“You can follow the pulse of the economy just by watching what’s going on with Craigslist,” said Jerry Patterson, a carpenter in Phoenix who once had plentiful work framing new homes and remodeling older ones. “It’s a massive amount of people going for just a few amount of calls.” Listings across the country, typos and all, capture the desperate effort to find even a tiny scrap of work.“Trades man in South Florida for over 44 years ... For the time being not any job is to small,” reads one typical ad. In Las Vegas, one of the areas hardest hit by the housing collapse, a handyman writes: “30 Years of actual hard earned construction experience. / Skilled in almost every single trade. Las vegas native & Single dad in need of work.”Unemployed people across many occupations are seeking work on Craigslist, of course. But while other industries are starting to improve and restore more formal jobs, construction remains on its knees.According to the Labor Department, the construction industry slashed 2.27 million jobs from its prerecession peak to the trough of construction employment in January 2011.

Just 95,000 jobs have returned, or less than 5 percent of those lost. With national unemployment at 8.2 percent in March, the rate among workers in construction and excavation, including drill operators and people who remove waste from building sites, is more than twice that, at 17 percent.Manufacturers, by contrast, have restored 470,000 of the 2.29 million jobs they lost from the start of the recession to their low point. And retailers, who cut about 1.2 million jobs, have brought back 342,000 jobs, more than a quarter of those shed during the comparable period.When work was easy to find in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Patterson, 43, struck out on his own. He would place an ad in the Sunday newspaper and get 30 calls, yielding at least three or four jobs. Now, he said, he puts an ad on Craigslist two or three times a day and is lucky to get two calls a week. On his last job, he said, he and an assistant installed 12 windows on a house. After paying for materials, he said they cleared about $100 a day for the eight-day project.“

Everything has been so slow that you know, when you make some money, it’s just gone immediately trying to catch up on everything,” said Mr. Patterson, who added that he can cover his bills only because he shares a rental home with his girlfriend, who works in a hospice. Some construction workers have left the industry. But “it’s been very hard for people to give up and move to other sectors because it’s not like there’s been a lot of expansion in other parts of the economy,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor in the department of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. business for sale kepong“Most of what I’m hearing is people eking it out on the edge of the construction industry.”handyman services berkshire In Las Vegas, Paul Amyot, a union worker who once installed carpets in casinos, has solicited jobs on Craigslist for two years. business for sale leyte philippines

He is about to exhaust his most recent stretch of unemployment benefits after completing a three-week union job last December, his first in more than a year.To save money, Mr. Amyot, 41, has moved in with his sister. Not only are opportunities fewer, he said, customers are paying less. A month ago, an apartment building landlord hired him through Craigslist to lay tile in two bathrooms. business for sale gansbaai western capeHe earned $19 an hour, down from $31 as a casino carpet layer, a job for which he spent four years as an apprentice.“business for sale okaloosa countyWhat you think you’re going to get, you might as well cut 50 percent off of that,” he said.handyman in columbus ohWorkers who once built houses, offices or big-box retail complexes are now venturing into the absurd.

Ken, who declined to give his last name because he said he was embarrassed by his situation, said he had been paid $250 to clean out a Palm Beach apartment where a tenant had committed suicide.But he has rebuffed other responses to his ads, variations on “RENT A HUSBAND ! ! ! HANDYMAN SERVICES - 25% OFF.” Last month, he said, “I had a guy call me 10 o’clock at night and ask me if I had a vise. And I said yeah, and he said ‘Can you meet me somewhere and I want to put my hand in the vise and you crush it?’ ” Ken said he demurred.Then there was the woman from Fort Lauderdale who called wanting to hire him to rig up a sex swing while her husband was away. “She wanted me to come hang it in her ‘room of doom,’ ” he said. “She offered me a lot of money, but I said ‘No, no it just doesn’t seem like something I want to get involved in.’ ”After losing his assembly line job at Northrop Grumman on Long Island early last decade, Ken, 48, turned to construction and moved to Florida.

His unemployment benefits dried up two years ago. Now, he said, he was lucky to get 10 hours of work a week through Craigslist and was behind on the rent.The outlook is grim. After rising early in the year, new-home sales fell in March, and government spending on infrastructure projects remains low. “It’s going to be a slow recovery,” said David Crowe, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. Workers “are not going to get back into construction — at least most of them, — for at least another two years.”In Florida, Ken said that he and his fellow construction workers found themselves wishing for a hurricane. “They don’t want a really bad, severe damaging one, just one that could cause a little havoc so we could have some work,” he said. “That’s a hell of a thing to pray for.” * Please call for a detailed quote. Safe & Confidential | Best Move Ever Guarantee Across town or across the country, moving doesn’t have to be stressful.

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