Detroit area electricians protest job cuts

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The official jobless rate in Michigan is 10.6 percent the highest in the nation. Construction workers have been particularly hard hit due to the collapse of the housing market and the reduction in new building.


Approximately 50 members of local 58 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union held a protest this week at a non-union construction site in Birmingham, Michigan, just north of Detroit, where a doctor’s office is using low-wage workers to carry out renovations on a new office.


A union representative said there were over 1,600 members of the union without jobs. The protest, he said, had been called to draw attention to the unemployed union workers.


According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 800,000 construction jobs were lost in the last two years. The unemployment level in the construction industry nationally is 15.3 percent, the highest of any sector of the national economy.


The Commerce Department reported last week that US builders broke ground on 550,000 houses in December, the fewest in five decades of government statistics. The recent spate of layoffs represent “structural, not cyclical changes to the economy,” said Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland to BusinessWeek. “They’re the hallmark of depression.”
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/elec-j30.shtml