Exactly, they are two senators proposing similar programs with different roll outs. Hopefully that isn’t an insurmountable difference of opinion that becomes a wedge issue to divide people who want the same underlying thing.
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That’s where the “tuition-free community colleges” come in. (Many people just think of community colleges as a cheap way to get general education requirements out of the way before transferring to a 4-year-program but they are also a critical resource for vocational training.)
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Sure, even for infrastructure they’ll need more than construction workers (though mostly they’ll need construction workers) and people can be retrained to some degree, but there’s going to be a bit mis-match in terms of who is being rendered redundant by automation and who is needed to repair roads and bridges and install fiber optic cables (or manage that work). But the proposal, thankfully, isn’t just about infrastructure, so it’s a lot more likely to find jobs for a wider variety of skill-sets. However, taking someone who got automated out of a good union job in manufacturing, for example, and offering them half their previous wage to start over at 50 isn’t going to go over so well. (See the coal miners’ rejection of retraining schemes, for example.) I’m fully behind the idea, but it won’t fully take care of issues around unemployment.
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Wow, look at that bipartisan consensus. Congress should pass this now.
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If we can build things the way they did during the New Deal I’m all for it. But in today’s America, by the time we spend half a decade planning and permitting and another half a decade getting all the impact statements, and let’s not forget to let every NIMBY group with a lawyer tie things up in court for a few years, we’ll spend billions and build bupkis.
The Hoover Dam was built in five years, two years ahead of schedule and under budget
The Empire State Building was built in less than thirteen months
Now if we can build like that, I’m all for it. But if what we get are graft-packed, massive time sinks and money pits like the Boston Big Dig and the NYC PATH terminal, no, Jesus fuck no.
Cities like Boston and Chicago are great at extracting opportunities from projects like this. Think of the college funds and fishing boats this will buy for the families of city commissioners.
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The Hoover Dam was built with the massive exploitation of underpaid labor, subjected to immense danger and prevented from unionisation by violent oppression. There are quite a lot of working men’s bodies entombed in that concrete.
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If consumers decide not to buy products from companies that replace all their low-wage employees, people like that will go out of business.
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Killed by? Yes.
Entombed in? No.
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Whoops, misled by pop history. I was going off memories of this:
The basic point still stands, though. There are good reasons why we no longer build in old-timey style.
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Also noteworthy is the fact that the mass slaughter of workers is not required to build epic engineering projects. Look at France, look at Germany; the public works over there are mindblowing. And all done in heavily regulated, heavily unionised contexts (by American standards).
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Add the proposal that the first project shall be erecting a tomb of gargantuan proportions for Trump, that should do the trick.
At least the buggy whip industry still lives on in porno. Funny how that works.
Unions were forbidden in France back when the Eiffel Tower was built, but only one worker died over the course of the construction, thanks to the remarkable management and safety measures.
The approvals process for the Hoover Dam began in 1890 and construction started in 1931, there were a lot of unnecessary deaths, they had to go back and fix patchwork jobs years later, and they still had to build all of the interior to the dam so it could include hydroelectric power generation which was the entire point of the dam to begin with when they announced it completed.
The Empire State Building is a better example, but it still took unknown years of pre-planning and the design was essentially an existing design stretched taller to cut down the development time aong with using the existing foundation with added support. On top of that, the financing was so rocky that is bankrupted several people and businesses and didn’t break even until the 50s.
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Don’t know about the NYC project, but the Big Dig makes your point pretty well.
Obama’s stimulus plan was a great idea, in theory, very sound social engineering - use government money to help people insulate their houses, thus saving fuel, in effect helping myriads of individual American families a little bit to make a big punch in the face to oil-funded international political instability and leave more money in the pockets of the people who are most likely to spend locally. Tax dollars spent to grow the tax base and achieve foreign policy goals, brilliant! But in Delaware the rollout was so obscenely corrupt… in our case the contractor came out and spec’ed the job, then filed the paperwork to say they’d done it and got their subsidy dollars, then folded up their LLC and slipped away into the night, never to be seen again.
I guess that was a long winded way of agreeing with you. Theory’s great, but implementation is where projects fail, after all.
Still and all, not trying guarantees failure to achieve, y’know?
If the contract includes Federal dollars, than the workers are paid in accordance with the Davis-Bacon Act. Wages are tracked regionally, so workers in wealthier parts of the country generally get a higher hourly wage than workers in poorer parts of the country. $15/hr minimum would benefit workers in states like Alabama and Mississippi, but would likely have little effect in much of the northeast.
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