Construction: The Issues Of Labor Availability In The USA

Engineers design buildings and structures, why does society use the system of separation of responsibility for different tasks.

Firstly, I want to compare and contrast the issues of labor availability in the USA. The labor market means the labor market is a market where labor resources are sold in exchange for work Many of factors affect labor markets in the United States, including immigration, discrimination, labor unions and income. In the United States, the minimum age for employment is 14 years age, and most of labors are working in full-time and part-time jobs. Now I want to discuss the supply for labor in an economy and the demand for labor in the economy. There are two points to understand the supply of labor and the demand for labor: firms in the economy are the economic agents that are demanding labor and people are the economic agents supplying the labor in the economy.

The issue in labor market – labor union

The early half of the 20th century saw a rapid rise in labor union membership. Today only about 1/8 of American workers belong to labor union membership. What happened to the union labor began as a way for the common worker to achieve collective bargaining power against employers for higher wages, safer conditions and better hours. A union collective power was often enforced in the form of a strike. The practice is still common today among public school professors and transportation workers.

The issue in labor market – immigration

The immigration issue is the secondary issue. Immigrant labor means people will move from places where they are less productive to places where they are more productive. For example. Lowa dairy farms depend on the immigrant labor force. They have 36 Mexican and Guatemalan works and one American guy, American people don’t want to do the work. There are too many people that have this hostile attitude towards immigrant illegal whatever that they all just got to go because they are screwing up the whole country as an agricultural producer. They are key to making the whole system turn and not fall apart.

The issue in labor market – discrimination

Discrimination is still an issue in our culture today and can happen to anyone anywhere at any time. In our labor market, we have a lot of inequality, a lot of differences in outcomes as well. For example, people think that women make less than men, and blacks are less likely be hired than whites. Trying to understand the differences in labor market outcomes, one very important point of entry is hiring. And to understand why it is that members of some groups are more likely to be hired than others is a very important part of the puzzle.

Secondly, I want to talk about the risk associated with construction in the USA. There are four common risk factors on construction projects: labor shortages and productivity issues, health and safety hazards, subcontractor default and change orders. Health and safety hazards means people need to ensure their workers safe. Subcontractor default means an incoordinate subcontractor may cause serious losses. Change orders mean to change the original contract and may cause enormous losses.

I want to discuss labor shortages and productivity issues today. The most direct embodiment is market not have enough workers available to work. According to a new study the construction industry is still short three hundred and fifty thousand workers and they lost about 1.5 million jobs during the financial crisis. People are more likely to want to take a nine-to-five job, sit around in an office rather than working construction. The wage is a very important factor why people prefer to take a nine-to-five job. The median wage for construction workers last year was only 36,000 dollars. How to fix this problem of US labor shortage? Improve the wages and conditions is the most important solution.

Now I want to focus on solutions on what companies are doing besides raising wages what are they doing to combat labor shortage. For example, if we have more immigration, we will have more available workers then we will have a smaller labor shortages problem. Because construction has one of the highest numbers of foreign-born workers. If we can get more people to participate in the labor market, we will also reduce the labor shortages problem and there is a lot that the government can do to raise labor force participation.