Yeah, the jobs Americans won't do. Nothing ticks me off more than hearing some politician say that. Construction isn't the kind of work that anyone ever thought of as a highly sought after career. But it is a satisfying job and I have known many people who have made very good livings in it. A good number become contractors and even developers. But a lot simply worked hard and became good enough to deserve and get above average wages.
All that is a much more difficult proposition these days. How do you support a family and buy some property on $10 ph? How can most young men hang in long enough to become contractors like that? Especially when many contracting companies are completely composed of illegal aliens including the owners.
I remember a friend's father advising me when I was about twenty that there were certain jobs/trades that would keep you employed anywhere in the world. The top three, in his opinion, were a cook, a carpenter and a plumber. It took me until I was 24 to get someone to hire me on as a carpenter's helper. No complaints; that's just the way it was. No one wanted to train someone new if they could help it.
That was the 70's on the Front Range of CO during a building boom. Even with that boom openings were hard to find and there weren't any illegals in the trades apart from maybe flatworkers. There were Americans, w/experience, from all parts of the country ready to fill those jobs. Guys from the depressed northeast, the depressed midwest and the depressed southeast thanks to Carter's malaise.
Now every trade is getting saturated with illegals and forget about being a cook in a restaurant. Or a dishwasher or in food prep which is what you have to do to get the experience to be a short order cook.
There is the crux of it. The bottom rung jobs are the doors to moving up in the working world and illegals have been saturating the job market from the bottom up. There was an article last year about ag jobs not being filled because the illegals were making more in construction. So what is the answer to that? I suppose we need to find workers more desperate than Mexicans and Latin Americans. Ann is not using any hyperbole when she calls this "importing a slave class" and Bush and other Republicans are all for it.
These days, it’s mighty hard to survive on 10.00 an hr. My bf remembers when he was working in heating and air. The owner slowly replaced Americans/legals with illegals. This guy was also so cheap and unscrupulous, that he made the workers hike the equipment around instead of using cranes. My bf blew out his lower back in his late 20’s, and he and others filed a class action lawsuit, and won.
Illegals didn’t have that option, back then anyway.
Even though construction is hard work, it is possible to work your way up to becoming a developer or contractor, like you said. All it takes is iniative and hard work. However you get owners who don’t care about anything but the bottom line. A couple of developers are being sued up here for shoddy construction. One family had to rent a hotel room because their brand new home was unliveable. That didn’t use to happen like it does now.
Your father’s friend gave you good advice. It was possible to start out as a dishwasher, and end up owning your own restaurant. Oh well, slaves are much easier to control than free people :(