Kids these days, they just don’t want to work. The complaint is as old as the hills. But we hear enough grumbling to that effect from custom builders around the country that we decided to ask them directly. What is the state of the work ethic? Is the current crop of construction employees less motivated than their predecessors? Are self-starters a thing of the past, or are the sharp kids simply choosing careers that offer higher pay or lesser physical demands? And is the problem—if there is one—only generational? Once we scratched the surface, we found a topic better suited to a book than to a magazine article. But if our brief inquiry failed to get to the bottom of this issue, it did prompt lively responses. Every builder we talked to had a different experience of the state of the work ethic and at least one theory to explain it.
Page Repp, who heads a design/build firm in Tucson, Ariz., says the motivation gap in his market is real. “It’s getting more and more difficult all the time to get the people in the field willing to put in the time and effort and craft to do what we do.” The main reason, he says, is the booming Sunbelt construction economy. “There are fewer people to go around. It’s like when the NFL expands; all the teams get worse.” When Repp advertises for help, “The quality of the applicants is not necessarily what we would like.” And he’s not holding out for a killer resume, just a spark in the eye and a willingness to learn. “You can train somebody to do anything, but if they don’t have the drive or motivation, you can’t instill that.” But in Repp’s view, a competitive labor market only exacerbates a greater underlying problem: declining support for young people who might choose careers in the trades. Now 32, Repp grew up in northern Arizona, where vocational and technical education was relatively strong. “Down here in the bigger cities it doesn’t seem like they have those things.” A general perception of construction as a less-than-worthy career means “a lot of people seem to be doing it until they figure out what they want to do with their lives. The craftsman is a dying breed,” he laments. “But people have probably been saying that forever.”
Monty Jones has been saying it for long enough, and he sees a regional, as well as generational, pattern at play. A native of South Carolina, and something of a perpetual-motion machine himself, Jones thinks his region is too laid back. “It’s traditional,” he says. “When I hire somebody I’m looking for someone who wants my position. Take my job. But you don’t find many self-starters or people with initiative. Midwestern people have a much better work ethic.” Part of the problem, though, may be a national media culture that accords low prestige to jobs that involve physical labor. “These younger kids don’t look at this as a profession,” Jones says. “They look at it as a job of last resort.” Perhaps as a result, Jones runs a small field crew staffed primarily with family men in their 40s and 50s. People of that age, he says, still expect to put in a full day’s work for their pay. “It’s the Now Generation that doesn’t have a good work ethic.” And that’s a shame, he says. “These guys have an opportunity to make more money than college graduates.” Of course, there are still some younger people who have the will to work. Jones gives as an example a man he has partnered with in a spin-off company building small spec houses and custom homes. A furloughed American Airlines pilot, Corey Johnson is 34, Jones says. “He went to work at 4:30 this morning in Savannah and got off at 2:00, and now he’s here [on Spring Island, S.C., some 30 miles away] helping me.” But then, again, Johnson grew up in the Midwest.
Steve Malcolm does business in New England, which has a nationwide reputation for craftsmanship and hard work. “There is no doubt about it,” Malcolm says. “We’re very spoiled because there is such a strong work ethic here. Many guys over the past 20 years have come across our threshold who were not New Englanders, and I can’t say many of them stayed for long. Their peers drove them to a level that they didn’t want to tackle.” That tradition is part of what draws Malcolm’s second-home and retiree clients to Maine from other parts of the country. At the risk of irritating his colleagues to the south, he says that more than one has asked, “Can I fly your crew down to North Carolina?” But even in this bastion of traditional craftsmanship, the work ethic has had its down days. “If you had asked me a year ago, or two or three, I would have said it was declining rapidly,” Malcolm says. When credit card giant MBNA moved some of its operations to Maine, it hired enough people at high enough wages “to get kids coming out of school thinking that $40,000 a year was attainable.” That made the labor market tighter than Malcolm had ever seen it. “It was almost like I was being held hostage because of the wages other people were paying to get good people.” On the way to a buyout by Bank of America, though, MBNA recently shed hundreds of those same jobs. Perhaps not coincidentally, Malcolm says, “within the last year, there’s a surge of available labor. We seem to be getting some very good people knocking on our door, folks who want to work long hours and be part of what we do.”
But if a hot labor market hurt Malcolm’s business, it seems to be doing the opposite for Bart and Steve Jones, who build multimillion-dollar custom homes in the supercharged market of Las Vegas. “It’s definitely hard to find people who’ve come up through the trades,” Steve says. “People who started from the dirt and worked their way all the way up through the house are harder to find.” But the Joneses have been able to grow by hiring quality people with lesser training and promoting from within. “We just promoted a superintendent,” Jones says, “and he started out [with us] as a laborer.” Steve reports no shortage of motivated entry-level employees, and, surprisingly, he credits the local building boom. The strong building market draws a constant stream of hopeful workers to the area. Maybe 95 percent of them don’t have a great work ethic, but that’s OK, because the Joneses are looking for what Steve calls “the five-percenters. They’re the people who want to be the best at what they do.” As the top niche in residential construction, custom building naturally appeals to those workers, who may be disillusioned with the piecework nature of tract construction prevalent in Las Vegas. “I think it chases the better ones [to us], the guys who say, ‘I enjoy construction, but I don’t want to just put up plywood.’”
The custom home industry rests, ultimately, on the shoulders of such people. As the economy shifts toward post-industrial work, custom building requires workers with an independence and devotion to craft that are decidedly pre-industrial. On top of that, the work is technically challenging, physically demanding, and gets your clothes dirty. Dedication, motivation, and desire to learn are critically important. As Steve Jones says, “The results at the end of the day show well or show poorly.” We won’t pin down the state of the work ethic with just a few interviews, but with so much riding on the question, it always pays to ask.
What is the state of your employees’ work ethic? Tell the editors of CUSTOM HOME what’s on your mind. Send your comments and questions to Bruce Snider at bsnider@hanleywood.com.
