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Severe Shortage Of Skilled Trades Has Ripple Effect Across Housing Industry

West Virginians have struggled to find affordable housing for years. The pandemic made things worse as a surge in home sales left builders unprepared. A lack of available housing inventory, and land on which to build, is exacerbated by a severe shortage of laborers and skilled tradesmen to build the houses. 

The shortage of available housing is affecting a disproportionate number of lower income families across the state. But the solution isn’t as simple as building more houses or offering tax incentives for builders. 

Ed Brady, CEO of the Home Builders Institute – a national nonprofit provider of trade skills training and education for the building industry – said the imbalance of supply and demand has created a confluence of events that are contributing to the problem.

“The need is at crisis levels, we don’t have skilled labor to build the housing, or infrastructure that we need in this country,” Brady said.

Economic Downturn

During the Great Recession, the residential construction industry lost an estimated 1.5 million jobs. Thousands of home builders went out of business. The road to recovery has been a long one. With fewer workers, rising lumber costs and a limited inventory of raw materials, last year took an average of 8 months to build a single-family home. That is the longest since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1971. 

The Home Builders Institute actively recruits people in the skilled trades through on the job training and no cost pre-apprenticeship training and certification programs. Brady said their partnership with the Home Depot Foundation helps provide programs across the country that began as an outreach to help transitioning military families.

“Now they’re helping us get into high schools,” Brady said. “They’re helping us with organizations like 100 Black Men of America, they’re helping us create academies throughout the country. We need to get industry invested in this movement to get more skilled labor. The opportunity for young people, underserved people is there; we just need the funding to help them find a career path like the rest of the country has.”

The Home Builders Association of West Virginia has six local associations. They include North Central West Virginia Home Builders Association, Southern West Virginia Home Builders Association, Greater Charleston Home Builders Association, Eastern Panhandle Home Builders Association, Northern Panhandle Home Builders Association and the Mid-Ohio Valley Home Builders Association.

The association’s president Aaron Dickerson said that the severe labor shortage in skilled residential construction is worse in the state’s rural areas.

“Housing affordability and affordable housing kind of goes hand in hand,” Dickerson said. “And with that, the labor shortage of creating those homes, we’re really trying to draw the manufacturers, the businesses into state but the rural areas where the companies are trying to come to – it is difficult in finding the construction companies and the labor to provide the affordable housing for the individuals who are going to work on those projects and eventually form the skilled labor for those companies.”

Aging Workforce 

In 2022, nearly a quarter of skilled tradesmen were 55 or older. For every three tradesmen that retire, there’s just one trained worker waiting to take their position.

“That generation was heavy into the skilled trades and they’re all leaving the workforce, whereas my generation, when I was coming up through school, if you didn’t plan on going to college then you were doing the wrong thing,” Dickerson said. “So you’ve got two generations there that have left the workforce, and it’s created this huge void we are now trying to fill.”

It’s estimated the U.S. won’t catch up with demand until 2050. By 2030, almost 80 million skilled tradesmen will have retired.

Apprenticeships are increasing as manufacturers and other companies associated with the trades partner with organizations like the Home Builders Institute to provide students with the skills, experience and job placement while addressing the industry’s labor shortage.

Dickerson said part of the problem is the stigma surrounding manual labor and the emphasis today to earn a college degree.

“We’re trying to get rid of that stigma of walking down the street and parents saying, ‘Well look at that street sweeper, you don’t want to be that person, or look at that plumber, you don’t want to do that,’” Dickerson said. “That stigma of getting your hands dirty isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s the old adage that dirty money is a clean money type situation – that you can make a good living wage, and not put yourself in a ton of debt.”

The Home Builders Association of West Virginia works with tech schools in Marion and Monongalia counties. They also collaborate with the Wood County Vocational Technical Center in Parkersburg. A student chapter through the Mid Ohio Valley Home Builders Association is focused on introducing more young people into the profession.

“Because those students are coming out – that’s the next generation of our workforce – so the more we can be involved with them during the training program, the more we can ensure they are trained in the way we would like to hire somebody.”

He said national efforts to fill jobs are better funded, but they try to do as much as they can on a local level to make the profession more attractive. 

Viable Wage

“In the future, your skilled trades are going to be some of your higher paying jobs because less and less people want to do it and that skill just isn’t there like it was handed down generation to generation in the past,” he said. “And that’s where getting rid of that stigma of getting your hands dirty is so important – to let these kids understand that you can go out, get your hands dirty and still provide for your family.”

The average salary for entry-level sheet metal workers in West Virginia is $56,000. The hourly rate for the men and women who choose to become electricians is $27+ an hour. Carpenters can make up to $31 an hour and up to $64,000 annually.

Kent Pauley, state representative to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), is a seasoned tradesman and contractor. He said the good news is that today’s skilled laborers are entering the profession at a time of increased job security and better work conditions.

