Unions major cause of immigrants in construction
A few years ago the army turned over their Military Ocean Terminal (now called the Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor) to my hometown, the City of Bayonne, New Jersey. Since then the local redevelopment authority has been trying to get a number of large residential projects going.
Trammell Crow Residential, one developer of one of those projects plans to build 544 units of luxury rental housing and is ready to proceed except for a small monkey wrench: union representatives of the Hudson County Building Trades want guarantees that union labor be hired before the city grants a 30-year tax abatement for the residential development.Trammell Crow has refused to consider such hiring since it says that unionized employees are 60 percent more expensive.
I would like to mention that the unions in this country have already killed every major industry and enterprise in this country. The boom in housing construction during the past decade is largely attributable to immigrants in the construction industry. If it were not for their reasonable wages almost no one except for the very, very wealthy would be able to afford homes. That is to say, that immigrants have saved the American construction industry.
Unfortunately unions were too strong years ago and so immigrants were unable to save our steel, automobile or railroad industries. If unions had any human decency and negotiated for fair labor wages instead of egregiously exorbitant hourly rates, no-shows, no-works, and other featherbedding practices, we would still have some industry left in this country.
I Refuse to Use Union Labor
I did not use union workers in the building of my home. Consequently it cost less than 50% what some other poor shlubs are forced to hand out. If my city ever required me to use union labor I would simply have my house pre-built in Mexico and shipped from there to New Jersey and still pay half as much as unions want.
Because union workers are basically extortionists the differential between union and immigrant wages are so disparate that developers are willing to pay huge fines to use non-union labor. If union wages were reasonable it is unlikely that there would have been enough financial incentive for developers to risk huge penalties for hiring immigrants.
The unions are their own worst enemies. Simply put, I would rather pay fines than hire a union worker.
And yes, there is even an International Sex Workers Union in the UK but I wouldn't have any objection to members of that union since at least they freely admit that they really do suck at their work.
