Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
Sounds like you're assuming people are paying pennies for labour. I don't think that's true at all
While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.
Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.
The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.
This is not true at all! Parking lots are not particularly complicated, with the main obstacle being machinery and logistics. I know folks that started off residential and moved to commercial once they accumulated enough capital to buy the necessary machines to take on bigger commercial work.
Highly questionable premise. I bet very few people are going to gamble their most valuable asset on a newbie trying to learn the ropes. I’ll pay someone experienced multiples more for my once in a decade or two capital projects on my home.
Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?
It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.
Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.
Learn to code indeed.
For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.
yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed protectionist policy to artificially inflate the value of their labor. Let's see how union tough you are when the administration changes and you have to compete with a global labor pool again.
I don't really think electricians have to worry about that. There may be the some shops that employ immigrants as helpers, but most electricians have spent at least several years getting their hours, building their kit and learning the NEC + local codes. It's hard to picture companies importing labor and training them for so long.