The worker shortage

Fewer employees might translate to more profit for some industries, but this is not the case for the construction industry. According to James R. Bogonet of Bogonet Construction Associates Inc., a D.C. firm that specializes in building and renovating interior office space:

“I’ve had to go out and work weekends to keep a project on schedule. The construction industry is suffering a severe worker shortage that is helping drive up the cost of development, including wages and office rental rates.”

The trend is continuous, because as early as year 2000 more than 240,000 jobs related to the construction industry are glossed over for higher-paying jobs. It’s a case of double jeopardy- if the firms do not pay enough, they don’t get staffed. But they lose immense profit when they do pay higher salaries to construction workers. The problem is cyclical.

Prices are going up, up, up…

According to Engineering News-Record, an industry publication: “National construction costs are up 2.3 percent this year.”

The problem calls for more capital outlay on the part of the clients, because to handle for the backlog due to shortage of workers and even tighter deadlines because of being understaffed, it takes $125-$150 to construct a single square foot of office space in the prime areas of United States.

This figure exponentially rises when we’re talking about the largest buildings and skyscrapers that are either leased or rented out to individual office-space holders.

Subcontractors decline

Smaller outfits are being more selective because of the relative shortage of manpower in the construction business. According to David Dempsey, a senior vice president for Spaulding & Slye Colliers, a development and construction group in the District:

“Ten years ago, if you put out a bid for masonry work, you might get twenty some responses. Today, you’re lucky if you get six.”

As we can see here, the construction industry is experiencing a very tight labor market. In the event that such labor conditions exists, every cost rises to match the unceasing demand. On the other hand, when labor is plenty, the prices drop because of the distributive quality of supply and demand scales.

According to Andrew Craig, vice president of construction and design for Staubach Co., an international commercial real estate brokerage:

“There is so much demand for development in this area that the problem takes on more urgency. We have to be more strategic, more nimble. They (the clients) want to know, `Why am I paying $50,000 for something I paid $30,000 for last year?’ You have to help them understand what’s happening in the marketplace.”

Craig’s analysis is quite dynamic because it highlights a basic truth about all industries- that in the end, if the market is sluggish, everything topples to the ground.

Chronometers date back to the 1500s with the first pocket watch, the Nuremberg Egg being invented by Peter Henlein. However, there are debates to this claim which state that it was a 19th century invention. Nevertheless, there is history tied to wind-up timepieces.

Swiss watchmakers dominated the timekeeping industry until the mid 1970s when the Japanese introduced highly accurate quartz watches that were mass-produced at low-cost. By the early 1980s Switzerland was only producing 10 percent of the timepieces in the world. Two-thirds of watchmaking jobs in the country also disappeared. This was aptly called the Quartz Crisis in the industry.

Mechanical wristwatches did make a comeback in the late 1990s after the successful introduction of chronometers that used the quartz design. They were marketed on the value of fashion rather than on the accuracy of telling time. The industry banked on this success to re-introduce the old technology of the automatic chronometers. At which time they were presented as carefully crafted (and some even handcrafted) luxury items linked to tradition dating back to the 1500s. This was a re-definition of its value as they were historically perceived as accurate metronomes.

What helped the resurgence of these luxury items was the discovery that they were highly valued by collectors who strongly guarded tradition. When the industry was very fragile and was thought to collapse, these collectors started buying the wristwatches at auctions at record prices. This gave the message that there was underlying value to the ancient technology. In another instance, an old Zenith employee hid all the moulds needed to produce the horologes when other companies were disposing or scrapping theirs. These enthusiasts and the old employee are now seen in history as the guardians of tradition.

It was also necessary in the industry’s revival to redefine the competition. It wasn’t anymore, at this point, competing with quartz, but with horologes in its own league – which is the high-end market.

This is the same pattern that we have seen with the resurgence of the vinyl records or with fountain pens. Record collectors who valued them have facilitated their comeback and redefined competition for these collectibles apart from the downloadable music that this society now enjoys.

Consider all the needs for new refineries, pipelines, ethanol plants, wind generators, construction materials, bridges, aircraft and up-grading all the tooling to make Harley Davidsons, GM Automobiles and Peterbuild Trucks? What about all those tractors, locomotives, tanker cars and military vehicles too? Some one has to design, make and manufacture all these things.

There are structural pieces, ball-bearings, fittings, valves and hundreds of thousands of machined moving parts, which must be built at specific tolerances otherwise well they just will not work. This is something that America is well suited for, getting the job and the parts right the first time. Find a need and fill an important customers desires and you win. There are a million niches to fill too from Space Shuttle parts to the next cruise ship. So, do not sell industry short when considering a business category to hang your hat on.

Man lifts have increased convenience in the construction industry as well as in firefighting missions as they fulfill the need for a temporary lift at the cost that is only a fraction of the cost of building a permanent solution.

Types of Man Lifts

The two most common designs include the following

Boom Lifts: A boom lift has an extended arm with joints along it and bucket at its end. The joints in the arm allow for greater mobility and the platform to be adjusted to varied heights. The ability to move it in different directions also allows easy access into the narrowest spaces. The boom lift is a common sighting at fire stations.

Scissor Lifts: The Scissor lift is a type of boom lift. It gets its name from its look. It has folding supports arranged in a crisscross pattern. This aerial lift only extends vertically. However, they have a higher capacity between 500-2500 pounds. It can be used to transport multiple persons at a time. The system powering a scissor lift is either a mechanical or hydraulic lift.

