During the pandemic I briefly lost my job and was dealing with an extraordinary amount of economic and financial uncertainty.
While I luckily own my house outright and merely got behind on property taxes temporarily, I know a handful of people at my company who were eventually evicted from their homes because they couldn’t pay their rent.
One of them was living out of his car for over a year before our company hired us all back in the middle of 2021. Suddenly the construction work in my state had resumed and our employers needed help again. This also coincided with a huge rush of hiring across all industries in this country, eventually leading to the labor shortage we’re dealing with now. While some of the initial effects in 2020 might be improved by now, we’re largely in the same boat as before, especially my employer. We are a residential construction company and we desperately need rebar tie wire for foundation work and exterior walls. Without the necessary rebar tie wire, we have to put many of these building projects on hold and that’s costing us a lot of money in the short term. We’re not paid for our work until the homes are finished and given to the companies that eventually sell them to the future owners. I’m hoping that the production of bar and rod wire resumes at full capacity again so my employer can resume all of our building projects that also require concrete and rebar tie wire reinforcement. We mostly use black annealed rebar tie wire and galvanized rebar tie wire, the latter of which has a zinc coating to protect itself from corrosion.