CONSTRUCTION WORK: The Jobs Americans WILL NOT DO?? -->

And Bush's idiotic, myopic, LUDICROUS, slap-in-the-face argument ONCE AGAIN goes up in smoke...

:nuke:

The companies that are hiring these construction crew chiefs who hire illegals for the jobs....should be prosecuted!!

...American is downsized in order to get them!

I forsee that coming, and SOON...

p.s. Poor Curious!

Some blue-bloods at a charity fundraising party at Jennifer's penthouse:

"The Gipper's doing a hell of a job up in Washington!"

"Oh, yes! We'll have a balanced budget if it kills us all!"

Is big business THAT powerful that they can so brazenly skirt the law?

Guess that was a dumb question. Of course they are. Wouldn't want to take their slave labor away from them, they might actually have to pay them a living wage with improved working conditions.

the supply of super cheap labor for Republican business owners would dry up here. :(

Why would they want to improve Mexico's economy to the point of equality with the U.S.? Then there'd be no incentive for unwitting Mexicans to cross the border illegally to find a "better life." The poor, poor U.S. companies would lose their most important pool of labor - slave labor.

This oligarchy never intends that hard-working Mexicans should be able to live in their neighborhoods or attend their schools either.

Gainesville GA was once the chicken capital of the south and employed mostly blacks and poor whites. (Funny, how they seemed to want to do those jobs.) Those jobs allowed many of them to pay for homes and education for their children, even in a segregated south. We were there last year to visit family. Seems like black unemployment is at an all-time high there and the reason is that what processing plants are left there only hire illegal immigrants. Same thing is true about the textile factories in North and South Carolina. The jobs that Americans once wanted and still do are off limits to poorer American citizens who have been in these areas for many generations. It's really sad.

work miles beneath the Earth mining coal. Far too many of them don't come out every year. They do it because they can earn a living wage and support their families.

There-------are------no-------jobs-------that-------Americans--------won't-------do.

LEGALLY adequate pay and benefits.

Illegals work for less than minimum wage and/or don't have taxes withheld from their pay (which translates to future benefits).

Those greedy American workers - they'd destroy corporate America if we let them!!!!!!!!

refuse to pay Americans a living wage and decent working conditions.

Why do they hate America so much? And Americans? I suppose one reason is because we are no longer useful to them anymore - we are cattle they can simply brush aside.

Employers are getting 2 workers for the price of 1. :grr:

How can you blame people for asking to be paid a living or livable wage? That's why Unions were established in the first place. Labor laws were passed too, but they mean nothing anymore to the whores in Congress who have sold workers out to the Corporate bastards. :grr:

Never. I LOATHE their every man for himself, dog eat dog, selfish, greedy, rude, unfeeling, callous philosophy.

BTW-I was replying to #5 but glad to see your post because it's a good one! :hi:

That always amazes me. Whether it's construction or coal mining, Americans ARE in fact willing to do the job!

Amen! The working poor are the ones who are feeling the brunt of this, mainly because they can't or won't live 8 people in a 2 bedroom house, with no car and no insurance.

Big companies hire illegals because it's cheap and they don't make demands of any kind. They'd rather have someone who can't give them any shit about anything. They would hire citizens for those jobs if they couldn't hire illegals.

New construction techniques for homes using pre-built walls
allow the site-construction to be much faster, with much better
structural quality as the wall sections are designed to contain
no air pockets, not nailed together by immigrant labour on site,
but fixed together on a flat table in a climate controlled computer
house kit cutting/assembly warehouse.

yes, but still there's much manual labor that needs to be done onsite.

Also, the quality can be debated - I've heard some real doosies in terms of structural nightmares.

This way they can employ and build year around. Only the assembly of the house and pouring of the foundation needs to be done in the summer. It really makes sense. Warmer climate states would find it more cost effective to do construction this way too, with the exception of a very hilly terrain where a lot of the building would most likely still have to be done on site.

The art of house design has stepped forward indeed, expecially
with the embedded efficient heating systems, passive solar,
heatpumps, that a house is a giant refrigerator, running in
reverse, putting the cold in to coils underground instead of
the heat.

That the whole thing is designed as a few slabs from a factory
including everything from electricity to plumbing, allows them
to keep all the trades in the big factory under 1 roof. The
assembly team takes the finished "kit" to site 1 week, provided
the foundations preparations, septic soakaways, services and
roads.

