Latest news with #labor shortage
Fast Company
18 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
They helped make Waymo go. Now they're building AI-powered robots to solve America's labor crisis
America's demand for new infrastructure is surging, driven by the AI data center boom, clean energy projects, and a growing national housing crunch. Yet just as the country needs to build faster than ever, it's facing a mounting challenge: a severe construction labor shortage. The U.S. construction industry is already short more than half a million workers, and nearly 41% of its workforce is expected to retire by 2031. For a sector still heavily dependent on manual labor and analog tools, there soon may not be enough people left to do the building. To confront this growing labor crisis, Boris Sofman—a Carnegie Mellon robotics Ph.D. and early Waymo executive—cofounded Bedrock Robotics in 2024. Instead of building autonomous machines from scratch, Bedrock retrofits existing construction equipment like excavators, bulldozers, and loaders with AI-powered operating systems, sensors, and lidar to make them fully autonomous. Sofman has brought together fellow engineers from Waymo, Google, and Caterpillar (CAT), many of whom were instrumental in scaling autonomous technologies in some of the world's most complex machines. The team shares a fundamental belief: the future of construction lies in autonomy, not more manpower. 'I saw the powerful potential of applying modern ML approaches we developed at Waymo to construction. This is a problem you could not solve without the modern approaches we saw to be so effective, and helped deploy, in transportation, so it felt like a huge opportunity to address this critical need,' Sofman tells Fast Company. 'We can get to a deployed product for a fraction of the cost it took Waymo, and continue to build toward the full potential while growing revenues and serving real customers.'
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Immigration crackdown causing labor shortages to California's construction industry
Los Angeles — One construction site in Los Angeles has just about everything needed to build a traditional family home. Everything, that is, except enough workers. "We have probably three people on site, four people on site, and normally, we'd have about double, about eight to 10 people," general contractor Jason Pietruszka told CBS News. "They're hiding. People aren't will to coming to work." Pietruszka said he only hires builders here in the country legally, but that he also relies on companies that employ highly skilled, undocumented labor. Many of those workers are now no-shows because they are fearful of the ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. "If a company has five trucks going out and doing work every single day, and there's two guys per truck, and half their crew doesn't want to come, that's literally three jobs, or two jobs, that can't be performed," Pietruszka explained. The labor shortage comes at a time when more than 12,000 homes destroyed by the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County earlier this year need to be rebuilt. About 41% of construction workers in California are foreign-born, according to a 2023 analysis from the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group for the housing construction industry. A report in March from the UCLA Anderson Forecast found that a rise in "deportations will deplete the construction workforce" statewide. "For single-family and smaller (non-high rise) multi-family development, the loss of workers installing drywall, flooring, roofing and finishing will directly diminish the level of production," the report found. Pietruszka said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is already causing longer construction delays and greater competition for fewer crews. "When you find the people who are willing to do the job, they want probably double the hourly rate," Pietruszka said. "...That means the consumer is paying more." Wall Street Journal reports Trump sent "bawdy" birthday letter to Epstein, Trump threatens to sue Medical expert on Trump's chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis President Trump sues WSJ publisher, Rupert Murdoch over Epstein letter story Solve the daily Crossword
CBS News
5 days ago
- Business
- CBS News
Trump's immigration crackdown causing labor shortages to California's construction industry, builder says: "They're hiding"
Los Angeles — One construction site in Los Angeles has just about everything needed to build a traditional family home. Everything, that is, except enough workers. "We have probably three people on site, four people on site, and normally, we'd have about double, about eight to 10 people," general contractor Jason Pietruszka told CBS News. "They're hiding. People aren't will to coming to work." Pietruszka said he only hires builders here in the country legally, but that he also relies on companies that employ highly skilled, undocumented labor. Many of those workers are now no-shows because they are fearful of the ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. "If a company has five trucks going out and doing work every single day, and there's two guys per truck, and half their crew doesn't want to come, that's literally three jobs, or two jobs, that can't be performed," Pietruszka explained. The labor shortage comes at a time when more than 12,000 homes destroyed by the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County earlier this year need to be rebuilt. About 41% of construction workers in California are foreign-born, according to a 2023 analysis from the National Association of Home Builders, a trade group for the housing construction industry. A report in March from the UCLA Anderson Forecast found that a rise in "deportations will deplete the construction workforce" statewide. "For single-family and smaller (non-high rise) multi-family development, the loss of workers installing drywall, flooring, roofing and finishing will directly diminish the level of production," the report found. Pietruszka said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is already causing longer construction delays and greater competition for fewer crews. "When you find the people who are willing to do the job, they want probably double the hourly rate," Pietruszka said. "...That means the consumer is paying more."
Bloomberg
16-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Construction Costs to ‘Go Up Radically,' Prologis CEO Says
The chief executive officer of Prologis Inc., a real estate investment trust that owns and runs warehouses, said US immigration policy is causing a labor shortage that's driving building costs higher. 'Construction costs are going to go up radically,' Prologis CEO Hamid Moghadam said Wednesday on Bloomberg TV. 'We thought they were going to stabilize this year, but I think all of this immigration stuff is putting more pressure on construction.'
NHK
16-07-2025
- Business
- NHK
Japanese firms offer pay raises to retain staff amid labor crunch
Some Japanese employers are offering higher pay and other financial rewards in a bid to retain staff amid a labor shortage and rising inflation. Nojima has decided to give two raises in basic pay a year beginning this fiscal period. The major electric-appliance retailer says around 3,000 employees can expect a hike of 10,000 yen, or around 68 dollars, a month in September. Another raise is slated for as early as January next year. A young Nojima employee at a Tokyo store says rice and vegetables are very expensive and the new scheme is quite helpful. The employee adds that the biannual hikes will ensure long-term employment. A Nojima official said: "The employees will be able to work with a sense of assurance now that the twice-a-year of base pay hikes have been decided. The company plans to raise wages as soon as possible even if it's only by 10,000 yen." Skylark Holdings plans to raise a salary cap for its restaurant managers to 10 million yen, or about 68,000 dollars, a year. The amount at the major restaurant-chain operator is currently around 57,000 dollars. Surging consumer prices in Japan have been outpacing salary increases. Inflation-adjusted wages for May posted their largest drop in nearly two years.
