I learned a lot during a 30 + year career in masonry construction both here and abroad with eight of those years in a union environment as a member of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Crafts . At the time here in the USA those Union wages were often desparaged by the general public as being the root cause of the high prices of everything and so a concerted effort by all in Government and Industry was implemented to see that those wages were curtailed .
That effort proved to be a success as fewer Union jobs existed and inexpensive imported labor was embraced and as of this writing the wage for a local bricklayer comes in at half of my earnings 30 years ago. Oddly, and against all logic the cost of getting anything done in the construction trades now comes in at about triple what it did back in my Union days .
I recently watched a crew of seven migrants peeling paint from a recently painted wall with their finger tips reminding me of an old Three Stooges skit . Little one inch strips of paint at a time as the recent paint job was failing and needed to be removed before being reapplied . Afraid to damage the drywall underneath the paint was removed using finger tips …..inch by laborious inch . Now lets do the math and weigh this out as I have a contention to offer…..
I’m thinking one Union worker with a spatula motivated by $40 U.S. dollars an hour could easily accomplish the task in the same time as that of the seven $11 dollar an hour imported crew for a total savings of $ 37 per hour …. just saying .
On the other hand ….. a Union painter probably would not have used the incorrect paint in the first place …. again, just saying , but there is no turning back to the way things were now . Besides , we are all going to be busy employed at all the new car wash and storage centers since all the good jobs at Chick Fil-A are already taken
