

Construction Employment Is At Its Lowest Level Since 1946 - mattobrien
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/construction-jobs-are-at-their-lowest-level-since-1946/257980/

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WalterBright
When I watch crews build a house, I am struck by how resistant this activity
has been to automation and mass production techniques.

A truck will drive up to the site with a stack of lumber on it. Workers will
individual measure, cut, and fit the pieces together. Wiring is all eyeballed
by the electrian, and custom fit. The same for plumbing. Finish carpentry is
all done piece by piece, by skilled craftsmen, and all hand fitted (and are a
huge component of the expense of a house).

It all seems ripe for a revolution.

I'm not suggesting that houses be all cookie-cutter identical. But a custom
design could largely be built in a factory, trucked in, and then you'd just
have final assembly done on site. The result would be higher quality and lower
cost (and less labor).

You can see some of this with roof trusses today, which are custom built in a
factory and then trucked to the site.

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bitwize
Unions probably have a lot to do with this in the United States.

I seem to recall footage of a building-erecting robot in Japan. Basically it
was a frame that went up and down on four pillars, with an armature that could
move in two dimensions on the frame, almost like a "UFO catcher" or crane game
machine.

~~~
krschultz
Unions haven't really impacted the residential home building market. I don't
think onsite automation will help much. Most of the easily automated steps
(foundation laying, framing, roofing, sheetrocking) are actually outsourced by
the general contractor to specialized subcontractors. They can frame out a
house in a week easily and are very efficient. It's simply not worth all the
effort of programming computer manufacturing instructions and setting up a
machine to automate the construction of a house becuase it doesn't take long.
The painful/expensive/time consuming part of building a house is the
'finishing'. Hanging windows, installing the kitchen, doing plumbing, etc.
Making a machine do all of that just isn't worth it.

(Some offsite automation like bringing in pre built roof supports or
foundation forms makes sense, but that is already happening.)

On the commercial side, unions are heavily entrenched. You absolutely can not
build a sky scraper without heavy involvement from the metal workers trade
union, the electricians union, etc. There is a lot of waste there.

I could see automation on the commercial side, but not really on the
residential side.

Also working against you - construction workers are _cheap_ right now. The
unemployement is due to lack of demand, not the cost of building. We can't
even fill already built buildings.

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joshuahedlund
I don't think this is "depressing". I see a post-WWII boom that was followed
by a long downward trend that was temporarily broken by the housing bubble and
is now continuing. In other words, for the last 50 years we have been figuring
out how to build things with fewer people, freeing them up to do other things,
and I see no reason why that will not continue or why we should wish that it
should not.

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gmkoliver
Exactly; even though the article mentions the meaning of the graph, it seems
to misinterpret it anyway.

From my perspective as a residential carpenter I see a continuing decline in
the cost of labor combined with increases in efficiency due to new materials
and equipment. Combine that with the high price of land in most urban areas,
and I don't see much incentive for the big home builders to push manufactured
homes and on-site automated fabrication.

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minwcnt5
Curiously, in Canada the construction industry is experiencing the exact
opposite effect and is at an all-time high:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-31/canadian-
building-j...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-31/canadian-building-
jobs-boom-while-u-s-busts-chart-of-the-day.html)

~~~
cgh
Construction employment in Canada is high for the same reason it was high in
the US in 2006. Can you guess what that is? Hint: it eventually goes "pop".

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camiller
While I can't say for sure with regards to residential construction, but the
amount of NEW never leased business/retail space around here is staggering.
I've seen several small to medium strip centers go up in the last five years
just along routes I drive daily (or at least a few times a week) and much if
it is sitting vacant having never had a tenant. Several have a single tenant
with 3-7 empty bays.

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jf271
I'm thankful that the construction companies have enough sense to not build
more new houses when the is a 6-12 backlog in existing houses. This kind of
common sense isn't common in the USA.