“When I was coming up in the early ’70s, it was very difficult to make a good living, I mean the pay scale,” Pauley said. “I tell the story if I was fired there’d be five people behind me wanting that job. Well, that’s not the case today. We have to pay better, do a better job of taking care of our employees, there’s better insight for job safety than what it used to be.”

Immigration

The residential construction industry has historically relied on immigrants who make up 30 percent of all positions. This includes Hispanics and people from eastern Europe trained in skills like carpentry, painting, drywall, tile installation, brick masonry and others. 

But with tougher immigration policies, this readily available workforce has shrunk.

“With an immigration policy that restricts the flow of those that are willing to do jobs that sometimes are hard to fill, it causes just another headwind to provide the skilled labor in order to build the housing we need in this country,” Brady said. “Without a good immigration policy, which provides legal free flowing skill to come into the country, we’re going to continue to go in the wrong direction in providing that skilled labor.”

Brady said the industry needs to embrace change.

“We have a huge opportunity to diversify this industry,” Brady said. “It’s traditionally been, quite frankly, white male dominated. You add in the immigrant population, we need to market to women, to people of color and we need to diversify this industry in order to populate the skills that we need.”

According to the Home Builders Institute, 723,000 more jobs per year are needed to keep up with demand. That translates to the need for builders to bring on 30 times more new hires than the current pace. 

Brady stressed the answer lies in opening the skilled trades to a broader and younger workforce.

The reason it’s so important to get young people into the industry is we’ve lost a generation or two of giving people the opportunity to explore the industry,” Brady said. “A degree was a mandate out of the high school system. And that hasn’t panned out to be all that productive.”

——

This story is part of the series, “Help Wanted: Understanding West Virginia’s Labor Force.”

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Three presidents and one mission: Beat Trump

CNN  — 

Sometimes when a president needs a hand, only another president – or another two – will do.

President Joe Biden’s bid for a second term and reelection campaign coffers will get a hefty boost on Thursday when he’s joined in New York by his two immediate predecessors as Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

The lucrative fundraiser in New York will send a message of commitment from the 42nd and 44th presidents for the 46th’s bid to prevent the 45th president, Donald Trump, from returning as the 47th.

Obama, especially, has become increasingly involved in Biden’s reelection campaign in recent weeks, motivated by alarm at the possibility that his friend and former vice president will be forced, like he was, to hand the Oval Office to Trump. CNN’s MJ Lee and Jeff Zeleny reported Wednesday that Obama was in the White House for a working visit just last week. Sources said Biden has also been in regular touch with Clinton, who was in the White House when the current president was a major Senate voice on foreign policy and judicial issues.

The appearance of the three men together at Radio City Music Hall will conjure a moment of symbolism that will underscore the stakes of the election. Two Democratic presidents who won second terms are uniting to try to usher a successor, who is older than both of them, into the same rarified political air.

It will also mark a rare occasion when four presidents are in one area, other than Washington, on the same day. Trump, who is permanently estranged from the ex-presidents’ club because of his extreme behavior, is due on Long Island on Thursday to attend a wake for slain New York City Police Office Jonathan Diller. The other living ex-presidents are Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care for over a year, and George W. Bush, who is very friendly with both Obama and Clinton, but as a Republican is unlikely to campaign for Biden even given his disdain for Trump’s contempt for democracy.

Biden, Clinton and Obama are in the unique group of men who have known the lonely burden of the presidency, the responsibility of sending military personnel to war abroad and the strain of trying to win a second term while doing a day job in the Oval Office.

The fundraiser is the first major joint appearance of Obama and Clinton on behalf of Biden this campaign cycle. But it will also raise questions over whether the two past presidents have quite the political heft that they once enjoyed. While both remain Democratic rock stars and possess more charisma and talent as campaign trail rhetoricians than Biden, it’s been 16 years since Obama was first elected in a euphoric mood of hope and change. And Clinton has been out of the White House for nearly a quarter of a century. The two former presidents both retain strong support among African American voters who are vital to the Democratic coalition. And Obama is expected to be dispatched to college campuses in the fall to try to work some political alchemy on young voters – a tough crowd to get to the polls. But both the Clinton and Obama presidencies now appear ideologically somewhat conservative to many progressive and younger voters whom Biden has his own challenges in reaching.

Still, Leon Panetta, who served Clinton as White House chief of staff and Obama as defense secretary and CIA director, told CNN on Tuesday that Obama especially could be helpful to Biden, in particular on health care – an issue on which Biden and Obama teamed up to highlight on a call last weekend.

“I think they have to be careful about where they use the former president,” Panetta said on “CNN News Central” on Thursday. “I would probably wait until we get closer to the convention and to the election and the fall. But I think he can be a tremendous asset in terms of reaching not just the average American but obviously, the Latinos, the young people, the minorities that are going to be critical to Joe Biden if he is going to win this election.”

