Reply #8: while it's not really a statistic, here's a real fact [View All]

[griffi94]

about 6 years ago when i was still working as a cabinet maker i got call from a guy i had worked with previously. he told me a friend of his was running a cabinet shop here in central texas and they were really under the gun on a job that they had to finish by the start of the school year(the project was redoing several labs and some conference rooms in a local high school) i went and interviewed, and the shop foreman told me they were behind because they were lacking qualified skilled cabinet makers. they had plenty of people to sweep up and load and unload material, and even assemble the cabinets. they didn't however have anybody who could read blueprints or make up their own cut tickets, or even understand what they were cutting out if somebody else made their cut tickets for them.
i toured the shop and saw that nobody on the floor except the foreman could speak english.
at the end of the interview the foreman offered me a job, and asked how much pay i wanted. i told him i had been getting $15.00 an hour at a start up, and they let me take side work that was too small for them to mess with. the guy started shaking his head and told me that the highest pay he could offer was $9.00 an hour, and then he told me "That's $2.00 more an hour than Burger King pays." i had to explain to him that i wasn't currently working at burger king and that cabinet making was a whole different set of skills than what the workers from burger king had. he also told me he could get 2 mexican immigrants for what i wanted, and again i pointed out that he wasn't lacking in unskilled labor. anyway by the end of the interview he was all but begging me to take the job, but he wouldn't move on the pay, so i had to turn it down.
anyway...that's not a statistic, but it is a real fact.