Courtesy of jlconline.com
Courtesy of jlconline.com

Here's a piece we all should read, reread, think about, talk about, and act on.

Researched and written by my colleague, Journal of Light Construction editor Clayton DeKorne, it's prescriptive, "how-to" service journalism in its essence and at its best. Check out "How Will Construction Solve Its Skilled Labor Crisis?"

We'll explore what Clayton's article means and why it matters to you in a moment. First, though, a few relevant side notes and a personal story to shed light on a few biases that may pry into my thinking about this topic.

  • Did you happen to catch National Association of Home Builders economist Natalia Siniavskaia's analysis of the "Highest Paid Occupations in Construction in 2018?" Siniavaskaia notes that half of payroll workers in construction earn more than $47,290, compared with the U.S. median wage of $38,640.
  • Next, have a look at a piece in the Wall Street Journal that maps out "What 'Women's Work' Looks Like," showing the fields "where women have made the most inroads, and the least." Okay, the answer here is that one field had to be dead last among 24 occupations when it comes to women's inroads, and, as you most likely guessed, that field is construction. Whereas women make up 50% of workers in the U.S., only three of every 100 jobs in the construction field are held by women.
  • Then, please have a look here at "It’s a Crisis’; Lumber Mills Slash Jobs as Trade War Cuts Deep," an analysis of direct impacts to the construction supply chain of global trade dislocation. Wall Street Journal staffer Austen Hufford notes, apropos of this conversation, "Northwest Hardwoods Inc. of Tacoma, Wash., one of the largest domestic producers of hardwood lumber, is closing plants in Buena Vista, Va., and Mt. Vernon, Wash., that together employ 100 people."

Now, permit a personal digression to make a point here.

My mother stood at 5'-even on the tallest day of her eighty-four years, and never weighed over 105. In her mind, there are two kinds of people. Some are the kinds of people who toil and produce things of value with their hands, and others are those who work in offices--not with their hands. Her father made a living digging artesian wells, and the green cast-iron pitcher pump outside his house in West Kingston, R.I. pumped iced cold crystal clear water from a shallow well all the days of my childhood, a delicious testament to his trade. Her husband, my dad, practiced medicine as a surgeon. This was manual labor in my mom's mind. She herself pick-axed boulders and axed to pulp 100-year-old elm stumps, and wheel-barrowed bricks and slate so that she could mason up walks and stone walls, and sculpted garden, meadow, brook bank, marshlands and woodland's edge into four-season sublimity from her picture window in the kitchen.

She'd ask me now and again what it was like to work in an office, typing, and talking, and listening, and meeting, and analyzing, and managing, and producing who knew what, and for what real value.

For her, dirt in her nails, bruised knees, a deep bronze tan, bug bites, sinewy shoulders, an achy back and a patch of ground to grow in or weed out all added up to sustenance for her body and soul. Deadlines, for her, were first frost of late autumn and the first sprouts of crocus on the hillside and the first vine ripened cherry tomatoes that melted like juicy candy in your mouth and the first multi-foot snowfall that would shut down the roads, and make the place quiet enough to hear the icy air. Winters were for refinishing and repair projects. High heat summer days, she'd park a big jar of iced tea and Tang at the shaded base of a tree, and, accompanied only by a couple of dogs, slowly tease, with her hands, a large, jagged outcropping of unevenly terraced granite ledge into a rock garden. It was as if genius lived in her hands, beyond dexterity, beyond shaping raw dirt, and rock, and wood, and the sedge, and the laurel into a coherent language of adoration. For her, it was her hands learning from nature itself, what it wanted, what it could do without, what to do next.

Ask my mom at any point how she felt about her work at transforming acres into the unique spot we'd call home and she'd mention that she was a season or so behind in her labors. In fact, she felt nature constantly asked her to re-skill, to learn new arts and sciences and physics to bring out all that she could of the essential place, its beauty. Her work was never done. There was ever more beauty in her hands and in her muscular frame that wanted to discover what this place could be and what it was not. The work itself, for my mother, was the origin and regenerative source of its resilience. It kept her coming back to the job for upwards of four decades in that one place. I'm certain those acres--some quarter century since she last turned the soil--awaken each morning with at least some of that resplendence she gave them.

