Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com says a prayer for the construction industry as he discovers that China can now build your hotel out of shipping containers – and then install it anywhere:
Across the US and the UK and, in fact, everywhere, millions of jobs have been lost to offshoring and to automation. Construction is one of the last industries that has been barely affected by these changes, and that still provides lots of “blue collar” jobs to people all over the country. But some construction jobs are so hard that Americans and Britons don’t want to do them anymore, and the industry relies on a lot of foreign workers, which are a diminishing resource as America and Britain close their borders.
This might well, as Chapman Taylor notes, make housing more affordable and even better quality, its construction and energy consumption more efficient. But is it a good thing, when we should be building out of sunshine and employing more local people? I doubt it. However, I suspect that it is inevitable. If this takes off, we might well see the kind of disruption in the construction industry that we have seen in everything else, where our buildings become like our iPhones: designed in America but built in China. We might get our housing faster and cheaper, but we might also lose thousands of jobs as the industry is offshored.
Now that they have figured out how to ship a human-sized module in a transportation system designed for freight-sized containers, it really does change everything. I have to agree with Chapman Taylor; this is going to grow exponentially and might just eat the entire construction industry as we know it. Just don’t mention the C-word.
Not being an architect nor in construction, I’ll just take Lloyd’s word for it. The libertarian would probably argue this is a good thing. But if it destroys an industry and jobs done by locals, is it really a good thing?
This is the sort of thing government should get involved in, imposing tariffs to stop the destruction if it truly does appear to be destructive. After all, governments protect societies. But will a government controlled by corporations, driven by profit, be wise enough to make the proper decision if faced with the scenario? Or will the corporate morality drive it to chase the dollars, rather than the community?
Reminds me of cancer.
