ABSTRACT
The building industry has experienced during the present century remarkable alternations of activity and depression. A period of extensive building in the first years of the century gave place to a very serious slump, due largely to high interest rates, in the years before 1914. During the war house-building was almost entirely suspended; and the labour force, already depleted by pre-war unemployment, was further reduced, so that after the war there was in some trades an acute shortage of skilled workers. In 1933, however, the sharp fall in interest rates led to a remarkable boom in private house-building, which reached its peak in 1935, and continued at a high level through 1936 and 1937. Building Trade Unionism is still organised on a basis of separate crafts, and the traditional lines of demarcation remain in being, despite the growth of new processes and methods of construction.