Of "course" it would be cheaper to house the trades in a space,
a warm space, where all the tools are well lit, safe, on flat
giant tables in an aircraft hanger, to make a house panel that is
tolerances of aerospace grade, aerospace grade insulation, NO
air gaps if you don't want any, impeccable insulation.

I'm totally pscyhed about the potential of the computer one-off
factory kit house business. I believe its a way to give masses
of people EXCellent housing, and drive the cost of replacing
houses outright in to the market preference.

Let us pretend that I was an unscrupulous, money-grubbing person.

I could hire a crew of illegals for $5 per hour. Buy number-three lumber, single-hung vinyl windows with clear insulated glass, 20-year shingles, broken-edged drywall, Masonite siding (or .040" vinyl siding, which is about as cheap if you don't put the fanfold insulation under it) and cull insulation from the Builder's Bargain Center, then order trusses from the same place. Go out and throw up a row of houses just as fast as I possibly could. Then paint them with "America's Finest" paint (it's not), put the lowest grade of vinyl flooring I could scrounge up in them, buy carpet from "Good Old Boys Carpet and Seafood" (don't laugh, the place is half a mile from Home Depot) and pressboard cabinets...and ya know what? I could turn around in this town and sell every damn one of those places for $150,000 each with no warranty coverage to dumbshits with VA loan guarantees, no fucking idea how to buy a home, and no cash in their pockets. It happens every day. The houses won't last ten years, but that's not the contractor's problem.

I think this is the major reason I want a new job and am working so hard to find one: it is extremely difficult to face the never-ending stream of people whose new houses have things falling off them that shouldn't be falling off 20-year-old homes. It wears you down.

I'll give you an example: Last week a customer came in wanting to know how to fix the leaks in his roof. The roof system is two years old. I'm thinkin' leaks around the flashing, y'know? Wrong--the whole roof deck was leaking. So I cleared it with a manager, grabbed a Gorilla ladder and got in the guy's car. Turns out that the flashing was the least of this man's problem. It was leaking there, but there was no roofing felt, no starter strip, no roofing cement on the flashing, no ventilation, nothing. These days the common way to ventilate a roof system is gable vent and ridge vent; some guys recommend power ventilators, wind-powered turbine vents or whatever, but you've still got to have some way to get air circulating through the roof system to keep the underside of the deck and the trusses from rotting out. This roof didn't have anything. The whole roof deck was leaking because the Mexican-import carpenters drove nails into the self-sealing strips on the shingles with so much air pressure that they tore the fiberglass backing. Good thing they only used two nails instead of the four you're supposed to. The cheap bastards spaced the shingles vertically so they could get 110 square feet of coverage out of 100 square feet of shingles, which had the added benefit of screwing up the self-sealing feature of the shingles so that they didn't actually seal--you shouldn't be able to put your hand under a two-year-old shingle and lift it away from the roof with no pressure, but I could these. The roof deck was made from 3/8" oriented-strand board, which is thinner than code has allowed for...oh, at least 20 years. Better: no roof clips. A roof clip is a little H-shaped piece of metal you put between two sheets of plywood/OSB on a roof deck, and it's there for two reasons--to allow for expansion of the roof deck, and to strengthen the deck in case of high winds. They cost $5 per bag, they slip on, and this roof would have required two. "How do you fix the leaks in your roof? Call a lawyer, tear the roof off down to the joists and start over. Nothing up here is right." You would have thought I'd have proposed killing his puppy from the look on his face. And I gotta face these people every day and tell 'em that not only is their house fucked up but there's no way to fix it that doesn't involve second mortgages that dwarf their first mortgages, class-action lawsuits against contractors, or insurance fraud.

Sweetheart, you're looking for "better structural quality"? Don't make me laugh. The guys cranking out houses as fast as they possibly can using whole truckloads of illegals and shit materials aren't looking for better structural quality. They're looking to build a house that exactly meets code as cheaply and as quickly as they possibly can--or, in places like Cumberland County where there are too few inspectors, to build a house that LOOKS like it meets code. That's it. Who cares if you have to repaint the whole place in nine months because the guy bought his paint from Builder's Bargain Center, and BBC bought it from a guy who accidentally let a whole skid of paint freeze on the loading dock because he laid off two-thirds of his freight crew in the winter then halved the hours of the other three guys so they didn't have time to bring the paint into the building. Who cares if the wall of your garage adjoining your house is covered in half-inch drywall and the door's not fire-rated so, when the wonderful Mexican wiring job burns the house down, the insurance adjustor can measure the drywall, declare it too thin (code on garage walls that abut houses is 5/8" Type X drywall) and deny your claim?

