Comment by AngryData

That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.

If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.