I understand the basic rationale: get people working again by putting money into the roads and bridges and other things that need a-fixin’. Sound infrastructure benefits businesses by ensuring efficient transport of goods, thereby stimulating the economy. The employeed workers buy things, which further stimulates the economy.
Perhaps I just don’t have a good grasp of the problem, but most of the lay-offs I’m hearing about are in the white-collar service sector. How would a public works solution benefit the overweight, 45-year-old woman who doesn’t know a wrench from a hammer but is a MS Access query guru. Or the ectomorphic, bespeckled programmer who failed high school shop class? What would a public works program do for these people, in the short term?
Since no one else has answered… I’d say it depends on how bad things keep getting. If things stay bad, the white collar workers who can’t work on construction crews start taking jobs as burger jockeys - and that gets the burger jockeys looking for other work.
My misgiving about this is that beyond pure grunt labor, a lot of construction work is pretty skilled, and takes a fair amount of training. We can put burger cooks on the construction crews, but those crews won’t necessarily be all that productive.
Because keep track of gravel contracts and renting steamrollers requires data management too.
If Obama’s plan works out anything like he says it will. A lot of what will be upgraded is national information systems. National medical records database, national ID most likely, new power plants. You name it.
Public works projects have been a popular means of injecting money into the economy here in Japan for quite a while. Construction firms and government offices make up a large percentage of the workforce here and both stand to benefit from infrastructure development. Whether this is really helping or just sinking the government into further debt is debatable.
Also, at least in Japan, many of these projects are more than a little suspect:
A few years ago, before moving out to the mountains, I lived in a small suburban dormitory town less than an hour outside of Tokyo. The mayor’s pet project was the reconstruction of the larger of the town’s two train stations. The citizenry, suspicious of the necessity of a new train station, was assuaged when the mayor went door-to-door, handing out pamphlets and explaining that the new station would be safer, more attractive, and a much-needed catalyst for downtown revitalization…
…Of course, it was merely coincidence that the contract for the handsomely priced project was awarded to the mayor’s brother’s construction firm.
You assume that they CAN learn. There’s a reason why construction crews aren’t full of 45 year old women.
And the threat of not eating is also a good motivator ( and justification ) for starving people to kill you and take what you have so they can eat. Or for them to vote in anyone who will promise them food, for that matter.
“Because we had to choose between this and home ec, and we didn’t want to be sissies?”
“Wrong! You are here because you are America’s FUTURE! You may someday be doctors, or lawyers, or scientists. Most of you, however, will be pumping gas, or cutting sheet metal, and that’s why we have… shop class.”
The premise is incorrect. You might have noticed that there isn’t an awful lot of building construction going on nowadays. You don’t hear about massive layoffs, since they get hit by just not getting the next gig. I don’t know if their skills map to road and bridge construction, but I think they can handle the physical part of the job with no problem.
If these guys start spending, then existing companies can stop cutting production, and the white collar people will have jobs again also.
Given the sorry state of our infrastructure these days, this seems like a win-win to me.
Everyone should remember that the last public works projects were completed before the days of the Big Union. That change alone could prove politically problematic for a new attempt at this.
Have you watched a construction project lately? Compared to the “good old days”, there is a lot more heavy equipment and other productivity enhancements. I don’t see too many general laborers swinging picks.
Exactly. I have been on a lot of heavy construction projects involving water and sewer pipe installation. Most of the equipment operators and drivers spend the majority of their workday sitting down. Even the laborers spend much of their time guiding pipe while heavy equipment physically moves it. When mechanical joints are used, power tools are used to tighten the bolts.
That being said, it’s fair to say that a large majority of the workforce would still not have the training or inclination to actually work on a construction crew.
Nevertheless, public works projects also result in work for engineers (like me!), construction inspectors, project managers, project controls personnel (including finance people), schedulers, etc., etc.
With respect to your 45-year-old female MS Access query guru, we could use her right now in my office. I work for a public water/sewer utility, and we’re trying to create and manage a database of sewers to be replaced using a junior engineer who has only taken a basic one-day MS Access training course.
Government construction contracts = paperwork. There’s beginning of project paperwork, weekly paperwork, billing paperwork, change order paperwork, and end of project paperwork. Minimum. Usually more. Lots of paper that all has to be filed and kept for multiple years.
There are more construction workers than office workers, but government contracts require more office work than regular contracts do.
I have a feeling that a lot of the infrastructure projects in the next 10-20 years will be along the lines of exactly what you’re describing.
My Mother-in-Law before she retired did GPS/GIS work with Arizona State University. The city of Phoenix had actually no map of the city’s fire hydrants or it’s sewers for that matter. She had her students go out and plot the infrastructure based around the fire hydrants and other things. Turns out a couple years later the city’s sewers had deteriorated very badly because they used concrete pipes that were untiled. Of course the mapping of the sewer system was terrible. I don’t recall precisely whether she worked specifically on mapping the sewer system or not. While Phoenix from what I understand is a notoriously poorly planned city, I imagine this is fairly common across the nation.
Poor information management is endemic across the nation. There should be plenty of work for Access Gurus on infrastructure problems in the coming years.
Public works projects are a terrible way to stimulate the economy.
The best estimate for how long this recession will last is on the order of a year and a half. Maybe a couple of years.
It can take more than two years just to complete the environmental impact studies for a new infrastructure project. And you generally need specialized labor wherever you’re building something. The need for a backhoe operator in Arkansas doesn’t help a former auto worker in Detroit. You’re talking about hiring mostly skilled trades, and these aren’t typically the people who are looking for work right now.
Also, the money that gets invested in the early stages doesn’t go into the pockets of workers. It goes to white collar engineering management firms, lawyers, surveyors, geologists, and the like. People who are not necessarily going to run out and spend every dime they earn helping to keep the velocity of money going.
The Democrats have an even bigger problem with this, because the people they’d have to piss off to accelerate the process - lawyers, environmentalists, big labor - are their constituency.
So what you’d be doing is borrowing or taxing the money during a recession, and using it to start projects which will not return their value or a stimulus until after the recession is over.