Thoughts (some radical) on the labor shortage
“Naught without labor.”
That was one of the key super-secret-ritual themes of my cloak-and-dagger college fraternity (from which I’ll probably be expelled now that I revealed it). And it’s also one of the major themes of the year that was 2014.
Wherever the hardware and building supply industry met, there was talk of the exodus of construction workers, and the oil industry’s thirst for drivers and crews.
The naught-without-labor theme played out at the 2014 ProDealer Industry Summit in San Diego. A careful review of my editor’s notebook reveals a host of labor-shortage related ideas.
“If you pay them enough, oil workers will come back to Phoenix, right?” asked True Carr, general manager of Alliance Lumber, based in Phoenix.
He was joking. But he was serious when he said, “We have 277 passionate employees and 47 inmates.”
Through an Arizona prison-employment program, the inmates help plug the labor shortage and bring advantages to the yard and the community.
Carr explained: “It helps them pay their child support. It gives them some money when they get out of prison. Their worst day is a Friday because they know they’re going to spend their next two days [in prison]. They’re a good example for other crews because they want to come out every Monday to work in our yard. So it’s been a good combination for us, and we’re thinking of expanding on that next year.”
Prison labor was one idea. There were others less radical.
Sam Collins, president of S.W. Collins Company, based in Caribou, Maine, has been actively engaged in local colleges to build a pipeline of talent.
“This is certainly a challenge,” said Collins. “But it’s not just our industry. There a lot of industries with aging work forces that need to recruit younger people. We have to make it appealing to the younger worker and figure out how to do that. We don’t necessarily look for someone who is experienced; we look for someone who has aptitude and attitude.”
The shortage is affecting contractor customers even more. And that will have an impact on how yards grow, said Chris Yenrick, president of Smith Phillips Building Supply in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“Some of the custom building guys are fighting for trim crews, and fighting for framing crews. Installed sales is something that we’ve only dabbled in, but now we’re seeing a lot more of our builders are wanting those services.”
While the shortages are real, Randy Aardema, senior VP logistics at US LBM Holdings, believes the building supply business has a trump card: “This is a marvelous industry, and I think people are going to gravitate toward this business.”
It attracted us, right?
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