Where do they come from.

[mthomas1]

One thing I’d add as someone who has hired three different “fully insuredâ€

[n/a30]

Yes, immigration does play a huge part of the problem related to the errors created. Denial of that fact is delusional and counterproductive.

Most of the qualified workers have left the business and only a few of the remaining workers can speak English properly. Some of the more qualified workers become managers and many others outsource the services. Some contractors just use day labor workers that congregate at street corners.

There needs to be better compliance to the demands of quality performance. It is not only the construction industry that has been highly diminished. Almost every industry has been undermined by the lack of quality control.

The public is screwed. It is difficult to find any construction workers that are competent and capable of proper communication and proper ability in this country.

It takes more than little technical education to have a conscience and dedication to doing the right thing to insure quality control to protect the public from substandard work and service providers.

The bottom line is if you want quality artisanship, you may find it a difficult task to locate anyone with a competitive bid because many American craftsmen cannot compete with the substandard and poorly done work done by others with lacking skills /creditentials / abilities. For a variety of obvious reasons, you will not get quality work from many in the current workforces due to the lack of control over the industry.

[mthomas1]

Whoa Nellie! It appears that part of my post above has "disappeared", is that the norm around here?

[Bain]

I don't have anything terribly interesting to add, but yes, it's about the money. The roofer is paid by the square of shingles, the framer by the square foot, the finish carpenter by the linear foot . . . the mindset is to get the job, finish it as quickly as possible, and move on to the next gig.

The smart and skillful tradespeople realize they can't do their best work and remain competitive with pricing, so they wind up starting their own companies and working on existing structures.

Around here, a framer--typically with a crew of two or three others--can fetch about $6.50 a square foot on a 5,000 sq. ft. custom home. Factoring in the weather and other variables, he can stick frame four--maybe five--houses a year. That's not a lot of money after expenses and taxes. And when it comes to ?skilled? labor, like most everything else, you get what you pay for.

[Jim Katen]

Originally posted by Al Austin

They probably come from Mexico and can not read, speak or write much English.

It is the illegal visitors from the south that do most of the construction, including residential building and they make the majority of the very stupid mistakes.

Al, that kind of comment makes you seem as if you're a bigoted, redneck dumbass.

Not that you are, of course. Just thought you'd like to know.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[kurt]

Yep, that's the way it is around here if something crossed over a line that a Moderator thought was inappropriate. I've been deleted several times when I was a dumbass. I even deleted a Hausdok post one time.

This is a very delicate issue as far as I'm concerned, and I'd appreciate it if folks kept the conversation right about @ the hairline edge it's been walking, and not go over into personal bias & hate mongering. It ain't about political correctness; it's about decency. Most of all, it's about economics, like Katen astutely observed.

I can site several instances of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the felonious perpetrated by legals, illegals, and every representative of the melting pot.

All I saw was some dumbass carpentry, and honestly, I don't care where they came from.

If anyone's to blame, it's rich white Americans for being overly fascinated w/mega square footage & fancy granite countertops over good design, energy efficiency, intelligent material usage, or any other aspect of coherent architecture. They're the one's that are demanding the oversized, overstuffed, overbearing garbage that the morons are putting up.

A TIJ Moderator......

[AHI in AR]

Originally posted by Jim Katen

Originally posted by Al Austin

They probably come from Mexico and can not read, speak or write much English.

It is the illegal visitors from the south that do most of the construction, including residential building and they make the majority of the very stupid mistakes.

Al, that kind of comment makes you seem as if you're a bigoted, redneck dumbass.

Not that you are, of course. Just thought you'd like to know.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

This is exactly why I was hesitant to even open this can of worms. I fully realize that all immigrant workers are neither incompetent nor illegal. Far from it. As I said earlier, many rise above the obstacles and do quite well.

On the other hand, several native-born workers I have had the "privilege" of working with as a builder could barely read or write English. Which would I choose? Easy...the one with the right attitude...regardless of nationality.

[Jim Katen]

Originally posted by AHI in AR

. . . I fully realize that all immigrant workers are neither incompetent nor illegal. Far from it. As I said earlier, many rise above the obstacles and do quite well.

On the other hand, several native-born workers I have had the "privilege" of working with as a builder could barely read or write English. Which would I choose? Easy...the one with the right attitude...regardless of nationality.

In addition to attitude, I'd make my choice based on basic intelligence and ability to learn and adapt. Attitude is great, but it doesn't make up for lack of brain cells.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[Jim Katen]

Originally posted by AHI in AR

Originally posted by Jim Katen

Originally posted by Al Austin

They probably come from Mexico and can not read, speak or write much English.

It is the illegal visitors from the south that do most of the construction, including residential building and they make the majority of the very stupid mistakes.

Al, that kind of comment makes you seem as if you're a bigoted, redneck dumbass.

Not that you are, of course. Just thought you'd like to know.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

This is exactly why I was hesitant to even open this can of worms. . .

Your posts on the subject have been well-reasoned and thoughtful. Just for the record, I have no quarrel with them.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[Jim Katen]

Originally posted by Al Austin

Yes, immigration does play a huge part of the problem related to the errors created. Denial of that fact is delusional and counterproductive.

So are sweeping generalizations.

Most of the qualified workers have left the business and only a few of the remaining workers can speak English properly. Some of the more qualified workers become managers and many others outsource the services. Some contractors just use day labor workers that congregate at street corners.

They were complaining about the same thing in 1972 and, probably, in 1872.