Yikes!

Thanks for your input, very interesting.

Oh, right, let's see who benefits from the current arrangement:

Cheap bastard contractor: yep. By the time problems show up, all you can do is sue, if you can afford to.
Realtors: same
Bank: What, and pass up that 2nd mortgage?

The main beneficiaries would be the poor schmuck buyers, but if they knew enough to hire someone to check it out, they wouldn't buy to begin with.

And, of course, if the government shut these guys down for their violations, they'd just complain about "Big Government driving entreprenuers out of business".

It's not all as dismal as I described, but it's close. There are some decent builders in Cumberland County, but it's a strange market.

Let's say you were to drop two-fifty on new construction in this area. The logical man would expect the home to be...well, DONE...for a quarter of a million dollars.

There are, right now, twelve brand-new 2500-sf-plus quarter-million-dollar homes sitting on the market right now in this county that will close with no light fixtures, no appliances to include water heaters, "unfinished bonus rooms" and primed walls. Unfinished bonus room means no insulation in most of the ceiling, for one thing, because according to NC building code the insulation requirements in the attic are predicated on the existence/nonexistence of a bonus room. Ask me about this later. This actually makes some bizarre kind of sense. These homes are purchased by taking out a mortgage on the structure and land, then opening a Home Improvement Loan account at Home Depot or Lowe's to buy the appliances, light fixtures, paint and building materials for the bonus room. When the appliances and light fixtures are in, the county will issue a certificate of occupancy so you can move in. They give you a while--IIRC six months--to either finish the bonus room or cover the attic floor with R-30 insulation. Under this plan, you're not paying interest for 30 years on a refrigerator that's going to break in ten, on light fixtures you immediately take down and trash because they're ugly, or on paint you immediately cover up because it's Contractor Grade Ultra Flat Kinda White. OTOH, it is a bit disconcerting to walk with a realtor into a house that's worth that much money, be taken to the kitchen, and be told "this kitchen just has so much potential!" Which is realtor-speak for "you can either equip this room with the latest in modern culinary conveniences and impress all your friends and neighbors, or put your guitar amp over there where the stove's supposed to go and just heat up canned food in the microwave when you get hungry."

If you're willing to go down to 1900sf you can get a nearly-finished house (the bonus room is still gonna be unfinished, though) with appliances and lights for the same money.

Now here's what the truly intelligent homebuyer who's got the income to support payments on a house in the $300,000 range does: he goes looking for a home that a field-grade officer just moved out of. Get a house that a major or a light-bird colonel vacated (Fort Bragg regulations require all full-bird colonels and generals to live on post) and all the things that fell off when it was new have been nailed back on, the bonus room is done, the cheap-ass Contractor Grade appliances and Contractor Grade paint are gone, and all the fixtures are tasteful and of good quality. Those homes stay on the market for about a week because they're fairly rare--if an officer is any good and he arrives at Fort Bragg, odds are they won't let him leave until he grows mold and starts calling the division commander "wet behind the ears," so there's very little turnover--and they're always in excellent shape. But if you can get one, you'll really like it.

When all is said and done, this sort of construction
system seems the future, given how architectural drawings
and computers can produce one-off "custom" kit designs.
After seeing the construction quality, next to cheap site-
built timber framing, i'm very impressed.

http://www.buildit-green.co.uk/about-SIPs.html

To fix that chappies roof, why don't they use sarking board,
like rough-cut timbers that the shingles are nailed into...
in some older builds, these are ventilated underneath at the
eaves. Newer roofs using warm-roof felt don't need undervents,
and i don't understand why they're not using proper felt on the
roof you mention... isn't proper felt, the code?

My next roof i'm gonna do in sheet-metal. Its faster to install,
handle's high winds better, and is cheaper...... the high quality
stuff is rated for 80 years, and i've seen too much wind damage
on shingle roofs, usually at the very worst times of years to be
out there doing roofwork... no way... corregated polyester never
seemed that attractive before!