Electrically Insulated Lifts – The third type of man lift is not so much a distinction in design as it is in its construction. It is made using electrically insulated components such as non-conductive hydraulic hoses, fiberglass insulated booms and buckets and fiber optic control cables. Given this special feature, this type is used in areas that are prone to electrocution hazards.
Guide to Buying Man Lifts

There are several factors that must be considered when buying or hiring a man lift for a construction site or a fire station or at any other maintenance department.

The first obvious factor to consider is the design. If you are limited on storage space, it is a better option to choose a space saving designs that can be easily folded after use for the ease of storage.

Given the purpose for which it is used, the transport of persons and heavy objects, the man lift should be sturdy in its construction and should be made of quality materials.

Man lifts are a pricey investment and cannot be purchased repeatedly. However, on account of constant exposure to inclement weather conditions it tends to wear out faster. You should opt for a machine with higher durability even if that means paying a little more.

The height and weight capacity are also important features to factor in when shopping for man lifts. The machine you choose should also be easy to use and less-demanding on maintenance schedules.
Finally, you cannot neglect the safety features. Safety is tied to the build quality and the quality of construction materials. However, a few manufacturers also add a few extra features to increase safety such as high speed cut outs, pothole protection, handholds, LCD displays with sensory information, level warnings and static straps. Also, the lift should be an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and ANSI (American National Standards Institute) approved industrial man lift.

After oil prices hit their peaks a couple of years ago, Jet Fuel was so expensive that airlines were under extreme stress to cut costs, and most of them decided one of the best ways to cut costs was to outsource their maintenance facilities.

This caused the certified repair stations to ramp up quickly and hire as many airframe and power plant mechanics as possible, along with airframe inspection mechanics. You would think with the economic global slowdown that airlines would continue to outsource to all these facilities. And they do, however airlines have also cut out quite a bit of capacity taking airliners and parking them in the deserts.

Why the deserts? Due to the hot dry conditions that make it less corrosive on the aluminum fuselages and wings. But with fewer airplanes in the system, less maintenance is needed.

With the incredible growth of these types of companies, they have also been forced to lay off individual mechanics. Although, as the economy returns we can expect these FAR certified aircraft maintenance facilities to ramp back up to full force.

The temporary slowdown, or slow growth of profits in this sector should not be thought of as the death nail. Just like the entire travel industry, airlines, and auto industry this global slowdown and economic crisis hit every industry. This one included. Please consider all this.

Yes, I know that sounds like a mean-spirited thing to say in this day and age, but as a businessperson anyone that wishes to make a profit, maintain shareholders equity, and grow a business has to be thinking here. Luckily, there is some good news for industrial, mechanical, and manufacturing corporations right now the United States. Orders are up, and the global economy appears to be recovering. That means there are products to be made, and buyers waiting.

The supply chain is coming back to life, and things are looking pretty good. But before you jump up for joy and assume that this means more people will go back to work. Perhaps you should consider what I have to say. Most of the manufacturing equipment being bought up right now is high-tech equipment, the kind that operates with fewer employees, not more. Indeed, there will be people who will have to run many of these machines, but they will not need the hundreds, or even thousands of people on the line to produce the same amount of goods as before.

In fact, there was a great little article recently in Industry Week titled; “Manufacturing Technology Consumption Up 138.1% – February Consumption Totaled $329 Million” written by the IndustryWeek Staff and posted on April 11, 2011. The article stated in the teaser paragraph: “February U.S. manufacturing technology consumption totaled $329.43 million, according to AMT — The Association For Manufacturing Technology and AMTDA, the American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association. This total was down 10.9% from January but up 99.3% when compared with the total of $165.31 million reported for February 2010.”

The labor costs in China are also creeping up, along with inflation there. No longer will people work for 18 to 20 hours a day, 6 to 7 days per week. That sort of slave labor isn’t going to happen anymore. Rather than one dollar a day, these folks wish to live in the middle class, and that means they need to make twelve hundred dollars per year (which will increase after China’s currency is properly reevaluated). Already, that is an increase from one dollar a day to nearly 3 dollars per day. Even China is buying more automation equipment for their factories to become more efficient. In many regards this will level the playing field for manufacturers worldwide, but it doesn’t do very much good for employment in any country.

So on one hand this is very good news for those in the manufacturing business, but for many of the union employees who have pushed very hard to increase their salaries year after year, this doesn’t mean that they will automatically be returning to work to those once previously high-paying jobs. Indeed I hope you’ll please consider all this and think on it. If you have any comments, questions, and/or concerns please shoot me an e-mail.

In fact, they crashed several airplanes that barely got off the ground. That was until much later that they decided to go to where there were high winds, and decent terrain, their first successful flight didn’t last very long, although it was successful.

In recent years, people have built model replicas of that prototype and they ended up crashing them. So, the first successful airplane, it seems to be almost impossible to reproduce even using the same materials.

One thing that is very important is to not to let the accountants, or the money managers run the prototyping or R&D projects or allow them to hold the keys or plug. It’s very easy to pull the plug on a very good project just because a prototype fails.

In reality, it’s not that prototypes are supposed to fail, but rather they often do. It’s what you learn from your failures that help you make something that works, and get you closer to perfection. Besides when it comes to prototyping in any industrial mechanical industry, we must realize that Murphy lives amongst us, and he is just looking for ways to prove us wrong, make our lives harder, or destroy our prototypes.

You mustn’t ever let Murphy get you down, and you must never give up if you wish to succeed. In a way this is good advice for anything you do in life, it’s just too bad people in the prototyping industry allow accountants and lawyers to hold the reins. Innovation takes risks. So please make a note of it.