[srmom]

Roofing is a really dangerous job and most roofers end up injuring themselves pretty badly or getting asbestosis or silicosis from inhaling all the crap they inhale. Tar burns are pretty awful too. Many jobs are paid better because they are hazardous.

Most roofers in this day and age are getting picked up out on the corner in front of the local Home Depot.

My point is, is that when union wages are so high that a business owner has to hire illegal workers to stay competitive in the marketplace, which is what is happening nationwide, those union wages don't mean squat, and in fact are hurting roofers who would rather hire Americans at a fair market rate and American non union manual laborers. See one example in excerpt of article below:

State governments that contract jobs paid for with stimulus money will be required to pay workers on construction projects union wages rather than market rates -- good news for workers but good news for not as many of them.

The Office of Management and Budget included in the $787 billion stimulus bill the Davis-Bacon provision, a 1931 law typically only used on federal highway projects. But under the new spending plan, Davis-Bacon will apply to all state and local jobs on energy, housing, agriculture or construction.

Higher costs per project mean fewer projects completed, especially since some "shovel ready" projects were bid as non-union jobs. Some local officials and economists say the union wage mandate means taxpayer dollars won't be stretched as far as otherwise was planned.

"All this recovery money being spent, you have a lot of hands out," said economist Jack Kyser. "And so people have said OK, this has to conform to Davis Bacon, which means prevailing wage. And so you get hung up. So as I say, you're going to have projects, but you're not going to have the money go as far as you'd wanted it to go."

Los Angeles County officials who received $8 million in Community Development Block Grant money to weatherize homes for low-income people said they typically bid the job low and pay about $15 an hour for a worker to caulk windows. However, under union scale, that job pays $25 an hour and $5 in benefits, so instead of repairing 100 homes, they might do 50 homes for the same price.

Elsewhere, the union wage for a plumber in Long Island is $45 an hour, the market rate is $30. In Las Vegas, the Davis-Bacon wage for a glass worker is $57 an hour, a job the Nevada State Housing division currently pays $15 to do.

Now, who's this helping? I guess the few lucky union members who get the jobs - forget the rest of the Americans who would take the work at the market rate, or the people who would benefit from the project.

That's the exact reason I used "unions" in general and in a global sense, and not any one specific union (or any specific subset of workers). Unions attempt to (and often do) serve their own membership admirably, but that's the whole point: they likely have a negative effect on the whole to benefit the few.

Exactly...

Anecdotes about 98 dollars an hour and drinking beer are as useful as "welfare queens" buying lobsters and driving brand new SUVs.

See my earlier post (2 pages ago) where I linked table of actual union wages, that is not anecdotal.