Biden’s two explainers-in-chief

Biden’s supporters will be hoping that Obama and Clinton’s impact on the campaign will be similar to Clinton’s impact on Obama’s 2012 reelection race. The then-president was having trouble convincing voters he was properly managing the economy at a time when many Americans, then as now, were not feeling the full impact of an economic recovery following a crisis. But Clinton delivered a vintage prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention, using a folksy and persuasive turn of phrase that made a better argument for Obama’s second term than the president had made for himself.

“I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside,” Clinton said. Obama was deeply grateful for an appearance that injected new momentum into his campaign against Republican nominee Mitt Romney and he dubbed Clinton his “explainer-in-chief.”

Thursday night’s event will mark the latest twist in fascinating relationships among three men who reached the pinnacle of politics. People who become president, by definition, nurse substantial egos. Clinton, Obama and Biden, though they are now working toward the same goal, have sometimes also gotten in each other’s way – and at times there have been tensions between them.

And the thwarted hopes of another historic figure, former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who twice lost White House bids – to Obama and Trump – deepens the intrigue in the interactions of the three presidents.

It’s a mark of his extraordinary longevity as a politician that Biden actually ran for president before any of them. He was seen as a great future hope of the Democratic Party, but his 1988 run for the nomination – four years before Bill Clinton ran – ended in the embarrassment of a plagiarism scandal.

When Obama, seeking some foreign policy ballast, chose Biden as his vice presidential nominee in 2008 – after another failed presidential bid by the then-Delaware senator – many of his own staff were skeptical of Biden, whom they viewed as a gaffe machine. The Democratic nominee had also reportedly despaired at the old Senate bull’s meandering speeches and hyperbole. Journalist Gabriel Debenedetti relayed an anecdote in his book “The Long Alliance” about the Biden and Obama relationship: When Biden launched a stemwinder during a congressional hearing, the then-Illinois senator passed a note to an aide that read, “Shoot. Me. Now.”

But in the White House, the two men gradually became close. Biden played a valuable role as devil’s advocate and last sounding board in foreign policy debates. And his deep loyalty to the president and role in implementing Recovery Act spending plans earned him new respect. On one occasion, however, the vice president irked Obama’s team when he got out ahead of the president on endorsing same-sex marriage at a time when the issue was hugely controversial.

Biden leaned increasingly on Obama as his beloved son, Beau, was dying of cancer. And Obama delivered a moving eulogy which was as much a tribute to his vice president as to his deceased son, ending his remarks by embracing Biden and placing a kiss on his cheek.

In the final days of his presidency, Obama surprised a tearful Biden by awarding him the presidential medal of freedom. He quoted an unnamed Republican who said of Biden, “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you got a problem. He’s as good a man as God ever created.”

Biden and Obama have appeared several times together during the current administration. And in the Covid-19 campaign in 2020, the former president delivered a powerful primetime speech on behalf of the Democratic nominee in which he warned that Trump posed an unacceptable threat to democracy.

But one thing continues to sit poorly with Biden – his belief that Obama thought Hillary Clinton, and not him, represented the best bet for Democrats to keep the White House. Biden was still thinking about this as recently as last year, when he sat for an interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating his handling of classified documents. “I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did,” Biden said. Some former Obama aides have denied that their old boss did anything to prevent Biden running in 2016.

Clinton and Biden go back even further than Obama and Biden

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993, Biden helped usher Clinton’s pick, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, onto the Supreme Court in one of the then-president’s most enduring legacy achievements. During the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Biden sometimes irked the White House as one of the most hawkish voices on Capitol Hill arguing in favor of US intervention about which Clinton long procrastinated. He eventually launched a peace initiative that ended the most damaging post-World War II war on the European landmass until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

But Biden was also a valuable ally for Clinton after the president’s impeachment over an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. And after he became vice president, Biden developed a friendly and cordial relationship with Hillary Clinton, maintained by regular breakfasts at the vice president’s official residence in Washington.

Obama and Bill Clinton also had a tumultuous relationship before the former president came to Obama’s aid in 2012. Clinton was one of the first political heavyweights to understand the threat that the charismatic Obama posed to his wife’s 2008 campaign. Relations between the Clinton and Obama campaigns were, at times, deeply antagonistic as the young senator challenged and then beat the Clintons, breaking their hold on a party they dominated for nearly two decades. Bill Clinton, who had prided himself on his relationship with Black voters, became especially exercised as the African American Democratic establishment split from his wife and gathered around Obama.

At one point, Clinton described Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War – the key to his appeal among many Democrats – as a “fairy tale,” which fed complaints from some Obama supporters that he was using a racist trope. Clinton’s fury burst out into the open in South Carolina, where Obama beat the former first lady in the Democratic primary in a victory that put him on the road to the White House.

But the three presidents have long since buried their various hatchets, mostly, and will Thursday unite to counter a threat that they all believe poses a near existential risk to US democracy – a second Trump term.