Profiling and harassment are making it harder for this construction firm to find workers

Tariffs, immigration crackdowns, persistently high interest rates — Maurice Rahming, president of O'Neill Construction Group in Portland, Oregon, sees it all. He does subcontracting, often electrical, for commercial building projects.

But recently, he’s encountered another hurdle when it comes to running his business: people profiling his workers. Hispanic and Latino people make up nearly a third of the construction work force.

“We're seeing external kind of bullying, harassment off the job site that we can't control,” Rahming told “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Branaccio.

He spoke with Brancaccio about finding workers, market volatility, and more as part of Marketplace’s Economic Pulse series, which features views on the economy from a range of perspectives. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: All right, just as a baseline here, how's it feeling to you in your line of work? Is it busier? Is it quieter? What are you seeing?

Maurice Rahming: It's a lot slower. There's a little bit more volatility. Some markets are just really, really slow — not going at all. Some are picking up and then slowing down. But we've definitely seen a slowdown.

Brancaccio: So what's your sense of why a little slower from your perspective?

Rahming: It's the uncertainty in the marketplace between interest rates, being able to get material. It doesn't seem like we have a good feeling on which way the market's going to go. So there's a lot of pullback in the market.

Brancaccio: I mean, what uncertainty — you said interest rates, some people point to shifting tariff policy.

Rahming: Yeah, it's shifting tariff policy. Because of the way the tariff policies are kind of working, it's hard to price out projects. It's hard to let the customer know what the cost of the project will be over a long period of time. So if you think about how we look at permitting and just going through the process, we need some sort of certainty to be able to hold our prices. And so when we have those price fluctuations, it's a really hard thing to move for any size firm right now, because we can't give the customer a solid answer on pricing on certain projects.

Brancaccio: You presumably use quite a bit of metal in the things that your people install. And some of that's got to be steel, some of that's got to be aluminum. All that has tariffs, if it's imported,

Rahming: Definitely. Between steel, metal, copper, when you start looking at lighting and just some of the equipment that we purchase, I mean, most everything has some sort of foreign product in it, and a lot of what we do — because construction is so much more technical than what it used to be — we're dependent upon that stuff in order to make these integrated systems actually work collectively together. So most buildings that we build are smart buildings, so we end up with just a lot of product coming in from all over the globe.

Brancaccio: Are you finding the workers you need amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown?

Rahming: So when we look at technicians to be able to do the work, the immigration policies are having a lot of those technicians become not as available. And so when we lose good people because of immigration policies, we also lose the ability to train new people, so it has a significant impact on how we look at doing work.

Brancaccio: So a stability issue of your workforce. I think you mentioned to one of my colleagues, you're a little concerned about safety? How does that play out?

Rahming: We're seeing external kind of bullying, harassment off the job site that we can't control. And how that's playing out is that we end up with workers that feel like they need to protect their family, and so they then, in turn, either opt out of work or reduce their hours. And so it has some pretty significant impacts.

Brancaccio: Wait, so bad behavior in wider society is affecting the decisions that your workers are making?

Rahming: When they're off the job site, if they're picking up material, if they're just driving with a company truck, right, and people are yelling stuff out the window. And so it's a unique and different feeling, but we have had employees that opted out and/or reduced hours.

Brancaccio: I'm trying to understand this better: Maybe you have an employee who you send out to pick up something at a warehouse and then runs into people who are not your employees hassling them, profiling them maybe?

Rahming: That is correct.

Brancaccio: I see.

Rahming: There's not necessarily an HR thing that we could potentially be doing there. It's like, OK, how do we just consult, comfort, and move on. We have other employees, you know, they're concerned about their elderly parents, and so they choose to opt out to make sure that they can safely get to point A to point B, which then I'm losing talented people, and then it basically reduces our ability to do additional work when we lose those individuals.

Brancaccio: And if you're employing them, these are people with documents, right? These are people who have the right to work in America.

Rahming: Yeah, they're just being profiled. And so that profiling is what's causing them to say, "OK, I need to take care of my family” — which we totally understand — but it's unfortunate, because then we lose good people and can't train additional people in the market.

Brancaccio: So you've had people come back from an assignment saying, "Listen, I'm getting abuse and I don't like it, and it's not worth it."

Rahming: Yeah, we're having that. We're having [situations] where they're being kind of followed or watched as they go on job sites. There are particular projects that we tend to now kind of shy away from in certain environments, because we recognize that we're going to end up putting their people in a position where it's uncomfortable for them to feel safe at.