A return of value to skilled labor
Immigration enforcement emptied the framing crews Florida builders built their business on. The framers who remain — the legal, skilled ones — now command $40 to $45 an hour, double the old rate. Builders call it being 'dead in the water.' Another way to read it: for the first time in a generation, the market is paying skilled American labor what it is actually worth. That was the point of the policy. This is it, working.
- Jacksonville framers: about $20 an hour before, $40 to $45 now (Tidewater Homes president Scott Brannock, to the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16). Framing labor on an average 2,500-square-foot house: about $10,000 then, $25,000 to $28,000 now.
- One Jacksonville subcontractor reports 70% fewer crews available for some jobs; the crews remaining have doubled their rates in most cases.
- John Burns Research & Consulting (September): nearly two-thirds of builders say immigration enforcement is affecting their labor force — up from 23% in March. NAHB's September survey: shortages across the housing trades are worse than at any point in the 2004-2006 boom, and Florida builders are raising pay and offering recruiting bonuses.
- The math nobody ran: doubling framers' pay adds roughly 2% to the price of a typical new home (Rothman Report, on the builders' own numbers).
For about thirty years, the price of framing a house in Florida was set by whoever was most desperate to do it. When the going rate for a skilled framer is $20 an hour in a state where houses sell for half a million dollars, that is not a market finding a price — that is a market being fed a supply of labor with no bargaining power and calling the result efficiency.
That supply is gone now, and the market is finding the real price. In Jacksonville, framing carpenters who earned about $20 an hour now get $40 to $45, Scott Brannock — president of Tidewater Homes and of the Northeast Florida Builders Association — told the Wall Street Journal. The framing labor on an average 2,500-square-foot house, he said, used to run about $10,000; now it is $25,000 to $28,000. David Hacker, who runs the subcontractor Construction Specialties of North Florida, says the crews available for some jobs have fallen 70%, and the ones remaining have doubled their rates.
'We're almost dead in the water because our workforce is gone,' Brannock said. Read that sentence carefully, because it is the whole story. Our workforce — a workforce the industry did not train, did not retain, and did not pay enough to reproduce itself, because for a generation it never had to. National builders, he said, are 'missing projections, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they have slabs sitting on the ground and no one to frame.' Slabs sitting on the ground is what the end of a labor model looks like from the builder's side of the fence.
From the framer's side, it looks like this: a man who can frame a house — a real skill, learned over years, hard on the body and unforgiving of error — is finally being paid like it. That is not a side effect of immigration enforcement. That is the stated purpose of it, arriving on schedule. Nearly two-thirds of builders told John Burns Research & Consulting in September that enforcement is affecting their labor force, up from 23% in March. The National Association of Home Builders' September survey found labor shortages across the housing trades reported by 47% of builders — worse than at any point in the 2004-2006 boom, when the country was starting 1.8 million homes a year instead of today's 1.3 million — with framing crews among the scarcest, and Florida builders raising pay and offering recruiting bonuses to compete. Data-center construction is bidding for the same electricians and carpenters, which tells you what the open market thinks a skilled tradesman's hour is worth when it cannot be undercut.
None of this is free, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of headline trick. Houses will cost more at the margin — though when the Rothman Report ran Brannock's own numbers, the full framing increase came out to roughly 2% of a typical new home's price, which is a strange size for a catastrophe. Projects will be delayed while the industry relearns how to recruit, train and keep American workers — the pipeline it let rot because it never needed one. And enforcement has real human edges: the Journal reports legal-status workers staying home out of fear of being swept up, and men with eighteen years of Florida framing experience deported after a traffic stop. Those costs are real. They are also the costs of ending an arrangement that was never honest about its price.
Because the old price was a lie, and everyone in the transaction knew it except the man holding the nail gun. A $20 framer did not mean framing was worth $20. It meant someone else — the worker, in suppressed wages; the public, in the costs of a shadow workforce — was paying the difference. Now the difference is on the invoice, where it always belonged. The builders will adapt the way industries always do when a subsidy ends: they'll train, they'll pay, they'll plan around the true cost of the work. And a generation of Florida kids watching a framer clear $42 an hour might do the math the industry refused to do for thirty years, and pick up a hammer.
Welcome to the correction. It is what the policy was for.