<p>Personally, I prefer working with my hands & back-I tried to work on construction sites when I was younger, but lack of upper body strength/size made it difficult.</p>
<p>However- if these workers were legal, they would qualify for at least minimum wage and workmans comp, I suspect the industry prefers workers that they can intimidate and pay whatever they feel like.
( Yes I know that without illegals, developers cant throw up buildings as fast as they would like- time is money ya know… but personally, if the pace of ripping out single family homes that are replaced by condos slowed in my neighborhood, I don’t think anyone but the developer would be crying into their beer)</p>
<p>As I’ve often said, Americans will work almost any job if the money is good enough. No need to undermine the free market.</p>
<p>Furthermore, if the minimum wage is too high, we should lower the minimum wage. (I suspect that this line of reasoning will be lost on those who both support illegal immigration and a “living wage.”)</p>
<p>In Seattle- you would have to work 90 hours a week at minimum wage to be able to afford to rent an average two bedroom unit
How many construction workers earning below minimum wage will have to share that 2 bedroom apartment?</p>
<p>Construction jobs used to pay well, when I worked construction, they paid at least triple minimum wage- with union benefits. Now they pay less than minimum wage, with no apparent benefits, because the workers aren’t here legally, and their employers know that.</p>
<p>As long as there are illegal immigrants, willing to work for $4 an hour, there is no impetus to either raise the minimum wage or hire legal Americans.</p>
<p>That’s one upshot of globalization and free markets. The scutwork that no one wants to do goes to people who are willing to do it at far lower wages than Americans are willing to work for. Lowering the minimum wage, as Aries suggests, isn’t going to lure Americans to work at jobs that they won’t do for minimum wage, nor to the bosses who are eager to maximize their own profits.</p>
<p>I believe the article said Seattle Mexican drywallers were getting paid $14 an hour–hardly minimum wage. The going rate by Home Depot for really unskilled work is $10 an hour. Even without OT at $14/hr you are making over $2,000/mo and you still can get a 2br in Kent or Tukwila for $800 or so/mo.</p>
<p>Not to be completely snitty, but I’m not advocating that we lower the minimum wage. I’m simply stating that we actually enforce our laws and follow them. If our laws aren’t working, we should change them, not allow certain groups to illegally go about their business while placing burdens on other groups. </p>
<p>It is the completely logical conclusion of “We need people to work for $4/hour for our economy.”</p>
<p>Personally, I think that living wage is complete b.s. 98% of people who earn minimum wage are under the age of 25. There’s no need to pay high school students enough to support a family of four when they bag groceries at the supermarket. Trust me, I was one of those people, and I didn’t think that my unskilled time was worth $10/hour. </p>
<p>Not a fan of lowering the minimum wage, either - about $5/hour (ish!) seems reasonable to me for the lowest levels of work. I would rather have employers have the option to hire people to do menial work - people who lack the intelligence or bodily vigour to do other work. </p>
<p>Just saying that if the argument is, “We need people to work for $4/hour and can’t afford minimum wage,” then there’s an indication that minimum wage is too high. I personally think the argument is b.s. because I don’t find minimum wage to be too high.</p>
<p>the drywallers were making $4 to $7 an hour- while working 12 hour days
The one worker cited who was making $14 an hour was framing homes in a development in Issaquah.</p>
<p>Like I mentioned before, before the high influx of illegal workers , construction workers were paid better than they are now.</p>
<p>It is a dangerous job, one study found fatal and non fatal accidents to be 2 &1/2 times other occupations. It is very hard on musclosketal system, injuries on the job, may cause physical disability.</p>
<p>I was paid more 30 years ago as a carpenters asst, than some of these workers are paid now.
In order to increase profits- builders now hire workers to do one job, not work on the whole project. This makes the job less interesting for workers I would imagine, because they are doing one thing, over and over again. Repetive work would also increase likelihood of repetive injury while not allowing the worker to learn and build on skills as they would if they worked from breaking ground to completion.</p>
<p>(our grocery baggers also don’t get $10 an hour, more like minimum wage- and too often skilled workers earning the huge sum of $10 an hour,are not able to get full time work, unless they work two 20 hour jobs, making child care/transportation more difficult)</p>
<p>Last time I looked Ketchikan was not part of Seattle. It’s a small rainy city with no road access from anywhere else. Obviously they were badly treated and I am sure that happens fairly often but the focus of the article was how the illegals are building the Seattle housing so I don’t see why they even had to dredge up some case from Alaska except for it was the only bad story they could find.</p>
<p>It’s all a testable hypothesis. They can start in Eastern Washington, with the apple and cherry harvest. After the Wenatchee Valley Medical Center closes, and 1,100 people - 95% of whom are white – are thrown out of work, and doctors and nurses and lab technicians start picking cherries at $22/hour (after all the gas stations and supermarkets have closed) and the sale of cherries goes up as each cherry costs the same as a durian, we can evaluate, and see whether it worked. We can do the same with housing in King County. We really don’t need any more housing, If the illegals weren’t there, leaving the life of luxury in rental houses and apartments, housing prices would go down, and there would be plenty of cheap housing available for the rest of us.</p>
<p>I still remember my shock when I hired a landscaper in Virginia and his entire crew was white local people probably making under $10/hr. But in Central Va you can rent an entire house for $450 or so, so it’s a different world.</p>