Building trade

“ The commercial travellers told me the same story. They are doing a great and increasing trade in the new cities that are springing up at the rate of one a day along the lines of railway construction. “But,” they said, “at present the traders, the farmers, the business men, have to be putting all the money they can make or borrow into the land, into building and into stock. ”

“ It is interesting, therefore, to find it is that which experience has led practical men to suggest as a remedy for the disorders of one of the most important of national industries, that of building. The question before the Committee of employers and workmen, which issued last August a Report upon the Building Trade, was "Scientific Management and the Reduction of Costs." ”

“ Only England does not stand alone, and the building trade is so far not typical, inasmuch as it possesses a national monopoly that the most elaborate system of protection cannot secure any other group of trades. One must have one's house built where one has to live, the importation of workmen in small bodies is difficult and dear, and if one cannot have the house one wishes, one must needs have the least offensive substitute; but bicycle and motor, iron-work and furniture, engines, rails, and ships one can import. ”

“ The building-rent is the interest or profit of the capital expended in building the house. In order to put the trade of a builder upon a level with other trades, it is necessary that this rent should be sufficient, first, to pay him the same interest which he would have got for his capital, if he had lent it upon good security; and, secondly, to keep the house in constant repair, or, what comes to the same thing, to replace, within a certain term of years, the capital which had been employed in building it. ”

“ Along with the movement towards a national organization of the workers in a trade, or in some cases prior to it, is the growth of combined action between allied industries, that is to say, trades which are closely related in work and interests. In the building trades, for example, bricklayers, masons, carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, painters and decorators, find that their respective trade interests meet, and are interwoven at a score of different points. ”

“ It is also an undeviating fact that the closer those whose interests are identical are drawn together the easier and more satisfactory is the management of those interests. And realizing the identity of the interests of the building trades we, therefore, necessarily believe in their thorough federation upon such basis as will not interfere with the complete autonomy of each distinctive trade. [There are scores of reasons why such a move would be beneficial, which are apparent to all men of experience in labor organizations, and they need not be enumerated here.] ”

“ In our trade eight hours per day for stone-cutters has been the system for the last twenty years. It has been a success in every respect, for to-day, with improved machinery, cut-stone is fully 50 to 100 per cent cheaper than during the ten hour time. ”

“ Once again, new and unheard of crafts are ushered in, to engage their quota of the time and strength of the working force, and to put it to new tests of adaptability. Take the implications of the steel industry itself, in the building trades. The old time carpenter and builder gives way to the house-smith and the structural steel worker. ”

“ The coming of cold storage, and the development of the canning industry have, I am informed by a colleague in the Harvard Business School, enormously increased this speculation among both wholesalers and retailers, and it is very important in most wholesale lines. There is short-selling in materials for construction purposes, and in metals, apart from organized exchanges, and, where possible, contractors in the building trade often protect themselves by means of future contracts with speculators who are selling short. ”

“ But they more fully understood that the artisans and laborers connected with the building trades throughout the country would criticise their every act, and unless their position was definitely and clearly set out they might be misunderstood. ”

“ Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed, been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some parts of the country, that Mr. ”

“ It cannot have escaped observation that one of the principal sources of our wealth has been the lumber trade. We have seen on the revival of the town in the early part of the last century, how intimately the progress of the town was connected with operations in timber. Before the revolution our commerce was sustained almost wholly by the large ships from England which loaded here with masts, spars, and boards for the mother country, and by ship building. ”

“ From the nature of the business, the lumbering trade falls necessarily in a great measure into the hands of persons of capital, who employ large bodies of men at points far removed from markets, and who are therefore called upon to make considerable advances in providing food and necessaries for their labourers, as well as in building slides and otherwise facilitating the passage of timber along the streams and rivers. ”

“ To-day, the higher wages paid for unskilled and semiskilled labor, together with the higher freight rates on railroad, ship and truck—all these factors more than offset any economies which may have been gained through the improvement in methods of mill-production of many important building materials such as steel, lumber, plaster and the metal products. ”

“ To close a factory is to hasten the time when buildings and machinery will be piled upon the rubbish heap. The most magnificent and solid works of man have crumbled under the finger of time. The earth is strewn with ruins of gigantic engineering works, aqueducts, canals, temples, and monuments, whose restoration would be no less a task than was their first building. Everywhere vigilance and repairs are the conditions of continued uses of wealth. ”

“ Woodware factories on a large scale are established in the city, where all kinds of building materials, such as doors, sashes, mouldings, &c., are prepared by machinery, which, in addition to providing employment for a great number of men and boys, is very convenient for building contractors. They can obtain from these mills all their requirements, ready prepared for erecting buildings, and the hard labour thus saved is simply enormous, not to mention the saving of time, and as the old proverb goes, "time is always money." ”

“ The cutting away of the forests, together with high wages, higher freight rates and the higher cost of depreciation of timber construction, are putting an end to the superior economy of wood over the other building materials. ”

“ Railroad-building is also being greatly stimulated by private enterprise. A vast amount of capital is drifting into the Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast regions from Eastern cities, and a great empire is being built up there which will be a source of wealth to those who obtain possession of land, timber, minerals and manufacturing facilities before the general enhancement of values takes place. ”

