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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe.

Building trades unions are basically guilds; just giving them what they want might raise costs a bit, but it won’t stop anything from happening- they do actually do their jobs at high quality standards(and, admittedly, equivalent prices).

Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.

Take for example the IUEC. From WP:

The IUEC forbids modular construction of elevators, preventing the kind of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world, leading to higher elevator costs in the United States. The union limits entry of new workers into the field, and has constrained the ability of firms to use new technology to streamline elevator production in the United States.

Data indicates that elevator-related work is the highest paid trade in the United States, with a median wage $47.60 per hour in 2021.

See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):

Smith estimates that a new six-stop elevator that costs $170,000 to install in North America would run $60,000 or less across the Atlantic. Operating cost differences are even steeper. New York City guidelines advise affordable housing developers to budget $7,500 for annual elevator maintenance, with private housing operators in New York and Washington quoting similar numbers. This is several times European costs: one German firm, for instance, offers midrise maintenance contracts for about $450 per year.

I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.

To be clear, unions are not saints. But also labor costs are just generally high in America, it's unfair to give unions 100% of the blame.

Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.

If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.

Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.

In many cases it raises costs significantly, not because the individual tradesmen are paid that much more (they are, but that's not the problem), it's that they have union-mandated staffing levels. If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

This killed a plan by Steph Curry to open a HQ in the dogpatch.

If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

Not that this is politically feasible in the least, but to keep labor costs down, we could (like Singapore) bring in guest workers from places like Bangladesh to do construction work on the cheap—co-Asian bargaining, if you will

We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.

Ah, illegal immigration.

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