This article from the MoneyBox blog is a must read for every industry struggling to find skilled labor.
“Construction is ground zero in the worker shortage,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page chimed in on Thursday. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 150,000 unfilled construction jobs in the United States. And as the Journal’s editorialists note, “a January survey by the Associated General Contractors of America found that 73 percent of firms had a hard-time finding qualified workers.”
Why? Many people were flushed out of the home construction industry when it collapsed last decade, and went on to find other work. Many of the undocumented immigrants who filled the posts have left the country, or, in some instances, have been deported. The demographic that does this difficult physical work is aging—as the Journal writes, “the average age of construction equipment operators and highway maintenance workers is 46.” And, gee, it seems Americans just don’t want to get their hands calloused and risk injury pouring foundations and erecting frames.
What’s mystifying here is the fact that capitalist homebuilders and their cheerleaders at the Journal are, well, mystified over why Americans don’t seem to want to work construction. There’s a simple reason why Americans aren’t filling construction jobs—and the construction industry appears to be missing it.
Free-market types will tell you that there’s no such thing as a shortage of a commodity—of energy, of food, and, theoretically, of labor. Rather, there is only a shortage of the proper incentives, people willing to pay the appropriate prices or to send the signals that a commercial endeavor is worth undertaking. If you’re only willing to pay $2 for a gallon of gas, there will be a crippling shortage, because some producers won’t be able to afford to provide it. If you’re willing to pay $4 per gallon, the market will magically produce a bounteous surplus.
And yet the market sharpies collectively are throwing up their hands over the construction labor shortage instead of homing in on the obvious solution: Pay people more—a lot more if need be. Wages in the residential building industry are growing at twice the rate of wages in the overall economy.
CLICK HERE to read the entire MoneyBox article. It presents new ways to look at our country’s skilled labor shortage.