Some of my best friends are roofers, and this is what they've told me. The tin on your roof itself might be good for eighty years, but the washers used to nail the tin to your roof only have a ten year warranty: after that they start leaking. So basically, you're gonna have to tear your roof up once every ten years, replace the washers, and nail it back down; none of this is cheap. If you get guys who know what they're doing and actually give a crap about quality (like my friends), shingles aren't so susceptible to damage.

Now, like I said, my friends do shingles and not metal roofs, so I admit there might be a little bias in their advice; personally I've always loved tin and I'd still love to have a tin roof, but it's important to know the pro's and cons of all your options when making these decisions.

In doing investigation, most windows won't keep their insulation rating in over 100mph winds,
so i've factored in rolling blinds like they use in germany and italy, a modern version of
the exterior shutter that would handle being hit by a flying fencepost in 200mph winds.

As anyone knows who's been there, once you're *in* over 100mph winds, its the wrong time to
be outside tying things down, and if something breaks loose, you just pray the roof don't
tear off. So i've been investigating the exterior of the most exposed buildings i can find
on earth, and they all seem to be using metal exteriors. I wish that building systems came
with wind ratings, so that i could simply specify that the exterior should remain sound
at 250mph... i wonder at what windspeed sheet metal uplifts and departs.

IN this coastal climate, the fixings will deteriorate even faster, heck, even A2 stainless
steel rusts outside in the sea-salt. I'll be wary of the fixings... h mmmm.

I do indeed love a find spanish slate roof,
its got a lotta weight, lasts a long time,
only leaks in very highest winds and is generally weather proof.

Few roofing materials will not admit a drop or two
in winds over 100mph that is not the problem,
its them flying off the house and breaking windows,
metal, despire embedded energy costs, long lasting emblem.

who have been hired by Republican developers, construction contractors and sub-contractors and lawn service businesses. Most of the bigger construction companies are owned by Republicans. They hire the subs who hire the illegals. You used to see lots of black guys working on building construction crews. Now, it's unusual to see black guys or non-Hispanic guys on building construction crews. I must stress that it seems to be the subs that hire the illegals thus protecting the general contractor.

Some of these Hispanic workers are legal. I know an Hispanic guy who used to work for my lawn service company. He and his wife are now citizens and he owns his own company! He's a real American success story.

Now, there are plenty of self-employed Democratic carpenters and contractors in Georgia, however they usually work solo or with one or two helpers. I have several good friends who are carpenters, painters, electricians and plumbers.

My husband works for the state. His department had to recently fire two Hispaniuc groundskeepers who had used fake Social Security cards and numbers to get hired. They been working for very long before the fraud was discovered. Their formerboss saw them a few weeks after they'd been fired and they already had new SS cards and were looking for new work. New full-time (with benefits) citizens were hired to replace them.

These illegal aliens would not travel all this way to work for low-wages if there were no jobs. It is the fault of the employers who hire them and pay them low wages that we are in such a mess as regards immigration, low wages and lack of jobs with benefits for current American citizens.

I do realize that at leat 12% of the workers in constrcution and agriculture are illegal and that our economy (such as it is) is somehow dependent on these low-wage workers.

I heard a story on the radio about a federal contract to rebuild houses in New Orleans that got handed down through five subcontractors with everyone taking a cut until the guys actually putting down the blue tarps were illegals getting paid substandard wages. The problem is that I heard the story on the radio so I can't go back and look it up to give you a reference, so it becomes hearsay.

And that's a WHOLE NUTHER TOPIC....the hiring of illegals for Gulf Coast reconstruction work when there are thousands of displaced American workers who have been BEGGING for those jobs!

Anyone with info on this, please inform....

about how farmers (large agricultural corporations to be exact) in the Imperial Valley couldn't find workers to pick the lettuce harvest. They thought everyone was working in the casinos, but I suspect that they were working construction on the Gulf Coast.

workers so that they are making the same wage and benefits as Americans, then it will level the playing field. Also, you need to make sure that the laws fine employers who hire anyone under accepted union wages.

certainly isn't true where the majority of the farmworkers ARE citizens and they have broken their backs for decades, out in the fields, at substandard wages and working conditions. Unionizing them has always been the only answer to this problem.

I've never seen any rush of newly unemployed folks hurrying out to our pickle fields, to earn dollars on the bin, or strapping young white guys bent over in our bulb fields, snipping the petals off the tulips. Legal migrant farmworkers have generations out there, slogging thru the mud, with absolutely no competition for the work they do.

