Reshaping the Industry

According to the BLS (Bureau of Labor Standards) the March job numbers showed a positive growth of 162,000 jobs.  There is “joy in Mudville,” to coin an old baseball term, if those numbers hold true as it just might be the first positive indicator of the economy since we dropped from the peak of the last cycle in December of 2007.

There are those who believe that the recent numbers, while positive, are not conclusive. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee (no, it is not an online dating service) met recently to determine whether the economy was at its lowest point and they concluded that while some of the indicators have turned positive, not enough have shown positive results to determine whether or when the bottom of the trough has occurred.  There is no question in the minds of most  Read more »

Most of us in the construction industry will agree that the industry has an image problem, that being “the industry is not the most attractive alternative for job seekers when compared to other jobs.”

There is another “image” out there that we need to pay attention to now. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement  Agency (more commonly known as ICE) has a program called by the acronym IMAGE.  That stands for ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers or IMAGE, just one of the many programs that ICE has instituted in its efforts to control the employment of undocumented workers in the workforce.

ICE also applies to the illegal workers who are using falsified documents to go to work in the construction Industry. Read more »

According to the latest statistics listed on the  USCIS  website E Verify is currently used by over 192,000 employers on more than 705,000 jobsites across the US.  

In the last 5 months they have received over 6 million requests, that is 1.2 million per month. According to a study recently completed by Westat Inc. and quoted in the April 2010 issue of HR Magazine, 94% of the workers submitted were  Read more »

Welcome!  Our goal is to open a dialog that will address several crises and thorny issues surrounding the construction industry in the US and world today.  Other than the central fact that the economies around the globe are in "reset" mode, three thorny issues facing building contractors, developers and owners are:

1) looming workforce shortages, especially in the middle skills level;

2) the image of the construction industry as a viable option for employment and career growth;

3) the current workforce, especially at the lower end of the scale, lacking the basic skills to meet the needs of the construction industry now and in the future.

There are important variations on these themes.  One is the "unlevel playing field" created when Read more »