single biggest failing of our education system that students aren’t being steered toward trade schools

[ChaseSpace]

Sidney Powell is saying that all of the Trump voters who believed her claims about voter fraud are stupid. She is asking for the Dominion lawsuit to be dismissed because no reasonable person could possibly believe that the claims she made about Dominion and Venezuela were factual. I guess that would include Trump himself.

My response if I were a judge: "If no sane person is capable of believing them then why did you constantly repeat those claims?"

[pete]

There is no such thing as "skilled" tradesmen in construction right now... or at least they're rare as the sasquatch. A lot of the people who knew how to build things retired or dropped out of the industry during The Great Recession and even in the recent building boom that brain drain hasn't been fixed. At this point, be they white, brown, or purple, most subcontractors are just looking for warm bodies for their crews. If they knew what they hell they were doing that'd be a plus but, shit, the superintendents don't know what they're doing half the time anymore either.

[Flycoon]

There is no such thing as "skilled" tradesmen in construction right now... or at least they're rare as the sasquatch. A lot of the people who knew how to build things retired or dropped out of the industry during The Great Recession and even in the recent building boom that brain drain hasn't been fixed. At this point, be they white, brown, or purple, most subcontractors are just looking for warm bodies for their crews. If they knew what they hell they were doing that'd be a plus but, shit, the superintendents don't know what they're doing half the time anymore either.

No shit. I have a handful of clients that are repairing sub standard (being nice here) on homes they had built by a "custom" builder. The end results are homes no better than Lennar.

Lack of craftsmen can be attributed to two factors. Removal of mandatory "Industrial Arts" in public school curriculums and the destruction of construction unions that had apprenticeship programs that trained their members. As well as the big push for STEM at the cost of other education.

[the_narrow_way]

The lack of trade school/apprentice/union availability and participation is killing this country. I put the blame squarely on the corporatocracy and their disciples.

[RSchmitz]

There is no such thing as "skilled" tradesmen in construction right now... or at least they're rare as the sasquatch. A lot of the people who knew how to build things retired or dropped out of the industry during The Great Recession and even in the recent building boom that brain drain hasn't been fixed. At this point, be they white, brown, or purple, most subcontractors are just looking for warm bodies for their crews. If they knew what they hell they were doing that'd be a plus but, shit, the superintendents don't know what they're doing half the time anymore either.

Doesn't that show an insane need for skilled labor? I get that the 2008 housing crisis hurt the value of obtaining trade skills for construction(nobody is building houses when house values are falling off of a cliff), but it's surprising to see that we haven't had talent rotate back into that industry. Most trade jobs(hvac, electrician, plumber) make 50k a year or $25 an hour and the housing market has been the most stable industry in history even counting the recession, and of course it's a booming industry right now.

This is 100% a problem with our education system, we ram standardized testing down everyones throats and try to turn every student into a scholar, but over 40% of college graduates work jobs that do not require a degree. Meanwhile kids who drop out, may be better off for it because they aren't saddled with loads of student debt. I know mechanics and painters without a diploma who make 6 figures.

I wouldn't attribute it to the push on STEM, we do need engineers and doctors, but we are ramming kids through the system that have impossible gaps because of the No Child Left Behind Act. Inclusive education isn't working. The change needs to happen with the bottom percentile, not the top. The number of students in high school who need a calculator to solve multiplication problems is scary, at some point in the system there needs to be a serious divergence into specializations and a change of rigor. We need magnet schools that aren't just draining feeder schools of the higher level students but have an entirely different education plan for our lower level students to give them an easier pathway to success.

[pete]

Doesn't that show an insane need for skilled labor?

I'm telling you there's an overall shortage of labor, skilled or unskilled. Yes, there needs to be better training, as noted by Flycoon. But that's something that needs to happen in parallel with expanding the construction labor force in number.

[RSchmitz]

I'm telling you there's an overall shortage of labor, skilled or unskilled. Yes, there needs to be better training, as noted by Flycoon. But that's something that needs to happen in parallel with expanding the construction labor force in number.

So basically that is what I said. We need skilled labor in construction, even if we've been skirting by to this point. The construction industry may be desperate for labor, but that doesn't mean we should be ok with shoddy housing and infrastructure anymore than we should be ok with unskilled doctors/lawyers/engineers.

As a nation, we don't need unskilled labor, that's my opinion based on experience and research. Remember, I was a huge supporter of Yang in the primary and his big argument for UBI is that robots are replacing unskilled labor, and it's hard to argue otherwise when companies are choosing between shipping jobs overseas or building robots.

[Donnie D]

For 30 years I heard contractors complain that they were desperate for skilled workers. But they never wanted to hire them as permanent employees, they want them available whenever they needed them as temporary laborers. Well, the folks wanted permanent jobs, not standing around Home Depot hoping to be picked each day - and if they weren't picked, sent home without any work. Unless it was a huge project, contractors didn't hire new employees. When it was a big project, someone got hired for a couple of weeks as a temp and let go. People would go through training programs and never got hired, especially if they were black. Sorry, except when they were doing one of my projects and they had to meet minority hiring goals. Then they wanted workers. But as soon as they finished my jobs, they were on the street again. We put a lot of people through vocational training, but they could never get hired.

Narrow, in big cities, you can put the blame squarely on the labor unions who passed the training opportunities and jobs along to family and friends and kept blacks out of all of those training programs.

[Flycoon]

So basically that is what I said. We need skilled labor in construction, even if we've been skirting by to this point. The construction industry may be desperate for labor, but that doesn't mean we should be ok with shoddy housing and infrastructure anymore than we should be ok with unskilled doctors/lawyers/engineers.

As a nation, we don't need unskilled labor, that's my opinion based on experience and research. Remember, I was a huge supporter of Yang in the primary and his big argument for UBI is that robots are replacing unskilled labor, and it's hard to argue otherwise when companies are choosing between shipping jobs overseas or building robots.

He needed unskilled labor is in agriculture and food production. Know ant Americans who will pick in the fields from 6-3 6 days each week?

https://www.mic.com/articles/8272/alabama-illegal-immigrant-crackdown-destroys-farm-business

[pete]

The need for more construction labor is going to be exacerbated if Biden gets his $3T in infrastructure spending, btw. We're going to have so many more construction projects than we have skilled construction teams for a span of about 3-5 years. It's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem.