There's plenty of money to fix roads and bridges, but not enough workers
npr.org
npr.org
Support for woodshop and metal classes offered in high school disappeared in the early 2000s to make way for computer labs, Ray said.
We don’t pay enough and then complain there is a labor shortage.
Same for teachers.
At the same time I was watching as a local office building was built. On Sunday they would roll in a bus full of what looked like immigrant workers, with a few supervisors. Then in the evening they’d gather them all and drive them away. I hope I am wrong, but it seemed shady and abusive. Can’t imagine they were all compensated properly and had good health insurance.
I don't have the last 10 year data, but from ~2000-2014 the pupil-teacher ratio was flat and at all time recorded lows. This works against the thesis there is a shortage relative to post WW-II history.
It appears whatever teachers is paid, the feeling they get from helping kids vs building cogs for evilCo must be enough additional incentive to keep us near record low pupil-teacher ratio.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_208.20.a...
> demoralized, jaded and poorly performing employee
Ah this is a teacher bashing session to disparage the ones we currently have. Personally I highly value the efforts of our teachers and can't imagine making such a statement.
>Working for some highly bureaucratic and political organization (i.e. any given school district)
I think we're on the same page here. If you want to argue the idea of the institution of public schooling sucks, I won't disagree with you. That's why my jurisdiction has voted to allow you to use your tax money to bypass the public school district institution.
Have you ever actually worked for government or highly bureaucratic government adjacent industries?
There's a reason the phrase "going postal" exists. The conditions at these sort of highly bureaucratic and regulated to the hilt employers with broken incentive systems really wears on the average person. Working for these shitty organizations (which most are, although there are occasional pockets of goodness) wears on you. Most people become jaded and you just phone it in and do the minimum because even if you hit your KPIs the pay is almost all based on seniority anyway.
Tons of people go on to be good performing employees once they leave this environment. Many who stay start a side business and continue to be jaded at their 9-5 work but pour all their real effort into the side business which at least prevents them from burning out too hard.
The (technology) company I worked for at the time ran into this problem. We had a high-schooler who did some product photography and other miscellaneous tasks. He took the job to pay for gas for his motorcycle (dad agreed to buy it for him, but made him get a job to pay for the rest). He'd show up for a few days until he had made enough money, then would disappear until payday.
IIRC, at the time Darien had the second-highest per-capita income in the country, so its problems were a bit unusual. Unusual problems require unusual solutions.
I graduated in the 90's and my high school had (and still does have) amazing facilities, since it also hosted the regional technical career center which had a broad range of offerings ranging from culinary arts, trades, homebuilding (they'd literally build a house every so often), finance/accounting, digital media & arts. Wood shops, metal shops, a restaurant, computer labs, etc. were all part of the facilities.
Kids on college-track course plans didn't really have an opportunity to take advantage of this stuff, but for those not on the college-track, it gave them a great jump start into trade careers.
Definitely this - there should be no such thing as a labor shortage under capitalism, you can always pay more to get workers, and if the business can't afford that then it's a fault in the business model. At that point the ideal outcome is for the business to go under and sell off their assets at a low market value to recoup losses - which frees up those resources for new businesses to form
This is just modern immigrant labor procurement.
You get nasty fines for hiring illegals directly. Instead you hire a fly-by-night company with a bus to recruit them and attest to having checked all the paperwork.
When INS shows up, your hands are clean.
No more abusive than the old way, just more middlemen involved.
In an ideal world, he’d have apprentices under him, and they’d level up and expand the flock and so on. Have half a dozen jobs going. grow and build a nice sized business. Slowly just become the person who finds the jobs and manages the operation.
He’s almost 40, in excellent shape and is incredibly intelligent, but he wants to get out and into home inspection and such to diversify and have less bodily wear. Meanwhile I want to stop being at a computer so much and do things with my hands, and I’m almost 40 too.
America has a weird relationship with physical labor, who should be doing it and what they should get paid, _unless your labor can be easily vacuumed up by a corporation_ (like knowledge workers). It’s almost as if the country was founded with the idea that “other people” just do the hard work…
Close, it is more like the country was founded with the idea that money can buy labor in any quantity at any time. This just is not true because there are many factors involved such as training, location, family, and whether people even want the jobs to start with. I think few people want construction jobs any more because as the article says it destroys peoples bodies. There needs to be an awareness that construction should only be a temporary job, maybe 10 years at the most, and probably the heavy work should also be intermittent to prevent peoples bodies being destroyed, and hence the number of people in training needs to be huge. Either that or find a way to automate the work. Maybe exoskeletons can help. We're going to need more workers for not only building roads and buildings but for other infrastructure like electric grids. If workers are hard to find now they are going to much harder to find soon as we try to convert the nation to clean energy sources over the next few decades.
Exoskeletons is a far future solution that I don’t think will address the needs of the mid-21st century.
We already have a great model of temporary service with paths to go longer. Just flip the army from a force of destruction to a force of construction.
My aunt recently hired a plumber, who decided that ~12 feet of drain pipe needed to be replaced (exposed in basement, not the main stack). The bill, with "senior discount", came to something like $1200! I stopped by to look over his shoulder and inspect. Looking at the guy and how he worked, I knew he wasn't taking home much of that at all. It's the entire management structure cancer that's sitting above him, skimming the majority of his pay, while treating the person doing the skilled job as some mere implementation detail.
FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose.
It's taken us a few decades to get into this mess, so it will probably take a few more decades to get out. Assuming LLMs can lay bare the unnecessary complexity that is TPS reports, and continued political will for the existence of interest rates.
Rates are tangential, IMO.
College educated white collar professionals are the managerial class. They. Are. Us. The fact that we don't all have "manager" in our job title at any one time is not a meaningful distinction because the minority who do at any time get their ideas and their values and their norms from the whole culture. The problem is in the mirror.
It is our cultural values and norms that have created this situation in the same way that if we positively valued patronage and nepotism we would have only ourselves to blame when every bureaucracy wound up chock full of incompetents who knew a guy.
The reason your plumber has so much overhead is because that's what the cultural norms demand. Our culture is allergic to being responsible for mistakes and taking credit for one's self so we've created a culture of diffusing responsibility as much as possible wherever possible so that everyone has plausible deniability when things go wrong and everyone shares credit when they go right. Being able to shift and spread blame around when the job isn't right or the invoice isn't right is a valued cultural norm and behavior expected of business in the same way that a concrete crew in Iraq says a prayer before the pour.
>FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose.
Yes that's exactly what's happening across our economy. Depending on your industry it may be more or less sanctioned by your employer but favor trading is becoming more and more normal. It used to be that professionals used to only trade with each other, the electrician wires the plumbers house and vise versa. I think over the last 20yr it's expanded, the electrician wires the plumber's mom's house and the plumber's mom makes her other son do some mechanic work for the electrician's brother. The bigger the cost of compliance with regulatory and cultural norms the more incentive there is for this kind of economic activity to exist. Kind of like how high tax rates on legal weed keep the dealers in business. The cost savings are just so great that the sketchy system is still viable.
The overfinancialization is also what keeps the productive workers trapped under unproductive structures. They can do informal jobs for friends of friends, but what keeps them from setting up a web page, doing some marketing, and offering their services publicly at drastically better rates? I'd think one of the issues is the carrying cost of insurance - another malignant growth of the financial industry - which ties right into your "diffuse responsibility" culture point.
To expand on my last point - while I'd believe that bona fide tradespeople are doing more informal trading, I think there's a larger contingent of amateur DIY replacing professionals, and perhaps trading for that. Lets say someone wants to add another electrical receptacle somewhere, and they don't want to pay an electrician $1000 or whatever it costs for one to get out of bed these days. They can search "how to install receptacle" and other basic wiring things and get a video that shows clear instruction of how to do it, plus social encouragement telling them they can! (And yeah I know that's a pretty simple example for most DIYers, that's actually part of my point)
Yeah you'll pay $90k, but that job will last 1.3 years and after that where do I go? How do I buy a house?
Case in point: my uncle was a welder and moved to the hyper-dangerous underwater welding field just because there was a steady, stable stream of work. He had jobs lined up a year out or more, and didn't have to move or travel too much. Made good money but man does that stuff sound spooky.
