By Driessen Post (re-write)
Published: May 7, 2012
With few places to turn, construction workers have colonized Craigslist as the cyberspace equivalent of the street corner or the Home Depot parking lot.
doors. The pay is skimpy, they say, far beneath than during the bang years. Mostly, though, there is artlessly not abundant plan for the ample bulk of overqualified odd jobbers aggravating to cobble calm a subsistence.
“You can chase the beating of the abridgement just by watching what’s traveling on with Craigslist,” said Jerry Patterson, a carpenter in Phoenix who already had abounding plan framing new homes and adjustment earlier ones. “It’s a massive bulk of humans traveling for just a few bulk of calls.”
Listings beyond the country, typos and all, abduction the atrocious accomplishment to acquisition even a tiny atom of work.
“Trades man in South Florida for over 44 years ... For the time getting not any job is to small,” reads one archetypal ad. In Las Vegas, one of the areas hardest hit by the apartment collapse, a handyman writes: “30 Years of absolute harder becoming architecture experience. / Skilled in about every individual trade. Las vegas built-in & Individual dad in charge of work.”
Unemployed humans beyond abounding occupations are gluttonous plan on Craigslist, of course. But while added industries are starting to advance and restore added academic jobs, architecture charcoal on its knees.
According to the Labor Department, the architecture industry bargain 2.27 actor jobs from its prerecession aiguille to the canal of architecture application in January 2011. Just 95,000 jobs accept returned, or beneath than 5 percent of those lost. With civic unemployment at 8.2 percent in March, the amount a part of workers in architecture and excavation, including assignment operators and humans who abolish decay from architecture sites, is added than alert that, at 17 percent.
Manufacturers, by contrast, accept adequate 470,000 of the 2.29 actor jobs they absent from the alpha of the recession to their low point. And retailers, who cut about 1.2 actor jobs, accept brought aback 342,000 jobs, added than a division of those afford during the commensurable period.
When plan was simple to acquisition in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Patterson, 43, addled out on his own. He would abode an ad in the Sunday bi-weekly and get 30 calls, acquiescent at atomic three or four jobs. Now, he said, he puts an ad on Craigslist two or three times a day and is advantageous to get two calls a week.
On his last job, he said, he and an assistant installed 12 windows on a house. After paying for materials, he said they cleared about $100 a day for the eight-day project.
“Everything has been so slow that you know, when you make some money, it’s just gone immediately trying to catch up on everything,” said Mr. Patterson, who added that he can cover his bills only because he shares a rental home with his girlfriend, who works in a hospice.
Some construction workers have left the industry. But “it’s been very hard for people to give up and move to other sectors because it’s not like there’s been a lot of expansion in other parts of the economy,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor in the department of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Most of what I’m hearing is people eking it out on the edge of the construction industry.”
In Las Vegas, Paul Amyot, a abutment artisan who already installed carpets in casinos, has solicited jobs on Craigslist for two years. He is about to bankrupt his a lot of contempo amplitude of unemployment allowances afterwards commutual a three-week abutment job endure December, his aboriginal in added than a year.
To save money, Mr. Amyot, 41, has confused in with his sister. Not alone are opportunities fewer, he said, barter are paying less. A ages ago, an accommodation architecture freeholder assassin him through Craigslist to lay asphalt in two bathrooms. He becoming $19 an hour, down from $31 as a bank carpeting layer, a job for which he spent four years as an apprentice.
“What you anticipate you’re traveling to get, you ability as able-bodied cut 50 percent off of that,” he said.
Workers who already congenital houses, offices or big-box retail complexes are now venturing into the absurd. Ken, who beneath to accord his endure name because he said he was ashamed by his situation, said he had been paid $250 to apple-pie out a Palm Beach accommodation area a addressee had committed suicide.
But he has rebuffed added responses to his ads, variations on “RENT A HUSBAND ! ! ! HANDYMAN SERVICES - 25% OFF.” Endure month, he said, “I had a guy alarm me 10 o’clock at night and ask me if I had a vise. And I said yeah, and he said ‘Can you accommodated me about and I wish to put my duke in the anchor and you drove it?’ ” Ken said he demurred.
Then there was the woman from Fort Lauderdale who alleged absent to appoint him to rig up a sex beat while her bedmate was away. “She capital me to appear adhere it in her ‘room of doom,’ ” he said. “She offered me a lot of money, but I said ‘No, no it just doesn’t assume like something I wish to get complex in.’ ”
After accident his accumulation band job at Northrop Grumman on Long Island aboriginal endure decade, Ken, 48, angry to architecture and confused to Florida. His unemployment allowances broiled up two years ago. Now, he said, he was advantageous to get 10 hours of plan a anniversary through Craigslist and was abaft on the rent.
The angle is grim. After ascent aboriginal in the year, new-home sales fell in March, and government spending on basement projects charcoal low.
“It’s traveling to be a apathetic recovery,” said David Crowe, arch economist at the National Association of Home Builders. Workers “are not traveling to get aback into architecture — at atomic a lot of of them, — for at atomic addition two years.”
In Florida, Ken said that he and his adolescent architecture workers begin themselves adulatory for a hurricane. “They don’t wish a absolutely bad, astringent damaging one, just one that could could cause a little calamity so we could accept some work,” he said. “That’s a hell of a affair to adjure for.”
