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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.

'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 wonder if that is not the case here as well. The US has changed in a lot of was for the worse in the last half century. The effect of drugs and the 'I'm owed culture.' has done real damage to the groups near the bottom. Also as I have written elsewhere smaller companies have reacted to the perverse incentives that the endless array of federal state and local environmental, welfare, and income security laws by turning to the gray economy of undocumented workers. Even before the illegals appeared herein such force I was awear of smaller contractors working people off the books to avoid social security, workman's comp, and unemployment comp. payments.

The guys that did the roof stripping were all middle aged black males. They definitely had a good work ethic and were the 'show up Monday morning work all day Friday' types. For what ever reason the owner of the firm had only a Latino as the site manger and he was notable for being ineffectual or invisible.