Same deal for a neighbor who did paving, esp. the rubber paving you see at playgrounds, etc. Tons, like TONS, of demand, but it was all Western Canada, and could be in towns with only 2 motels and no vacancies; weeks of sleeping in the back of his truck but paying rent on a big city apartment. All of the driving, travel, shipping, and moving of tools and materials was very expensive. He gave it up because he could make more money selling trucks for Chevy; better pay, cheaper mechanical work on his truck, and slept in his own bed in his apartment every night.
The problem for the "passive income class" is that Covid made the labouring class figure out that they can make do with a lot less. Consequently, you can't move the labouring class anymore without putting up real money.
Not relative salaries, not arbitrary "this has six numbers so it's a lot".
Pay a salary that allows a grown man or woman along with his or her partner to buy a house with a garden, own a car, and raise children.
If you don't have that, there is no "not enough". There are tons of people doing bullshit jobs that would love to have a real job but don't because they will just lose slightly less rather than actually winning.
(I don't have the stats for how often it is granted)
I've seen a front end loader operator drive up to the ditch, hop out of his vehicle and then proceed to kick gravel into the face of a person who was climbing out of the ditch on a ladder while the foreman and the site super who happened to be there laughed.
If you've never worked in construction you can't appreciate that it's a whole other world man.
I am simply claiming that any real job (e.g. not a training wheels job for teenagers) that does not pay enough for a decent life _should_ have shortages.
Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers.
This article acts like it's a giant mystery as to why this is the case.
Not to say classism is solely or even largely responsible, but it must surely play a part.
If you get paid a salary by working for someone else you are working class and if you get paid through your investments alone such as owning stock or a company then you are a member of the capital owning class.
Retirement funds and investment funds are there so workers feel like there's less of a distinction between themselves and the class they are beholden to even though that truly isn't the case
A PM for a tech company, most FAANG ICs, a doctor who doesn't have an ownership stake in the practice they work for, an enterprise salesman, a wall street trader all work for someone else and NONE of them are working class for the purposes of this discussion.
There are huge social and cultural gulfs between the top, middle and bottom and they each have their own distinct cultures and there is natural conflict that stems from that (I would go so far as to say "most" does). Obviously some people manage to straddle the lines but the gulfs are very much there.
The article tosses unemployment stats. However (like every article that does that), it doesn't mention that BLS's official unemployment figure is ~20 percentage points lower than the actual number of unemployed[1]. This means there are many more millions who could benefit from those jobs but have no realistic access to them.
> Meanwhile people are flocking to tech and finance and medical careers.
The folks flocking to well-paying jobs are typically folks who have have paid-for college - and enough cash on hand to get established where the job is. Without both of those things, the odds of high-paying tech/finance/medical employment is fairly low.
[1] If you take the total number of 16-64 working ft & pt and subtract it from the total number of 16-64, you are left with a 20% difference. Officially, this 20% is neither employed nor unemployed.
note: BLS counts people who are self-employed and people who work w/o wages (eg: cargiving) as employed. ref: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
A significant portion of the remainder 20% are stay at home mom/dad with no desire for a full time job.
We could make some fairly simple formula like "The minimum annual pay must be at least 10% of the median house price" - the percentage can be whatever but then it automatically changes each year based on the housing market, and would help ensure that people can live near there job, which also has a side benefit of saving a bunch of time/energy on commuting
What I can tell you is that these small business owners are fabulously wealthy. The income from running a shop with even a few field crews is absolutely insane. And the entire business model is predicated on paying slave wages with zero benefits to workers.
For every multi-millionaire owner there are one or two sales/account managers and foreman making a middle class salary, and a small army of young guys and undocumented people doing the actual work making McDonald’s hourly wages.
I could have inherited one of these businesses but I left because I couldn’t stomach the wealth disparity.
If there are “not enough” workers then the employers are not offering a market-clearing wage.
If I'm being generous, the "shortage" is referring to supply and demand: if there were more laborers, they'd be cheaper to hire. In reality, a person only has so much time to offer for someone else. This is where the idea of a minimum wage comes from. An individual's time is always worth "at least this much". This is plainly a case of not enough money.
But the repair bill was going to be more than $200,000,000. So they put the entire sum toward repair, gave up on new roads for years. Still it took years to get all the roads and bridges open.
So there's that. Weather doesn't always cooperate.