Ronda Kaysen
speaker
330 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Ronda Kaysen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And Americans start building millions of new homes.
And also, they're not just building anywhere.
They're building in the Sun Belt.
States like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, and California, where there's a lot of immigrants because these are border states, and many of these states are right-to-work states, so they have very, very weak union representation.
And so where the construction industry is growing
is increasingly non-union, and they have this enormous workforce that is moving across the border, eager and willing to take these jobs that are not particularly attractive to a worker who's born in the United States.
It is.
And if you look at the share of foreign-born workers in the construction industry, it is just skyrocketing during this period.
But what's also happening simultaneously is union membership for both foreign-born workers and American-born workers is falling from this peak of 40 percent.
It's just falling off a cliff.
And while that's happening, wages for both union workers and non-union workers aren't keeping up with everyone else's wages.
Why?
Well, because if you think of union workers as like the standard of what you're supposed to be paid, then even if you're hiring for a non-union job, you're kind of matching that a bit.
So as there's fewer workers in unions, there's fewer jobs to be had, wages start to shrink.
And then the non-union wages sort of fall in concert.
So in some ways union work, even if you're not unionized, keeps your standard of living a little bit higher for everyone.
And that standard is now falling.
And at the same time, we're seeing this huge wave of immigration that is really transforming the construction industry.
Remember, in 1973, about 5% of construction workers were foreign born.
Tiny percent.
Showing 221–240 of 330 · page 12 of 17
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