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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

What's the endgame for construction workers? Everyone can't move into management. Many people's bodies can't handle that kind of manual labor for 40 years, and even if they could construction jobs tend to be insecure.

If you want people to make those trade offs you have to pay more.

This kind of rhetoric from companies drives me nuts. They push to remove regulations, but when the free market says they have to pay more for labor, suddenly it's not the free market driving up wages, it's a worker shortage. Now we need the government to step in and fix it. You see it most obviously with tech companies pushing for STEM in public schools and the push for more H-1Bs.

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The end game used to be wealthy retirement because it paid extremely well. And on a side note people's bodies can and do handle that kind of manual labour for 40+ years. Not all of course, some get hurt, some are not cut out for it, but go to any manual work site and you will see older people in their 50's and 60's still in excellent physical shape doing it and younger people doing the really hard shitty jobs since time immemorial.

>older people in their 50's and 60's

I edited "most people" to "many people" because I really don't have the numbers.

From anecdotal experience from friends and family, I'd think most people won't make it through 40 years of hard manual labor without injury. For every 60 year old you see on a job site, we don't know how many of their peers have stopped working construction.

I think this depends a lot on what type of construction you're talking about and also what trade.

Residential SFHs is different to low-rise buildings, which I assume is different again to building high-rise buildings.

It also depends on what skill you have. General labourers are likely going to be lifting heavy things a lot but I don't think that's universally true. Bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, tilers, etc all have different profiles.

I actually think that for a lot of these kinds of jobs that you could be doing them well into your 50s just fine. Being active makes it easier to stay active.

Also, if you do pursue a trade you will likely have apprentices eventually. Part of what they're for is doing the heavy lifting.

Experience in construction will eventually open up avenues such as being a general contractor, property inspection, construction management and so on.

> also what trade

I wasn't talking about skilled trades. Every electrician or plumber I've ever met, even the ones who only do new work, wouldn't call themselves a "construction worker", or say they worked in construction. I was assuming the article was talking about what the BLS calls "construction laborers", but maybe it was talking about all possible trades involved in construction? I only read the article summary.

>I actually think that for a lot of these kinds of jobs that you could be doing them well into your 50s just fine.

That's likely true for some trades and some people, but from some googling it does look there the risk to your body from working construction is pretty significant. I was able to find a German study of 14k construction workers that said for construction industry as a whole, workers were 1.5x more likely than other blue collar workers to receive a disability pension for musculoskeletal problems, and 1.8 times more likely for accidental injuries. They were over 2x more likely to be disabled from musculoskeletal problems as the general working population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1741071/

Maybe it would be something like Tesla's model (highly automated assembly line) but for homes. Manufactured homes have been around for a long time but it's not cool. I would buy a eco-friendly modular home if were awesome.

We've been looking at modular, for example:

https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/portfolio/

https://huntingtonhomesvt.com/featured-home/sylvan-knoll-1/

Going from an old house built in 1890 to one built in 1980 with 2x6 walls and modern insulation has been nice. I'd like to go the next step, and homes like the one above combine a nice interior with great efficiency.

Going from a 30yr old furnace and standard 10yr water heater to a highly efficient single tankless system was a great step up, both from the energy efficiency and creature comfort perspectives.

The endgame is being replaced by automation.

Most of the people I know that did construction worked like dogs for six months of the year on the road, then took most of the rest of the year off. These were mostly workers for largish construction contractors, so they would go into a plant during the biannual shut downs, tear the thing apart and put it back together over the course of three weeks or a month, then move onto the next job. They tended to work a lot of hours, since it's a very tight schedule with deadlines - it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars every day these kinds of plants aren't operating - so they'd rack up a ton of overtime, plus living on the road with housing taken care of or a per diem. It's not really that bad a gig, especially if you can live somewhere cheap the rest of the time. In a lot of ways it's very similar to people I know who are merchant marine.

After a few years they tended to have specialized into something, so they'd get a more regular job or go into business for themselves.

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