So, as you read, and re-read, and ponder, and discuss, and hopefully act on Clayton DeKorne's manifesto, think of the challenge "How Will Construction Solve Its Skilled Labor Crisis" with, number one, confidence that DeKorne expresses that this is solvable. What's more, solutions for the crisis draw from choices you make and recognition you open up to.

Put as simply as possible, the challenge builders face to bring a next generation of talented, committed, and adaptive people into the building fields comes down to:

  • Pay
  • Reliability and job security
  • Purpose
  • Fair conditions
  • Training
  • Diversity
  • Machine-augmented work

The challenge is as simple as a line of the song, "teach your children well," and as complex as the future of work in a society whose gorilla-in-the-room question across every industry sector, and every occupation, and every area of household wherewithal is "what future?"

Prior to the Smith-Hughes Act (which, by the sheer magnitude of the dollars it poured into states for a segregated vocational system, overpowered all early 20th-century educational reforms), there were other education movements that, while they didn't gain enough momentum to have a big effect on public education, nevertheless had a strong, albeit fleeting, influence on public opinion. One of the more interesting ones was the "manual training movement," which took off after Charles Ham published Mind And Hand: the Chief Factor in Education in 1886 (republished 1900). In this treatise, Ham defines the Ideal School (divided into various Laboratories for different trade skills) and argues that manual training not only is good for skill acquisition but also builds the self-esteem of individuals that is needed for them to become better citizens.
Prior to the Smith-Hughes Act (which, by the sheer magnitude of the dollars it poured into states for a segregated vocational system, overpowered all early 20th-century educational reforms), there were other education movements that, while they didn't gain enough momentum to have a big effect on public education, nevertheless had a strong, albeit fleeting, influence on public opinion. One of the more interesting ones was the "manual training movement," which took off after Charles Ham published Mind And Hand: the Chief Factor in Education in 1886 (republished 1900). In this treatise, Ham defines the Ideal School (divided into various Laboratories for different trade skills) and argues that manual training not only is good for skill acquisition but also builds the self-esteem of individuals that is needed for them to become better citizens.

Our choices as people in building need to focus, as DeKorne declares with clarion urgency, on "mind and hand" livelihoods that mean something and matter and stand up to present economics and future shocks and stresses.

Contrary to widely held conventional wisdom, young people will stand the brutal heat and the bitter cold, and the hard physical work, and the achy muscles, and all the rigors of our job sites if they can do one thing--make value and sustain being valued.

Today, on the eve of a 5G world and heading rapidly toward a 10G one, a single occupation, proficiency, area of expertise, and skill-set won't cut it for most people in elementary school or high school. They're going to need not only a skill to help them make value and become resiliently valued, but a framework to re-skill, again, and again, and again.

“We need a Waze for your career,” Mr. Sigelman said, referring to the navigation app that offers real-time maps and driving directions. “You could look at jobs that are adjacent to your skillset or role, and with fairly light training, you can make a jump into a better job.”

If we can spark young people, and that impressionable age Clayton refers to as a halcyon days of passing artisanal craftwork across the generations at the turn of an earlier century, to the notion that their purpose, their ability to make value and continue to be valued is resilient, and their learning is adaptive and ever-evolving, we'll be making the choices we need to to solve construction's skilled labor crisis.

Maybe my mother was right, that some people are cut out for working, creating grace, and making value with their hands, and others, not. More likely, though, today at least some kids and young people will need to blend the two, hands and minds. They'll need to learn a skill to make value, and they'll need to re-skill, and re-skill again by learning how to learn. It will be the only way to sustain being valued today, tomorrow, and tomorrow.