Builders Report Lack of Skilled Labor

A diminished labor pool is impacting new construction--will quality suffer as a result?

Yahoo reports that the building industry is suffering from a lack of skilled labor resulting from tightened immigration policies and young workers choosing other fields. We reported on this problem in an earlier post on the Berkeley building collapse. Quality suffers when demand is high and the skilled labor pool is low.

"Unemployment in the construction industry fell in June to the lowest level since 2001, according to an analysis by the Associated General Contractors of America. That's because contractors are having a hard time finding enough qualified workers to meet growing demand, association officials said....We've lost about two-thirds of our Hispanic and South American population in South Carolina, and that has had a profound effect on labor...Local high schools have training programs, but they have been slow to churn out new workers."

So where do builders get the labor to meet demand? We need to spend more on high school and community college technical training, that's where. In the meanwhile, more and better inspections must be employed so that mistakes left behind by untrained labor won't result in construction problems and building failures.