Wearing a game look, Luke grins from ear to ear. A huge lit stogie protrudes from the left side of his rugged face, framed by shoulder-length hair, and his nose is all kinds of crooked, having obviously absorbed many punches in the past. It’s not yet 7:30 a.m., but this construction wizard lives joyfully for his work and it’s a new day, with much to do.
“How you doin’, you jagoff pimp?” Luke greets me in his always charming West Virginia drawl.
“I’m good, how you doin’ pimp?” I answer.
About 6’ 1”, fifty-something, and lean and muscled, Luke is like many good American citizen construction workers, regardless of their age or body type—he’s an athlete, of sorts. There’s athleticism in this work, and good sportsmanship in his collaboration with team members.
We get on task, with me and my co-worker Vic “cutting” walls to prepare them for rolling. Luke follows behind with the roller. As he paints walls fast and beautifully with an 18-inch roller, his movements are graceful as a champion skeet-shooter. We progress quickly.
My house-painting crew boss, “Luke” (not his real name), is a construction master, like millions of American workers. If a problem has virtually anything to do with building or fixing a structure (or landscaping around it), he has done it and mastered it.
In considering Luke’s mastery and that of his co-worker son, “Vic”, I’m reminded that perhaps one of the most underrated things American construction workers can do to regain market share from low-morality foreign workers who depress their wages and whose pay is sent away to support a foreign nation’s economy, is to market their exceptionalism vigorously.
American construction workers’ extraordinary skills, greater productivity, and mastery of their trades (not to mention their impeccable command of the English language) are so far superior to the low-skill, apathetic, mostly Spanish-speaking hordes of invading migrant workers, that the two aren’t even comparable.
Native-born, American citizen construction workers are not limitlessly replaceable cogs—they’re typically skilled craftsmen who are experts of a few or many trades. But they need to “pimp” their greater skills and the savings they bring to companies hiring them, especially now that the U.S. is ascending with a MAGA outlook.
For example, foreign construction workers are notorious for leaving projects unfinished, incomplete, or wrongly performed, requiring extra work and money for the project owner—why would they care about the end product when the work is a seasonal gig supporting their home in Tijuana?
Foreign workers are not vested in craftsmanship as American workers are, and generally speaking, never will be vested. The idea of pride in a job expertly done is foreign to many of them. It’s mostly all about speed of completion, and their paycheck.
Despite all of these cons, American unions are courting immigrant construction workers and welcoming them into their ranks. It’s a divide-and-conquer-workers mentality that benefits only those who make money from hiring lower-wage, lawbreaking foreign scoundrels—these are the non laboring paper-pushing union bosses, construction company owners, and owners of building projects of every type who employ the wage-depressing desperados through the aforementioned.
What’s worse is that American contractors, who have historically been known for their predilection to fudge numbers and make projects appear more complex than they really are in order to charge much higher fees to owners, are using their access to cheap foreign labor to overcharge project owners. For example, they like to pretend projects they’re doing need three or four apathetic, diminutive Latin workers (it’s Latin America, not Latino America, so I’ll use the English word for the cohort comprising nearly all of these job thieves—Latins).
Looking busy so the boss can make more money, instead of being more productive or just plain honest about a project’s requirements and hiring fewer workers for it, is how job-thief employers roll.
American workers must articulate how much money contractors save by employing them. For example, many small jobs that contractors pretend require three, four or five foreign workers are way over-billed. All those workers looking busy is a way to pad the bill so the contractor can make money from those workers (whose pay, generally speaking, doesn’t even stay in our economy and benefit all of us in that one small way it does with every actual American worker’s pay).
A job like the one I just mentioned can often be done faster and performed better by just one or two correctly chosen, typical American construction workers.
The Latins are far shorter than the average American worker and make short Americans look tall in comparison (arm reach is important in construction and landscaping), are often seriously overweight, mostly lower skilled, and depress construction workers’ wages through their willingness to accept less than what is deserved for the work. But they don’t have student loans to pay, or an ailing parent in an expensive U.S. nursing home, or any of the other many costly aspects of America’s banker-biased economy that makes life harder for most of us. These foreigners can afford to undercut citizen workers, while also collecting government checks to pay for their food and housing (though they are illegal migrants who are displacing American workers).
Enough already, American construction project owners, property developers, homeowners, and property maintenance companies. Not only do you not singlehandedly own our economy, but your foolish hiring practices are pi***** away money to contractors who act with the impunity of mobsters and who hurt American citizen workers upon whom you depend. You are being overcharged and underserved, and getting half-a** work to boot.
Promote American workmanship, and hire only American citizens.
Image from Grok.