> Licensing IS a set of approved contractors, and we would be lying to each other if we pretended that state licensing requirements are always entirely aboveboard.

My employer holds contractor licenses in all 50 states. Please be specific about which things are not above board with regards to contractor licensing instead of allusion.

> Where I live, the city is notorious for being captured by local unions and setting (ludicrously high) minimum wages for tradesmen to guarantee they remain competitive.

Nobody is forcing you to live where you do. Major cities (sometimes states) do sometimes have rules about prevailing wages on publicly funded projects or city owned properties but I’ve never heard of forcing prevailing wages on private projects. If you have an example, I’d like to see.

Certain trade unions have been better about preventing non-union competition than others, pipefitters and sheet metal workers in particular, but I’m not aware of a jurisdiction that forces the use of union labor. If there is, I’d be curious to know what it is. Electricians are almost all union labor in Chicago due to the city’s electrical code requiring conduit and banning romex in residential construction.

By the way, I’m a construction project manager and deal with these things every single day.

> My employer holds contractor licenses in all 50 states. Please be specific about which things are not above board with regards to contractor licensing instead of allusion.

I live in SF. Prevailing wage laws and political opposition by unions to non-union projects are massive problems here, both for public and private projects. Our building codes are so crufty that it is expected that you will fork out for a private "permitting consultant" who's well-connected and if you don't your project will not be approved.

Yes, you are correct that it can strictly only be forced on public projects! When the city requires as much political bullshit as SF does, union support tends to be required for private projects to get approval. If you'd like, I can find some specific examples - they're not uncommon.

Building codes also frequently require "traditional" windows, ban modular construction, and I'm sure other things that make very little sense to anyone but the workers getting paid.

> Electricians are almost all union labor in Chicago due to the city’s electrical code requiring conduit and banning romex in residential construction.

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: when a jurisdiction enforces significantly stricter laws than are used in other places. Wiring a single family house is not more dangerous in Chicago than anywhere else, and you've already told me that this requirement tends to favor union labor.

Sure, there is an actual safety case here - but I am confident that this question of who this policy benefits was definitely considered before enacting it.

> Nobody is forcing you to live where you do.

This is a crazy take. Should I move because local construction workers are politically well-connected?

> By the way, I’m a construction project manager and deal with these things every single day.

I am not surprised! You clearly know a lot more than me on the issue, but to some extent this is like a banker swearing to me that monthly account fees are necessary.