"Men in their 30s earn about $5,000 less in real terms than their fathers' generation did"I walked into my office building the other day with one the building tradesmen - I've known this guy for 18 years and hadn't seen him in awhile - and we got to talking about jobs and how when we were in our early 20's (mid 1970's) the building trades; carpenters, brick-layers, roofers, plumbers, and even laborers, were good, decent paying jobs, but are not anymore.
"If the American dream means doing better than your parents did, then Mike Brockman's not living it. Single, with a 10-year-old daughter, he's a server at a Black Angus restaurant in Mesa, Ariz. His father at his age had a good, steady job as a machinist at TRW. ... csmonitor
There's a lot of non-union building going on and a lot of those jobs are being done for a fraction of what they one time paid.
It's interesting how a lot of builders have dramatically reduced their labor costs over those years but the cost of building continued to rise.
What sort of 'trickle', up or down, did that turn out to be?