“ The construction of factory buildings has been evolved into a science. Why cannot the same thing be done with the whole scheme of economic organization? Men no longer erect factory buildings according to personal whim or to the chance ideas of some budding architect. Instead they consult scientists in factory construction who have devoted years to the study and to the practical supervision of the detail of factory building. Can less be demanded of the community which hopes to build its economic life soundly and solidly? ”

“ Tangible commodities, with a semi-exception as to real estate, are produced by interchanges of human service from the very extreme of the primary production of those commodities to and including their final delivery for ultimate consumption. Real estate, too, is thus produced in so far as it consists of structures, of soil cultivation, of mining mechanisms, of excavations, or of any other kind of artificial alteration.
All commodities are subjects of Trade. Artificial commodities, such as depend upon human service for production, are not only subjects of Trade but are also its products. ”

“ When we consider the immense cost and vast number of these buildings, aggregating thousand of millions of dollars, the demand for building materials surpasses all computation and imagination. During the next few decades untold myriads of persons will get rich, either in this discovery of new fields for these materials, exploiting the old ones, or in the invention of new building matter. ”

“ The plain instruction, of these genuine facts, to our planters and farmers, is, to encourage household manufactures, and all other manufactures on the estates, at the doors, in the townships, villages, and counties in which they live, consuming raw materials, building materials, food for man and beast, fuel, drinks, and other productions of the earth. This system of adjacent manufactures saves all the cost of transportation of our productions to the sea-ports, and the expense of carrying foreign goods from the sea-ports to the interior, more profitable than canals and turnpike roads. ”

“ Up to one-half, except on forest land, vineyards, and the like, on which we lend only one-third. We do not lend on mines. On factory buildings we lend only on the value of the ground and of the building, independently of its industrial value. ”

“ The higher you keep the tariff against our lumber the better pleased we'll be; for you will have to build more and more mills on our side of the line. We are even prepared to put an export duty on logs to compel you to keep on building mills on our side of the line. ”

“ The greater and the more productive the stock or capital in any community, the more goods it can put into the currents of trade. A mill will make a town a center of trade. Docks, elevators, warehouses and railway terminals help to transform a harbor into a port of commerce. ”

“ Where land is expensive, or there are limitations in the space suitable for building, it is frequently necessary to build mills and shops higher than would be warranted by good judgment under other conditions; but where circumstances will permit it, the one-story mill has been very successful, not merely in immunity from fire, and very low cost per square foot of floor, but also in the advantages of manufacturing, particularly in regard to cost of supervision and movement of the stock in process of manufacture. ”

“ A market for machinery must of necessity be a wide one, for no single community, not even a large modern city, can alone support a great manufacturing enterprise. Machinery building can thrive only in a settled country having a large purchasing power and good transportation facilities. ”

“ Building materials have not risen in price as much as has labor, but they are, nevertheless, in most cases from 50% to 100% or more above pre-war level. We are now doubtless on a permanently much higher price level than in 1913. ”

“ Now commodities of every sort can be transported to virtually every quarter of the globe—rails and locomotives, cement and structural steel, machinery of all kinds from the motor and the dynamo to the printing press and the cinematograph, in a word whatever is necessary to recreate the waste places of the earth and to make life in these regions humanly liveable. The sheer scale and magnitude of such operations lifts them above the level of the international trade of five hundred or even a hundred years ago. ”

“ When the price of lumber went up during war times, we did not increase our price one dollar. By building hundreds of houses each year, by eight or ten years of experiment, and keeping the same foreman and crew, we have been able to develop an efficiency that will allow us to put these buildings up at one hundred dollars less than the best bid we could get from anyone. ”

“ Such houses, erected in the vicinity of New York, and many of our large cities, would add a large value to the ground they stand on, and pay a handsome rate of interest on their cost; better than any other class of building investments, as the supply is in nowise equal to the demand. ”

“ The workingman himself developed the extensive system of building loan societies, for the sole purpose of financing his own home. In this connection one may also mention the growth of large industries in the manufacture of building materials. ”

“ We were the first to manufacture a full line of Valley, Hip and Ridge Coping, Gable, &c., to enable the builder or roofer to use them at a reasonable price, and are the only factory in America prepared to furnish such trimming in any quantity; and while they are not absolutely necessary, they greatly lessen the amount of labor and cost of laying, besides adding a finish to the roof not otherwise obtained, so that the saving in labor will pay the additional cost. ”

“ The applications for building permits for new factories, mills, banks, business houses and the like are increasing with a rapidity that makes the people early on the spot smile their broadest and shake hands with each other at the stream of gold flowing into their bank accounts. To the Englishman, accustomed to the harmonious lines of handsomely-built business streets and macadamised roads, with their hard surface and the broad pavement, Moose Jaw does not make a particularly favourable first impression. ”

“ Mercantile Exchange.—Important as is the manufacturing industry in the life of the city, it is only a part of the economic activity that is continually going on in its streets and buildings. The mercantile houses that carry on wholesale and retail trade, the towering office-buildings, and the railway and steamship terminals contain numerous groups of workers all engaged in the social task of supplying human wants, while streets and railways are avenues of traffic. The manufacture of goods is but a part of the process; distribution is as important as production. ”