There needs to be better compliance to the demands of quality performance. It is not only the construction industry that has been highly diminished. Almost every industry has been undermined by the lack of quality control.

Well, the home inspection profession sure has sunk to an all time low. Must be all that immigration.

The public is screwed. It is difficult to find any construction workers that are competent and capable of proper communication and proper ability in this country.

Gosh, it's a wonder that anything gets built with all that incompetence out there.

It takes more than little technical education to have a conscience and dedication to doing the right thing to insure quality control to protect the public from substandard work and service providers.

Does that sentence actually say anything?

The bottom line is if you want quality artisanship, you may find it a difficult task to locate anyone with a competitive bid because many American craftsmen cannot compete with the substandard and poorly done work done by others with lacking skills /creditentials / abilities. For a variety of obvious reasons, you will not get quality work from many in the current workforces due to the lack of control over the industry.

Al, you have got to get into a remedial English class. Perhaps you could take one of those "English as a Second Language" courses. You'd make lots of friends there.

- Jim Katen, Oregon

[mthomas1]

In my experience if you think that a crew composed of recent Mexican immigrants and recent Easter European immigrants have the same set of cultural assumptions and interpersonal skills and attitudes, or the same set of assumptions about and strategies for dealing with supervision, and you attempt to motivate for for quality or job safety, you are going to fail with one group or the other and you are fooling no one other than yourself if you think otherwise.

My observations about culture backgrounds and behavior of many Polish and Russian semi-skilled construction workers in Chicago area is not uniformed bigotry, it's appreciation of reality informed by observation and experience. Watch one of these guys shoot a nail through another's hand into a stud, and discover that both participants and the rest of the crew think it's *funny* and a chance to prove how tough they are, and you begin to understand that they are on a very different page from the Mexican worker who does not report an injury because he fears for his job and wants to avoid any potential confrontation with authority.

And if you are going to stand there with Tyvek instructions in Spanish and Polish and then get them to do the job right once you leave the site, you had better be aware that on the average you are going to have to work through two largely different sets of assumptions about a lot of things, starting with "authority" and "authorities" .

And if you want to understand WHY it's that way, you need talk to them about their experience back home, for example under Communism.

I didn't make this stuff about Poland out of whole cloth, I LEARNED it from conversations with such workers. Life under communism imbued many people with a very fatalistic and cynical set of convictions about how the world - including the guy trying to get them to do the job right - works. (And FWIW, that's not a matter of my political preferences, I think the lot of blue collar workers as envisioned by the some on the right in this country at the moment does the same).

Rural poverty in Mexico creates a different set of assumptions.

Life in an economically declining blue collar community in Northern Indiana still another.

And if we want to talk about why we see so much apparently thoughtless and end occasionally perversely bad workmanship, we need to be able to talk realistically about assumptions, motivations and attitudes of the workmen - which encompasses a lot more than their attitude toward their paycheck.

And this reality, for better or worse, cannot get erased by erasing someone's words like an "unperson" in those 50s Soviet photographs.

-----------

Another news bulletin from my planet for the PC police here: whoever erased that post is WAY behind the times.

PC in corporate American - the heart of PC these days - *means* understanding these sorts of differences and managing around them. Classes, books, workshops, Power-points.. yadda, yadda, yadda, it's as PC as PC can get.

[kurt]

I don't honestly think Phillip meant his post to go where this has gone; it was about crappy carpentry, ala "where do we find such men?". Or at least, that's my interpretation.

Now we are on an internet forum quest for the last word. I'm giving it to Michael, my friend & neighbor.

It's Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or whatever else anyone wants out there, and I wanna go find it.

[hausdok]

Hi Michael,

FWIW, I'm the fellow who edited your post today. It was because your comment strayed beyond just deploring the state of construction skills and was bordering on political. I think this is an interesting discussion but I wish folks would remember that, unless your lineage is American aboriginal, you are the decedent of immigrants. Me, I'm a first generation American. My Dad is an immigrant. He came to this country during WWII as a teenager and built PT boats in Ipswich, MA for our Navy.

The issue with the construction business isn't centered on nationality. It's centered on a system that no longer fosters a tradition of excellence and pride in the trades. A system where we allow builders to hire untrained labor and don't require that contractor to ensure that the new employee is competent before sticking a hammer in the employee's hand. Can it be done right? Hell yes. A few years ago I had the privilege of spending a couple of weeks working around a crew of Ukrainian siders - you know, some of those folks who used to labor under the boot of the commies - and they did some of the best work I've ever seen.

I remember when my father's brother-in-law visited New York from Switzerland back in 1973 when my Dad was in the process of finishing up a 3000 square foot raised ranch in upstate New York. His brother-in-law asked what it cost to build that house. My Dad responded that it cost him about $42,000. Then his brother-in-law remarked that the same house in Switzerland, at that time, would have cost about $1.5M. When Dad asked why, he explained that builders there were very skilled and had gone through many years of formal training and then worked as apprentices before becoming journeymen and eventually moving up to master builder. They belonged to a guild and were well paid for their work. The system is ordered and it's hierarchal.

Sure, they have unskilled immigrant labor in Europe, but it's the hard labor that doesn't require an artisan's skills, and that's where they stay until/unless they go through formal training and work their way up the ladder. Nobody walks up to the guy mixing sand and aggregate at the tub and asks him to go inside and help the plasterer. If they tried it, the trained plasterers, who'd earned their bones the hard way, would walk off the job.

What a concept, huh?

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike