I’m going to talk about the construction labor market that exists in the Southwest, that is, California, Southern Nevada and Arizona. It’s one that has seen the most changes in the last generation or two and is likely where the rest of the country is headed. It’s not only a story of labor, but it’s part of the story of the homebuilding industry as well, pointedly the tract home construction and development industry.
In the 50’s and 60’s of the last century, there was a large number of people, okay, let’s be specific: men, who had grown up in the trades and had become highly skilled at taking a job from start to finish, particularly in the field of carpentry. It was common and it was expected that if you were a carpenter, you could not only lay out and build walls and floors, you could layout roof rafters or stair stringers, requiring a knowledge and skilled use of geometry that we reserve for AP classes today. Women were virtually non-existent in the field then, this situation exacerbated by dividing the sexes into the high school Shop and Home Ec classes of that generation.
Over the last decades of the 20 th century, there was a large influx of immigrants into the Southwest, mostly from Mexico and Latin America. These were people willing to work long hard hours but for the most part were unskilled and had little English language skills. Many found work in the construction trade as unskilled helpers. They would do the lower-skilled, tedious, repetitive work, such as nailing off shear paneling (there can be up to a hundred nails in a 4x10 sheet), stocking drywall from the truck into a house (a 4x12 sheet weighs over 60 pounds and there can be a hundred of those in a 1600 square foot home) or mixing stucco. Many of these workers become highly skilled and proficient in one or two very specific tasks. A smaller number become very skilled and knowledgeable about the whole construction process and learned English. They are many of the senior superintendents on construction sites today.
The homebuilders, always fighting to keep costs low in order to remain competitive (the same as every other industry in America and around the world) put constant pressure on their subcontractors to keep their costs low and those subcontractors had their own competitors to worry about. Gradually, a lot of the work on residential construction sites became piece-work. A framing subcontractor would pay an independent crew to nail off shear paneling at so many pennies per square foot, a different crew to “roll joists”* at so many cents per square foot of floor area, and yet another crew to cut and nail off the floor sheathing at a certain piece-rate. Each of these crews could be 2 or 3 men who had cut and nailed hundreds of thousands of square feet for a very narrow portion of the whole framing task and had become very, very good at it. They would drive long distances to job sites, work long hours (well over 8 in many cases) so that they could have a nice paycheck every week. They worked incredibly hard and deserved every penny they made.
Translate this to virtually every other trade on the jobsite. For example, a drywall subcontractor would pay one crew to stock the house. They would show up and when the drywall supply house delivered, they were the ones that pulled the board off the truck and put the correct amount in each room on the floor. Another crew came in and cut and hung the board on the walls and ceiling. A different person would come in just to put the corner bead on. Yet another crew for taping and finishing. Every crew or individual paid piece-work by the square foot.
This piece-work mentality has persisted to this day, but state labor laws have adjusted to make sure that people aren’t exploited, that they get proper meal and rest periods and that minimum wages are met and overtime is paid.
Remember those carpenters who knew how to do everything? They mostly retired by the turn of century. The ones that didn’t either did so by the time of the Great Recession in 2008 or they left the trades then for other industries and never went back. Making a living in construction is no easy matter, you’re either looking for work during a slow-down or you’re working long hours when things are good because you know you have to bank some money for the slow times. Add in the physically demanding nature of the work** and you can see that most people in the trades love what they’re doing and that’s why they stick with it.
Okay, so where do we go from here? What Dorothy Homes and many others are doing; we’re bringing a lot of the building process indoors and industrializing it. Using lifting devices to minimize the heavy labor, using machinery not available on the jobsite to make large improvements in quality and productivity and making it easier for a modern factory worker to deliver a consistently better home at a competitive price.
No place like home, right?
Dottie
*”roll joists” refers to pulling long 2x boards out of a stack of lumber, cutting them to length and putting them in place on the first or 2 nd floor, along with blocking and straps.
**a lot of conversation at break time on the typical construction jobsite revolves around which chiropractor you go to and how he fixed your spine or shoulder.
