Canada

The lives of the many for the good of the few.

And increase the demand by the same amount as the extra supply!

How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?

Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn't even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I'd like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into "full time equivalent" for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into "unemployment equivalent" for inclusion in our statistics.

How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?

Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.

Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.

It's obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it's being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.

Not to mention the toll it takes on your body. I know so many former construction workers who now have life-long, "wear and tear" injuries in their 40s and 50s, which makes it hard for them to find work without moving to an entirely different industry.

But isn’t an awful lot of construction work have a foundation of (relatively) unskilled labor? I mean, you don’t just magically learn how to plumb, you apprentice for it.

From my own anecdotal experience in a high immigration and rapidly expanding urban area in the US, lots of unskilled workers become skilled here. They then start their own roofing, plumbing, waste, whatever subcontracting businesses, which largely employ unskilled immigrant workers. And the cycle continues. But these employers are always hungry for workers.

It also leads to a crazy cycle of exploitative subcontracting and cash based employment, which means bad labor protection and tax avoidance by everybody involved (including large land developers who employ all these little subcontractors). But I digress. And I would hope that Canadian labor protection is a bit more robust, but I’m not sure.

The point I’m trying to make is that unskilled labor is often very very important, and has historically been at the helm of large entrepreneurial classes, at least in North America and Europe. I’m not so sure about how this works in Asian economies, and I think this doesn’t hold true in places like the Middle East where labor rights are absolutely atrocious.

Immigrants are under-represented in the building trades. Although immigrants make up 23 per cent of the Canadian labour market, they comprise only about 18 per cent of workers in the construction industry.

sauce

If we're prioritizing these skills, it doesn't seem to be reflected in the labour market.

I agree. Nation states shouldn't exist, along side their imaginary borders.