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An interesting question:

Roofing laborers, painters helpers, construction grunts, etc. are all receiving $10-14 per hour in my area, but there is a definite shortage of native-born folks who want to do it - or can show up for work more than a day or two in succession because of their drug or alcohol habit. We do have some serious problems with the lower-skills end of the American work-force.

Here in the Washington DC area when I was growing up 50's to 60's the lower skilled parts of building construction and roofing were predominately done by two groups; local blacks and white guys from down in the Valley of Virginia and near in West Va. counties. When my father had a roof put on his house in the mid-60's it was the same mix of workers doing the job.

In 2002 I had a roof replaced. The stripping crew were all older black men who had been with the company for a good while. They were very efficient and finished in a day and hauled away all the debris. The roofing crew were all Hispanic, Central Americans I suspect. They were a nightmare to deal with. The work they did was good quality it is that they never did much. The replacement of a simple rambler roof and putting on new gutters stretched into a 14 day ordeal. I was on the phone with the owner almost every day asking when his crew would be there or why they took off early (as in 2PM). When they were around they worked very slowly and it was rare for all of the crew to be working at the same time. These events took place right after Thanksgiving and apparently many Latinos consider the whole period from Turkey Day to the end of the 12 Days of Christmas to be a sort of extended semi-holiday. The firm's owner had a large job going on a building in DC and that is where he was spending his time literally sitting on the site to see that the workers spent 8 hours there.

I had to followup and have the owner bring people back to finish several parts of the job left undone. After these people finally departed I must have picked up half a peck of dropped roofing nails as well as numerous stray shingles and hardware used to attach gutters. I even found a complete belt of roofing nails ready to be put into a nail gun, apparently dropped off the roof. As I said the quality of work was good but the manner of doing the job was a shambles. This was also not any cut rate firm but a long established roofing company that does full spectrum work to include historical reproductions. It is not a Latino owned firm. I thought by picking such a company I would get outstanding service.

In my area, too, a lot of these jobs used to be done by blacks or semi-rural whites who came into the towns to work, but now many of these people are virtually unemployable. Crack and meth have completely destroyed these two groups in my area.

I think you got a lousy company or at any rate, one with a crummy site supervisor. I've had varied experience getting work done - one time I had a great company doing some interior renovations, and everything went fine for 2 days - and then the (white native-born) worker went on a drunk and everything went downhill from there. The owner had to get his son in to finish the job. He told me that when he employs people, the first thing he has to tell them is not to call him when they get arrested, because he won't bail them out. So anything can happen.

I'm not saying that immigrants are better. NYC was full of Poles and Russians who worked for construction companies, and some of them were pretty shaky. (Some were good, though.) But my point was that it's hard to find steady, willing native-born people who can fill the demand at the lower end of the job scale.