That's capitalism in it's purest form where the boss is unimpeded in his race to the bottom in terms of the wages he's willing to pay. I have a friend who was a carpenter here in Calgary. He married an American woman, a nurse, and they moved to the Chicago suburbs back in 2007. He was making $50/hour here as a foreman. Down there he was unemployable except as a handyman because the type of work he did was dominated by either (a) the contractor's corners, where they pick up Latino labourers for $20 a day, or (b) unionized carpenters, that were basically a front for all kinds of illegal Mafia hijinks. He couldn't do (a) because no matter what he skills were he couldn't compete with the cheap labourers, or (b) because being an outsider from Canada he didn't have the connections to get a crooked union card from a hall that didn't give a damn about his qualifications anyway.
I don't dispute what you're saying but this is the country that decades worth of anti-labour mentality and a general contempt for blue-collar tradesmen has built in the US. You're either scunge on the bottom of the totem pole and your trade tickets don't mean a damn, or you're some university educated professional on a career trajectory that will take you so high above the ones beneath you that they look smaller than ants. And there's precious little in between for those who don't fit into either category. My buddy in Chicago, after suffering a bout of severe depression when he realized his career as a carpenter basically died the minute he drove over the 49th parallel, ended up getting into county services, working his way up from a part-time meter-reader job to driving a truck for the country streets & roads department.
Canada's different because of our typical non-contempt for regulation and the rule of law. Yeah, we had the TFW program, but it didn't displace anyone in the oilpatch, not after the Chinese worker debacle at CNRL Horizon got a couple of Chinese workers killed. The companies still wanted as much experience and qualifications as possible on their projects even if the feds made it somewhat easier for them to bring outsiders in. Our trade unions are still pretty strong, if not as powerful as they used to be after WW2, but they still hold a lot of sway from coast to coast in all kinds of construction. Overall our regulations require education and government certified skill qualification, none of this walking in off the street, saying "hey, I can weld too", and ending up on a pipeline or structural steel job. I can't tell you the hoops welders, for example, have to jump through just to do some basic welding on some of the mega-sites or even in the pressure vessel/piping shops. No offense to Americans, but the last time I flipped through the want ads in an American newspaper the only qualification they wanted for non-white collar jobs was to be able to pass a drug test. Apparently someone smoking marijuana in their spare time is a million times worse to American employers than, say, trying to find tradesmen who actually knows what the fuck they're doing.
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