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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Jones who wrote (2792)	6/18/2002 4:04:46 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

They seem to have different work practices in California. Before we were married I lived out there and he lived here. He had little interest in moving out there primarily because the pay was the same but the cost of living there is so much higher than here. He was also turned off by the fact that they seemed to use a lot of wood on commercial whereas here it is almost exclusively metal (earthquake measures?). My husband works on a lot of very large projects. He's on an 18 story office building today, next month he could be in a shopping center or a hospital. He works on a lot of college buildings. The state universities are required to hire union (or maybe they just have to pay scale), yet he works on them as well. Maybe the general is union but the subs don't have to be. I don't know. I've tried to get him to explain it to me numerous times. At any rate, in Maryland there is very little advantage to joining the union. He has a pension and health benefits where he works. He didn't always, but he always made more money than his union friends because he worked more so he invested the difference in real estate. They were always getting laid off. He hasn't gotten laid off since 1989 and we were kinda hoping he would a few of those years so we could take an extended vacation some place warm. There is just too much work and not enough skilled workers to do it. As I said, he's got to hire people from other countries, not because they are any cheaper but because he can't find enough Americans that can do the work or want to do it. Americans look down on construction work as a profession. It kind of ticks me off that I hear these politicians on TV talking about how we need to create good jobs and he has to hire anyone with a pulse at times (guys straight out of work release and detox), and the pay is very decent for even the low skilled guy right off the street.