Unemployment in my county is at 5%, but nary a one of them would stoop to weed a pea field!

The farm laborers here are mostly second and third generation after the original immigrant farm workers organized. I doubt if there are many illegals. They make enough money to afford decent cars to drive to the fields and they have proper sanitation facilities and safety measures in place thanks to the unions.

They have proved that unionization is workable with so-called unskilled laborers. No one has gone broke and food prices haven't gone up from increased labor costs. Most of our produce ends up in the urban markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I'm sure residents of those cities can vouch that seasonal produce is reasonably priced. A good bottle of California wine can be bought for less than $10.

Ditching the Fields By Isolde Raftery/Skagit Valley Herald
http://www.skagitvalleyherald.com/articles/2005/09/25/living/living01.txt

~snip~

"The cucumber bushes sit low to the ground, and they're prickly and dusty. Unlike ripe raspberries that require a gentle pluck, cucumbers need a more aggressive tug. With each pull comes a small cloud of dirt. No one argues that pickling cucumbers are the hardest crop to pull."

high school friends and I picked boysenberries in the summer. It was the only summer jobs available for teenagers in our little inland base town in Southern California. We got thirty five cents for a box, which took us more than an hour to pick. An experienced bracero could pick a box in half an hour, but that was really fast. Even so he only got seventy cents for that hour working at peak efficiency and that was below minimum wage even back in the fifties.

The farm laborers in my area, thanks to unionization, get $10 to $12 an hour, and are not paid by the crate.

the buses would pick them up in the school parking lot at five-thirty in the morning and haul them over to the fields. She did it every year, working berries, pickles, cabbage and peas (peas were what they worked up to). Then when she turned fifteen, she was hired by the University Research Lab up here and she was so happy and excited to have a "real" check-paying job...came home from her first day totally bummed-out...they had her out picking strawberries all day!

I've never seen any rush of newly unemployed folks hurrying out to our pickle fields, to earn dollars on the bin, or strapping young white guys bent over in our bulb fields, snipping the petals off the tulips.

because middle-class Americans are LOCKED OUT in favor of illegals who are paid lower wages with no benefits or worker protections. American companies LOVE such a robotic, yes-man workforce where they won't sue, won't unionize, and won't complain.

Americans would be more than WILLING to do these jobs if they could - but no company is going to hire THEM if they can get away with illegally employing slave labor - and they can. That's the problem.

Unemployment in my county is higher than in the rest of the state, but as I said, none will stoop to earn a living the way our Farmworkers do.

Nobody is locked out, they simply would not lower themselves to accept the pay and the conditions that working all of one's life in a field encompasses.

These imaginary people you speak of are welcome to come on out and hunch side-by-side with the Chicanos who have been working the tulips for months now, already, in the mud and the rain. We have a shortage of labor and that is because these family-owned farms refuse to jeopardize their land by tangling with INS and Border Patrol, thus THERE ARE NO ILLEGALS.

This is why Democrats need to push for Labor Unions more.

There are jobs that can't be outsourced, so we need to unionize those blue collar workers in the service industries, to bring their wages up to middle class levels.

http://www.workingamerica.org/home.cfm

Thanks to Koko for posting it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3651476

In agriculture and 'CONSTRUCTION.'

Bullshit! Developers only want cheap illegal labor to build their projects, so they can make even more money. That is the only reason why construction would need cheap illegal labor. American citizens want and will do construction jobs, but they cannot afford to work for slave wages and still be able to provide for themselves and their families.

OUTRAGEOUS!

Oh yeah, it's NECESSARY to break our own laws in the hiring of illegal workers - what the hell has our country come to?

Couldn't find a decent American do to a single one of those so we had to move'em to China. Goes for those computer jobs as well. No one wanted to invest their time into studying computers so we had to ship those off to India.

Lazy Americans....

with hard-working Americans holding the bag.

I say it's not fair. Not fair at all.

I'd like to know.

Driving trucks is certainly a job Americans are more than willing to do.

We need to send the illegal immigrants back where they came from... And fine the shit out of those that hire them to get out of paying a fair wage for services rendered...

If they can't pay the fine, then shut them down, or jail them for a bit.

Not sure if it will work, but worth a try.